“Hello World!” was the default title of this post. It’s perfect. It speaks to my computer programmer sensibilities and is a fitting name for the post that commemorates the first day of my post-procrastination writing career.

I daydreamed about writing novels for over 10 years. I brainstormed and wrote ideas in notebooks, but I didn’t have the guts to make the decisions necessary to write one particular story.

The buck stops here. I scheduled a week away from work to sit down and focus on defining a story. Step one was to choose an audience and genre. Creating the tagline of this blog helped accomplish that (along with a healthy dose of research and soul-searching). Next comes more decision making about world building, characters and plot; then the outline.

I learned from my one and a half forays into National Novel Writing Month that discovery writing is not for me. I should have known right from the beginning that the more structured techniques of an architect writer would appeal to me. I am obsessively organized and I like knowing what’s going to happen in advance. Hello, outline? It was a bit of a “duh” moment for me, but at least I had the powerful and therapeutic experience of getting 50,000 less than stellar words down on paper. I instinctively started revising and loved the process of making the words tastier and more efficient. My writing fire is stoked, I just need to keep going.

Every journey starts with the first step. My writing journey starts now. I hope you enjoy the ride with me.