From Blog to Blood

Well hello there. So this is the first post here at Blood on the Motorway. You must be wondering what this is all about, or at least I imagine you are at least vaguely curious, given that you’ve gone to all the trouble to click on the link and that. The best way to explain is through some tedious expositionary backstory.

I bought the URL www.bloodonthemotorway.com a few years back, for the reason that I was writing a novel called Blood On The Motorway, and the idea I had at the time was that I would publish the novel myself through the said website in serialised form. The problem was that I was still writing it, and I wanted to get a bit further with said writing before publishing. But then I discovered that writing a novel, an actual proper novel, is quite a lot harder than one might imagine. So it was an age before I had enough to start putting up. By the time I got to that place, howver, I decided I hated the serialisation idea, and actually just wanted to write the bloody thing.

Also, the more I wrote, the more I started to learn about writing, and the more I realised I had a long way to go. Now this isn’t my first time round the writers block, not even the first novel that has spewed forth from my fingers, but it was the first one I really cared about, and the first time I have started to take myself seriously. As it stands I’ve been working on this story for a good four years now and I’m currently sat on about 30,000 words. I have changed stories, erased whole chapters, rewritten things until they were only a fraction as interesting as things I wrote before. Writing is hard.

So that is half of the story. The other half is that I’ve been a blogger for the best part of a decade now, back from around the time when blogs were mainly howls of impotent angst shouted into Livejournal (Ican legitimately say this as this was where I started) and so when I first bought this site it made perfect sense to move my blog from squatting on my friend’s server and lodge it here, which I did. In a moment of obvious genius I rechristened it Blog On The Motorway (I know, I’m brilliant, aren’t I?) and you can find it here, if you aren’t already one of the seven people who read it.

One thing my blog has never been, however, is a single issue blog. I talk about essentially anything that falls out of my brain, and of late that has often meant blogging about writing the book. Now I don’t imagine for one second that many of my regular readers are that bothered about reading how I’ve gotten bogged down in plot, or am having trouble finding the voice of one of my characters but until today it had never occurred to me that I have a perfectly good place to vent all my feelings about writing, leaving the rest of my blog free and clear to wax lyrical about Vin Diesel films. To boot, I also end up with what I’ve always suspected I needed, a single issue blog.

So, tedious backstory out of the way, the more I thought about moving all my writing related blogging here, the more I thought it might be a good idea. Since I started taking the writing a lot more seriously I’ve started finding some excellent writing blogs out there, but these tend to be by successful people who are handing down the advice they have. That’s not me. If you’ve come here as a struggling writer, then you have found instead someone who is going through the same things. I might not have the answers, but I think sharing the pain is just as important.

Through the joys of Twitter (@formulaic666 if you’re interested) and writing groups and such, I’ve also met a number of rather lovely people in the same position, amongst them some clearly very talented people, and though they don’t know it yet I’ll also be plaguing them for some guest posts, and if you are in the same position then I want to hear from you too. It seems to me that there’s strength in numbers, and support is every bit as good as advice.

So that’s about it, my rather confused mission statement. For those of you who only came from my blog, have no fear, that will trundle along at its normal molasses-esque pace. To any other aspiring writers out there, don’t be shy, please say hello.