Or, why I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days.

I’ve been at Readercon, a science-fiction convention in Burlington, Massachusetts, restoring my soul and enjoying the air conditioning.

Regular posting should resume on Monday.

Writing, that is.

It’s a job that you mostly do sitting at your desk, listening to the voices inside your own head. It’s not surprising that some writers end their careers as eccentric hermits; what’s surprising, actually, is that more of them don’t.

It isn’t required to be an introvert in this job, but sometimes it helps. At the same time, if you’re going to make a living (or at least a part of your living) as a writer, you’re going to have to get out in the world. If you don’t, you’re going to lose touch with all the stuff you’re writing about.

So make the effort. Schedule time for things like community involvement — things like scouting, or the volunteer fire department, or the folks who clean up sea birds after oil slicks. Whatever works for you, so long as there are other people involved in it. From an artistic-development standpoint, it helps if it’s the sort of group that attracts a cross-section of different types, so that the repertory company of actors living in your brain can have as wide a range as possible.

Don’t isolate yourself from other writers, either. Some days, it can be vitally important to your sanity that you’re able to have a conversation with somebody else who understands why it is you do what you do with all those words on the computer screen, and who understands why it matters.

Which is why I’m moving mountains, right this minute, in order to be at Readercon this weekend, down in Burlington, Massachusetts.

…and therefore, like every good freelancer, I’m working.

But in honor of the holiday, I won’t be working quite as much.

(To quote another writer of my acquaintance:  “Being a freelance novelist is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”)

Who am I?  I’m Debra Doyle, the “Dr. Doyle” of “Dr. Doyle’s Editorial and Critique Services”, and this is my brand-new blog.

Why am I here? As I’ve explained elsewhere:

For business, I write. About the only thing I’ve ever done for money besides writing—if we don’t count a stint working in the dishroom of the cafeteria while I was in college, which, really, let’s not—has been teaching:  Freshman composition (under the various trendy names it’s gone by over the past two or three decades), which wasn’t really that much fun; and fiction (yearly at the Viable Paradise workshop since 1997), which was and is considerably more enjoyable.

What do I do? With my co-author James D. Macdonald, I write science fiction and fantasy. We’ve been in the business for over two decades now, and seen a lot of changes in the field, but we’re still here and still writing. On my own, I do the freelance editorial and critique work that will be the primary focus—but not the only subject; I know myself too well to promise that—of this blog.

What about the “Doctor” bit? That’s real. I did my graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, and received a doctorate in English, with my main area of concentration being Old English and my secondary area being Old Icelandic. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly—the sf/fantasy field is full of renegade medievalists), this turned out to be excellent preparation for writing science fiction and fantasy, and for doing critique work as well.