Redesign

I've decided to make some changes to the way I blog. Specifically, I'm splitting this existing blog into two blogs and then adding a third. Because one blog just isn't enough.

This blog (Geeker Joy) will remain my personal blog. I'll talk about the stuff I'm doing and goals I have. I might try some other things, along the lines of that 17% post from 2014. Who knows, really. Basically, this will remain the catch-all blog, where I can write about whatever enters my head. It will mostly be about my life. I'm toying with the idea of making this one private, but I'll let you know before I do that. And I'll make sure friends and family know how to get on the white list.

I'm splitting all of my book reviews off into a dedicated book review blog. It's called Bookish Thoughts and you can find it at caitsbookthoughts.blogspot.com. I'm in the process of porting everything over to it now. It's taking me longer than I expected, because it turns out that Blogger enforces a 50 post/day limit. But I'm chugging along and should have that all set up within another week.

I'm hoping that the new book-only site will be somewhat more navigable. To that end I'm going back through and adding a bunch of tags to my old posts. You should be able to zero in on stuff by author, series, or genre, and I'll try to pull as much of that out as possible to make it easier. Doing that is creating some work for me now, but it should all run nice and smooth with minimal effort on my part once it's up and running. If you're one of the people who cares what I have to say about all the books I read, you can check out that site (which will remain public). If you don't, the personal blog will now be less cluttered for your enjoyment.

The third blog I'm setting up is a writing blog. It's called Paper and Ink Dreams and you can visit it at paperandinkdreams.blogspot.com. I'm hoping to post some short stories and writing challenges over there. Mostly I want to get in the habit of writing for some amount of time every day. I want to hone my story-telling abilities. I want to start producing a mountain of work in the hopes that I will get better at writing fiction. I want to see where this goes.

For the time being, I'm revisiting some old projects. In high school, I was given an assignment to write a short story for each letter of the alphabet, memoir style. Those are currently being posted as a sort of baseline for me to see where I can improve and where my strengths are. And for you all to have a good laugh at 16-year old. Some of these stories are pretty melodramatic. It's fun.

Once that's all up, I'm going to dive back into my companion project - the college alphabet. I started this years ago when I first started the blog. I posted five stories and wrote drafts for six more before it all fell by the wayside. I'm going to start polishing those up and writing new ones. They'll start going up after the high school alphabet finishes posting. Depending on how far along I am, they may or may not be in alphabetical order.

At some point I'll look into daily writing prompts or creative writing challenges or something and start posting based off those prompts. Maybe I'll come up with another project for myself. Maybe I'll start writing actual short stories (as opposed to what I've been writing, which I believe qualifies as "flash fiction" or "drabbles"). We'll see where this goes.