Woohoo! Looks like I've had just over 3000 hits in the 7 months or so since I started this thing. I guess that's still fairly low, but it's a heck of a lot higher than the total number of hits I had on my old web page in 5 years - that was more like 300!

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

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I've got a couple of comments from the crit group on the story so far, and they've pretty much confirmed what I suspected. To cut a long story short (pun not intended!) - it needs a lot of work.

That story (Spirit of Yosemite) was more of a writing exercise that seemed to want to grow into a story. It was a "what-if" scenario stemming from a scary incident when I went hiking in the mountains of Yosemite National Park. Luckily I lived to tell the tale!

I was a little disappointed, but nobody said this writing game was easy! I'm still on the lower end of the writer's learning curve (which never ends from what I understand), but it is heartening when I see the improvements in my writing over the past few years.

Few stories are fit to be published, and even fewer still become classics, but that doesn't seem to prevent people from writing - except perhaps if you're someone who expects riches or fame, only to be disappointed when neither materializes.

So why write at all, then? There are probably as many reasons as there are writers. For me, I think it's mainly about the satisfaction of spinning a good (or even average) yarn and learning more about the craft of writing with each new story. I'd love to get published, but it's certainly not something I feel I'm owed, and it probably won't happen anytime soon. That said, it would be pretty cool to see my name in print ;)

I'm not sure what I'll do with that story. It'll probably end up sitting on the hard-drive along with the others that didn't make it to the submission stage. Who knows - maybe I'll dust it off one day and work it into something more compelling?

Not to worry - I've got a couple dozen more ideas I'm itching to turn into stories, and countless more waiting in the wings, either in my ideas file or biding their time before they spring into life. Half the trouble is figuring out which one to write next!