Since I began blogging about three years ago, I’ve been using this blog as a form of steeping–a way to tease out my thoughts, to know what I think by putting it into words.

Over the past month, I’ve been doing a lot of steeping–thinking about how and why I use social media, including this blog, and about what exactly is my place on the internet. What’s my mission? What are my goals? How do I achieve them?

I’m still working on this, but starting to feel things coalesce, and what this means for my blog is both change and continuity.

Blogging requires a lot of time and mental energy. I’m a perfectionist, and loathe to post anything–even a one-liner on Facebook–without compulsive editing and fact-checking. My typically 1,000-word posts have eaten an enormous amount of my time, in part because of their length, but also because I tend to draft them on the fly, to write as reaction instead of writing in anticipation.

So the biggest change I’m envisioning right now is a move from pantsing to planning. For most of my writing life, I’ve been a pantser–a writer who writes by the seat of her pants, letting stories unfold as the words fall onto the page. Over the past couple of years, though, I’ve begun to plan my writing projects much more intentionally. This will be the subject of a future post, but at the moment, suffice it to say that I’m going to start being more intentional about planning what I will post and when. I’m also going to try to not be such a wordy-bird. (This post is under 500 words! Score!)

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about why I blog, and that hasn’t really changed. I started this blog as a reaching-outward, an attempt to “only connect.” I’m a connection junkie–a “we’re all in this together” cheerleader, a “we’re more alike than we are different” kind of thinker, a firm believer that if we would all just make the hard honest effort to meet each other where we find each other, that alone would vanquish at least half this world’s demons. This is why I blog, and ultimately why I write fiction as well.

Through the steeping process of the past few years, I’ve come to understand that what I offer (or at least what I am trying to offer) here is introspection offered outward–this is my particular brand of connection, my introverted people-lover’s letter to the world.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to explore my blogging quest here in more depth through a series of linked posts tackling the following questions:

• Why do I blog?
• Why do I write fantasy?
• Why do I write YA fiction?
• Why am I pursuing traditional publishing versus self-publishing?

I hope that in setting out my thoughts here, I’ll provide you with food for thought as well.