Absence here, presence there

I took an unannounced and approximately three-week break from this blog to focus on a few issues, projects, and priorities but I’m back and excited for a few entries coming up this month to wrap up the year. The following are in the pipe:

  • Wrapping up last month’s NaNoWriMo.
  • Wrapping up my first semester teaching at NCC.
  • A link to my latest short film (now in the editing stage).
  • My top ten favorite blog posts of the year.
  • Finally, my long-promised recommendation of Five Books for Boys.
  • Thoughts on Oprah’s Book Club.
  • Pros and cons of books as gifts.
  • A Writer’s New Year’s Resolutions.
  • New writing prompts and recommendations.
  • A new Scrawlers contest!
  • And, depending on how often I find myself with internet access, some daily blogging about a mission trip I’m co-leading down to Beaumont, Texas over the last week of the year.

While I took a break from blogging at The Scrawl, I have been quite active on our sister site, Scrawlers. I’ve posted a few new stories over the last few days and it felt good to write something new. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve written at my own website, which is pretty ridiculous, but something struck me in the last ten days or so that panned out to six new stories (and hopefully a few more to follow). That, I think, is a cool side effect of Scrawlers. How it can appeal to the writer who is daunted by writing a longer piece of prose or has only a finite time to scrawl something down or who is frustrated by having a lot of open projects but nothing concretely finished. 100 words? Short, brief, finished. Problem solved for that writer. There are those on the opposite end of the spectrum who are turned off or perhaps frightened at having only 100 words to complete an idea. To those folks I say embrace constraints as a challenge, not a limitation. Pretty sure I’ve talked about that here before.

Thanks for your patience during my absence and I’ll write to you soon, dear reader.

-nm

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