I haven't blogged regularly in about 4 years, because the last year or so of Clever Girl Goes Blog was a laughable effort of about ten posts that mainly said something along the lines of "HOLY CRAP I HAVE A CHILD" and "PAJAMAS ARE THE NEW COUTURE."
Turns out, that break was great preparation for writing a book, because writing a book is nothing like writing a blog. QUELLE SURPRISE.
No, seriously. It's not.
I thought that all of my years of blogging would be the muscle I'd fall back on when I started my book, but unforch, that wasn't the case. Because in the world of writing we're talking about apples and oranges and maybe even like pears or something, and while I'm not an expert on orchards, I know that these are all different fruits.
(This suddenly took a weird turn from a bike metaphor to a grocery store analogy but just go with it.)
Writing a blog is about telling a story in a concise, one-page-ish format that even someone brand-new to your site could mostly understand without having to sift through your archives for a ton of backstory.
Writing a book is all about elaboration. Developing your characters, the setting, the story arc - all of these elements take planning and drafting. I never wrote a blog post with more than a vague idea or a specific isolated incident in mind, and now I had to keep track of multiple fictional characters and an event timeline for each sub-plot.
So I did something that I hadn't done since I was forced to in high school - I sat down and wrote outlines. I scrapped those and wrote new ones, and did it again and again until I had a workable storyline.
(Then I cussed a little, because I hate when things I'm decidedly against turn out to be necessary and functional.)
And then I looked at everything and thought to myself "You know where it's going - now you have to make it go there."