Haiti Blog Update

Well, I finally finished my personal Haiti blog, or at least the "in country" part of it!

I cross-posted it to our team blog at action.ministrybuilder.com as well.

I recently spent a week in Haiti, and it was a life-changing experience. If you want to read more about it, or see photographs and videos I took on the trip, click one of the above links and take a look.

Still figuring all this out

So, I have a personal website through my work, and I have two external blogs set up... this one, and another at wordpress. Why bother with these external blogs? Well, several reasons:

1. My personal website is all over the place, so having a couple of separate blogs can help keep things more orderly.


2. I like to compare things, so this gives me three different blog/content managements systems to explore.


3. If I am going to be serious about writing, I should try to dedicate one site to it.


4. If I ever get some books published, having more sites might help with future marketing plans.

So, that is the plan... but I am having trouble figuring out best uses for each. For now, I'm going to keep StephenHermer.com as my personal site for everything except writing, my wordpress blog for writing, and this one for... musing?

StephenHermer.com - Haiti Trip 2010

Finally got day six posted. This post includes a sample of music from a Haitian church service in Lanzac.

StephenHermer.com - Haiti Trip 2010

Started a new outline for a novel

Between work, family, and headaches, I've been slow to get started in 2011... but yesterday I managed to get about half-way through a rough outline for a new novel I am planning. Tonight I will try to finish it off, if I can figure out how I want to end it.

I've been trying to write short reviews of the books I've read in the last six months... and it isn't easy either. For someone who wants to write, I'm finding it damn difficult to actually sit down and do it!

Mid-January Update

We finally have a company blog setup for the trip we took to Haiti! Located at action.ministrybuilder.com, it has blogs for everyone who went in November, 2010. For my part, I am simply reposting my blog entries from stephenhermer.com, but for the others this will be the only place they share their experiences. Well worth checking out!

I have not made a lot of writing progress in the last two weeks, between headaches and work I did not have the ambition. I did purchase a great little laser printer, though... so I can finally make hard copies of research notes and chapter summaries. If you are interested, it is a Samsung CLP-325, and I picked it up for $70 CDN at Staples.

Novel Idea Day

Today is my official start of the 2011 writing year!!

Today's goals are to:

1. Get this blog configured and linked into my website at StephenHermer.com.
   
2. Write out one paragraph summaries for ten novels to write.
3. Pick two or three novels for this year, and schedule out time to work on them for the year.

Why am I picking out three novels to start at once? Well, the easy answer is I plan to self-edit a lot, and I believe it will work better if I have breaks from each project between drafts. Potentially, this kind of scheduling might give me an escape from writer's block or allow me to play with different novel writing systems as well.