On the occasion of my second blog post ever!

Right, dialing it down. Inside voice.

As you might be able to tell, these posts are, at the moment, placeholders.
To give you the full picture, at the moment, I'm in the middle of formatting
my first book, a novella that's the introduction to a longer series.

However, I've got a day job, so that process is taking its own sweet time
getting going. Such is life, and anyone with family and job and dogs and cats
and a yard to keep up with...

Yeah, you can imagine how much free time I have on my hands.

Another thing I have to factor in here is that my day job is working as a
programmer/analyst/science writer. So I already spend a pretty significant
amount of time on the computer. Putting in extra time, however worthwhile,
is part of my learning experience as a fiction writer.

Gotta build up my chops, basically.

So, the blog is my way of doing a couple of things, at least right here at
the beginning. I need a good way of keeping mental track of what I'm doing,
and I need to carve out just a little bit of work-not work that's devoted
strictly to my fiction writing.

Over the next little while, then, I'll be explaining what I'm up to, so far
as getting my book out (current project), what other stories are in the
queue (for getting out as soon as this one's published), and whatever
floats my boat after that.

Oh, and I'll be up front. Mickie (or M.K.) Dreysen is my pen name. It's
nothing nefarious. Two particular reasons. One, it tickles me. Mark Twain,
O. Henry, George Sand, Richard Bachman, the list of writers who've plugged
away under a pen name is remarkable, ridiculous, and most importantly, it's
one of, I think, the little joys of a scribbler's life.

Second, remember, at this time I have a day job. I sort of owe it to my
colleagues, bosses, and the rest of the gang in that world to make sure that
someone with google-fu finds my daytime work where they need it, and my
fiction work where they need it, and never the twain shall meet.

And no, not because I'm writing my friends into the thing, either. I simply
want to make sure that the two different types of writing I do are easy to
distinguish. I don't want to trip people who didn't ask for it, that's all.
It's exactly the same thing as authors such as Nora Roberts, who also writes
as J.D. Robb (among other pen names) depending on which type of book she's
writing at any given time.