This is it: the last day of June… and after twenty-nine previous posts I’m wrapping up my daily blogging exercise, marginally focused along a question-and-answer theme I’ve simply called Those 30 posts in June. I hope you enjoyed it. There was almost no planning. Almost no (though I cheated here and there) writing of these words days in advance. Still mostly just this: each day a meanderingly vague prompt drove a meanderingly vague post… and today, it ends with this, the last post, a post just happens to be:

June 30th // Something You Want To Share

Ok. So it’s officially been over a year and a half since I spent that one crazy November doing NaNoWriMo and, sitting in a local cafe, regurgitated a novel-length block of text onto the interwebs. I note this because it has officially been over a year and five months since I’ve even looked at that smear of text and spent more than ten consecutive seconds considering the possibility of doing something with it… y’know, like editing, revising, and sharing it.

I’ve been a little distracted, I guess.

I mean, not that this is some kind of epic winner of a novel, but it is something that I actually spent time writing and could potentially — assuming I spent additional (potentially a lot of) quality time scrubbing and polishing it up to a publishable state — put out there for public consumption. Sell it. Have people read it. Get feedback and maybe money in compensation for that work.

This isn’t as far-fetched as one might imagine. I mean, look waaaaaaaaaaay back to 2010 when I wrote it and the world of self-published novels was quite limited, and usually realistically amounted to little more than paying some printing press to do a limited, vanity run of your words onto paper. But self-publishing, for those paying attention, has grown by leaps and bound in the intervening two years. In fact, one of my current favourite books — Wool, by Hugh Howey — is a self-published novel, sold for a meager few pennies on the Kindle Store, that has climbed and clung to the best selling top ten for a surprisingly long stretch. Things have changed.

See, all these big book vendors, old and new, have jumped on the skip-the-middle-man content train and opened up the world of self-publication to anyone and everyone. Independent novels are being published at an amazing pace as low-cost, take-a-chance-on-me electronic files. This is the time. This is the opportunity. This is the moment for anyone with an even remotely readable book to put a bit of spit and polish on it and hang it out on the Kindle store (or wherever) and try and make a few bucks and possibly a reputation as an author. And people are doing just that. It’s a remarkable thing.

And me? I’ve been a little distracted, just sitting here on my own bit of novel-like text, and wondering…

I’m wrapping up this month of daily blogging with this final post and these final words. I won’t be slowing down writing here. Nope. If you thought I was done, think again. I’ll be on this roll for a while yet. But, that said, I may just start spending a little more time with some of my fiction efforts — old and new — and possibly, just maybe, do a little more sharing of that novel I wrote.

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