my Patreon patron-only blog : Journeying, and the returns;

Since building myself a Patreon page, I've also been posting to a password-protected patron-only blog (I've actually been posting a small mound of previously-unpublished poems there over the past few weeks). I thought it might be worth reprinting the occasional post here, for the sake of general interest. Access to the blog comes with donations as low as $1 a month, all of which goes toward me working on all of my (mostly payment-free) writing, editing, reviewing and publishing.

Here's a post from September 17, 2017:

[the young ladies providing an essential grocery assist]

While posting another of the “12 or 20 questions” interviews today, I saw someone refer to a good book as a “page-turner.” I realized that this is perhaps the last thing I would aim my own writing towards. I suppose the difference is in the goals of the writing itself: plot-driven prose vs. the more lyric language and/or character-oriented fictions I’ve been attempting to compose.

While I tell myself that I would rather not be composing “page-turners,” that isn’t the goal of the work, either. I’m not writing plot-driven, get-to-the-next-plot-point works; I want to compose fiction where the reader is occasionally held in place by a line, an image or an idea. I want to be able to cause the reader to go back to passages, to see what they might have missed.

My own early reading, catching something on page fifty of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook when I was still in high school, a book recommended by my then-girlfriend: realizing I had missed something important on that very first page. I had to go back.