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I guess this will be the first of many public presentations I’ll be doing in my career as a writer. I just hadn’t thought it would be before the publication of my first novel.

I’ ve been asked to present at Blog Orlando 2008. I’ll be speaking about my social media novel, Calling Home, and will also be leading a discussion about Writing Social Fiction. I’m looking forward to it next Saturday and if any of you are in Orlando on Saturday September 26th, then please come on by and stop in on my presentation.

I’ll spend some of the time telling people about Calling Home and ideas behind it but then going into how to apply some of those techniques into writing your own social novel.

It’s gonna be a blast and I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

You might have noticed a new look to Renegade Sanctuary today, or even during the weekend. For years, I’ve used Movable Type as my blogging system of choice, but as time moved on and my needs changed I found myself increasingly limited by what I could do with my MT blog with the limited time I had.

Now this has nothing to do with skill, because I know I could have learned what I needed to get Renegade Sanctuary were I wanted. No, it was a matter of what I wanted to spend my time doing. Instead of tinkering with the blog, I’d rather be writing, and with this in mind I decided to make the leap to WordPress.

With the wealth of themes, plugins, and other extensible functions and design elements, I could easily change my blog with little effort. Compare that with the near Herculean effort of finding any sort of theme or design for Movable Type and you can see the appeal.

It took a little work during the weekend (and some help from great friends on Plurk. Hello Allan!) to migrate everything, but thankfully with the use of my blogging software, Ecto, I was able to quickly restore my old entries from MT to Wordpress in only a couple of clicks. I looked around for a couple of themes and decided on a couple of them, starting with Chris Pearson’s NeoClassical. A very nice and clean theme which I plan to build on by switching out the default images and adding a couple of more widgets.

Since I’m still new to Wordpress, if there are some plugins or widgets you’d recommend I use, please feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll look into it.

So, without further discussion, I’m off to continue writing. Keep an eye out here for new features, content and for details on a new writing project I’m working on involving social media and fiction.

Talk to all of you later!

I just came back from Residency at Seton Hill University today. It was nice to have an uneventful flight after the interesting week I had.

First off, I apologize for the lack of updates while I was there. About a couple of days in, I began to feel under the weather, which culminated in a visit to the urgent care on Saturday morning. It took only a couple of seconds for the test to come back positive for strep throat, but thankfully I was prescribed some meds and now I’m feeling better. My main problem now is my wife insists on asking me who I was kissing to catch it.

The Residency was enjoyable as ever, and meeting all of my friends always gives me a rush. Being surrounded by so many writers can in inspire in ways you can’t expect. Since there were a lot of things that happened, I’ll spread out some of the more significant events and lessons I learned through some of my blog entries over this week.

Lastly, while I was sitting in bed for most of Saturday there was one thing that kept popping into my mind: Was there any way I could do some work during the time? I found I lacked the energy to leave the room for the most part, but I’m curious if any of you have some tips and tricks for keeping productive while being dogged by the bug d’jour? Feel free to post some of your ideas in the comments.

I found this group while I was looking for a Central Florida-based organization of people who had similar interests as I do. They have a get together every 3rd Monday each month. This would have been the first time I’d have gone, but due to the time crunch I’m in I can’t afford to break away. It’s a shame I can’t go to this one tonight, but I wanted to pass this on to anyone who is in the Central Florida area and wants to have a drink or a spicy meal with them.

Florida Creatives

I’ve been neglecting all of my blogs. Life stepped in and occupied a good chunk of my time. It was only until recently that I feel I can dedicate the time I need to in order to make my blogs flourish.

Now, it’s going to take some time before you really see my hit my stride, but I hope to post more things of interest here and there and make it a worthwhile read.

And now on to current happenings.

At the moment, I’m preparing for my next residency at Seton Hill. It’s been a long road but I finally see a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not a freight train. I have only 15,000 words left in the manuscript and my mentor says that I can get it done before the start of Residency on June 24th.

It’s a lot of work, but I’ve done it before and I know with the new ideas and direction my mentor has given to me I can finally cross the finish line. Graduating next January is now no longer a distant dream and I’m excited just by the thought of it.

I’ll be posting about progress periodically, along with any articles, links and other things of interest I find in my travels across the Internet.

Thanks for reading!