Crazy to think that I grew up without the Internet.  How I managed, I do not know.

Between doing a cross-country drive, not getting settled into my new place right away, having to wait for a tech to come out and activate my account, and then having construction kill the Internet connection, I was without home Internet for the last five weeks or so.

Now, I wasn’t completely unconnected.  I have a tablet I was given for Christmas that will connect through a phone connection and an iPhone for my personal e-mail account.  But it was still quite the adjustment.

It’s amazing how many sites I have bookmarked.  I didn’t even bother accessing most of them while I was “off-line” because looking them up was just too much hassle.

And, sure, in this modern world there are so many ways to still connect.  All I really had to do was run up to the local Barnes & Noble.  But, with a dog to think about, that becomes trickier.  Somehow I don’t think B&N would appreciate me bringing the pup to the store with me.

Anyway, bottom line of all of that is that I didn’t even make an effort to post here for the last six weeks or so.  Hopefully that meant just that little bit more time for all y’all to devote to your own writing, your families, and your friends.

But if you did miss me, I’m back.  I’m hoping to settle back into a regular posting schedule now, but my writing is my focus at the moment, so if one or the other has to give it’ll be blog posts.

Good news is that the first week I was back to writing when I still didn’t have Internet I busted out over 20,000 words.  That’s, sadly, the most productive week I’ve ever had, but hopefully also a sign of things to come.  If I can hit that mark each week, that’s a million words in a year…

Oh, and if you noticed my lack of links to my short stories it’s because my silent protest of Amazon’s heavy-handed attempts to tell Hachette how to price their product was to pull my books off of Amazon.  If I’d had reliable Internet at the time I would’ve used that e-mail address Amazon sent me to tell Hachette I support their right to run their business how they choose and to not bow down before peer pressure from a business who is not a neutral party.

And, since I’m not a fan of being manipulated and I viewed the e-mail I received as a propaganda piece meant to persuade me to a certain course of action in Amazon’s best interests but maybe not my best interests, I will not be buying products from Amazon from here on out.

Not that my lack of interaction with Amazon is going to impact them AT ALL, but it’s the least I could do.

I’ll probably buckle under the pressure at some point and put the stories back up on Amazon, but it won’t be exclusively.  For now, they’re going up on Kobo, B&N, Page Foundry, Scribd, and iTunes thanks to Draft2Digital.

So, there you have it.  I’m back, sort of.  Working on a novel and a non-fiction book.  I’ll probably self-pub the non-fiction since it’s one of those works of the heart with probably zero commercial viability, but the novel I’ll use for the agent/publisher search once it’s done in a few months.

This writing thing, it’s a LONG slog.