... have been greatly exaggerated.
It's been a while since I published anything, for sure, but I promise I have been writing. It's just that I've been working on a bunch of long-form stuff (aka "novels"), and haven't had as much focus or interest on writing shorts.
The great news (for me at least) is that I just finished the first draft of one of them. (Did I say "30k words"? Um...) The bad news is, it still needs a lot of work! I've been reading Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell, and there's a ton of advice for writing novels in there that I'm itching to try. I hope that drafts two and three won't take as long as draft one did (over a year, by my watch).
What that means in the short term is that I've still got a long road ahead of me before this novel is ready to publish. However, I do have a couple of shorter pieces that I've started, and one of the suggestions Bell makes is to take a break between drafts. So I might throw my next few blocks of writing time at one of those and see how far I can get.
As a final note, there was a thread over on Tumblr about leaving comments or ratings on "old" works and whether there was any point to it, and I'm here to say — please do. It means a lot to us authors, I promise.
Also, I'm not using Twitter any more. If you want to stay in touch and find out what I'm working on, you can find me on Tumblr (@monkeysmut or @charlesjeffries) and Mastodon (@monkeysmut@smutlandia.com).
More soon, I hope. – chuck