Why this blog?

As I said in my bio, I love to write. Writing has been one of my biggest loves since I was a toddler; before I could put pencil to paper, I would literally dictate stories to my mom and have her write them down. I'm not just doing this as an outlet in which to write, though -- I'm actually in the process of writing a novel and thought this could be a nifty way to stick with it.

You see, when I took my creative writing capstone as a college senior, I wrote a 67-page novella. At the time, I would have liked to have written more, but that wasn't the assignment. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I really enjoyed the way it came out. As a result, I left it as is. It's pretty complete from beginning to end, and it definitely stands well on its own.

Sadly, there's no market for novellas these days (which, as an aside, I find to be remarkable -- in this on-the-go society, wouldn't shorter fiction be a great sell? Novellas are more developed than short stories but can easily be read in a short period of time. Perfect, right? But I digress.) That said, I'd love to get my work published...but in order to do that, I need to make it longer (by at least 40,000 words, give or take!). Considering that I work two jobs and go to grad school, that's a massive undertaking.

Honestly, the thought of expanding the novella occurred to me a few months ago. I wrote ten more pages or so before realizing that I need to come up with a plan of how to do this. So far, I have two ideas:

1. Add new chapters throughout, making the plotline more complex
 2. Add on to the end, and have the novella serve as a "Part I" or something

I'm leaning towards Option #2, but I haven't figured out an ending yet. Last year, I tended to get frustrated by this and gave up rather easily. I'm hoping that won't be the case in 2012. I'm not a New Year's resolution person by any means, but my goal for this year is to figure out what the hell I'm doing and turn this into a complete, cohesive, novel-length manuscript that I can start shopping around to publishers. Hopefully this blog will help me along the way.