Let me offer a slightly belated Happy New Year. My first post of the year was tied in to the last/first/only year of the novel Like Clockwork, and my second was an apology for any posts that might be missing this month. I still may miss some, but I am trying to avoid that.

Since we are in the month of beginnings, I thought I would remind my newer followers how this enterprise started. In 2015, EDGE publisher bought my SF novel Cyan, to be released as an e-book in their new EDGE lite (dumb name) line. In honor of that — which is a sneaky way of saying to drum up business for that — I began a blog.

By the way, if you haven’t bought Cyan yet (and why haven’t you?), you can pick it up from Amazon as an ebook or paperback.

Actually, I began a website containing two blogs. The website was to be called A Writing Life and the two blogs were to be called A Writing Life and Serial. It was a glaringly bad decision to call the site and one of the blogs by the same name, but I’m stuck with it now.

Cyan was due out at the beginning of 2016 and actually came out nearly a year and a half late. I had the embarrassing task of explaining every delay in the blog.

Posts were short at first. Here is the first one:

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1. Welcome to my World

Hi, I’m Syd Logsdon. I have been writing novels for four decades, but I’m a new blogger.

When I began, writers wrote, publishers published, and readers bought their books in bookstores – or at least at bookstands which might pop up anywhere. E-books, nooks and kindles, and the internet have changed all that. Now e-books outsell hardbacks and writers have to adapt.

Actually, this is an opportunity for me. Over the years I have accumulated a mass of knowledge, ideas, complaints, irritations, joys, disappointments, and backstage savvy that didn’t fit into any format available to me. Now I have a place to share these things.

What prompted me to start blogging at this time was the release of my e-book Cyan from EDGE, due in January of 2016. If you don’t know them, EDGE is the premier science fiction publisher of Canada.

Cyan is the story of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of a nearby habitable planet, set against the backdrop of cataclysmic overpopulation on Earth, and carried out by a fascinating and varied group of characters.

Old fashioned? No; just temporarily out of fashion.

Recent science fiction has often lost sight of the next century. This is too bad, since we are the last generation which can write what we want about nearby stars before astronomers map the actual planets which exist there.

You can expect daily posts here at A Writing Life. It is set up like a blog, but it isn’t a chronicle of daily activities. Each post is a mini-essay on some subject, current, historical, or timeless.  Most of the time, these posts will come four days a week.

At Serial, in the menu, you will find serialized fiction. Pop over there for details.

Drop in often; you will always find something new.

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A few things changed over the years. It quickly became obvious that running A Writing Life (the blog) four days a week and Serial five days a week was an unnecessary complication. I dropped Serial to four days a week early on.

After nearly four hundred posts of the A Writing Life blog, the four day a week schedule became unsupportable and I dropped to two days a week. Serial changed as well, but I’ll talk about that on Wednesday.