I love everything about blogging. I love creating new sites, writing and researching articles that align with my interests, sharing my thoughts, and interacting with my readers. Which is probably why I currently have two active blogs and a third publication on Substack.
Writing After Dark (Substack)
I started Writing After Dark on Substack to share my own paranormal romance excerpts, review paranormal fiction, and talk about writing. You can read some of these same excerpts on my autism blog, but Writing After Dark is dedicated to the paranormal fiction genre.
This publication can be viewed on site or read as a free subscription newsletter.
You can visit Writing After Dark at:
The Mystic Review
I started The Mystic Review in 2010 to help make sense of a very unusual dream and share the spiritual journey that followed. I blogged on a range of topics, including spirit communication, New Age spirituality, occultism, paranormal investigation, and tarot card reading. I explored most of these topics in the real world in order to blog on them.
I blogged twice a week, week in and week out and The Mystic Review became popular over time.
In late 2017, I began to re-explore Christianity. In 2018, I unpublished much of my content and wrote Christian articles during this period on various blogs, but The Mystic Review was mostly inactive, though people did continue to visit the site.
In 2020, I returned to my Catholic faith. I wrote a bit on the old blogging platform over the next couple of years but couldn’t quite find my niche. In 2023, I began listening to Catholic apologist Jimmy Aikin’s Mysterious World podcast and realized that my interest in metaphysics and the paranormal was NOT incompatible with the Faith. Not long after I returned to The Mystic Review and have not looked back.
Current topics include dreams, the paranormal, psychic phenomena, and more. New articles post about once a month.
You can check out the Mystic Review at MysticReview.com.
Writing on the Spectrum
I was diagnosed with autism in 2022 and started my second blog Writing On The Spectrum in August of 2023 to write about my diagnosis. But instead doing that, I wrote a single introductory post on autism, set the blog to private, and then spent the next few months sharing poetry and odd bits of prose.
I found it surprisingly hard to write about autism, even though I knew no one would read my posts. But sharing snippets of my creative writing was easy. I liked my short pieces. It was the longer stuff that was a problem.
I had been writing for most of my life, but none of my novels ever came out “right.” I had dozens of unfinished manuscripts and those I had finished failed to meet genre expectations over and over again.
Fast forward to April 2024. I had just finished my first full-length vampire story with the help of an online critique group. When that story failed, I realized that I’d hit a wall with my writing.
In an attempt to understand why writing readable long-form fiction was so hard for me, I began to learn about autism and how it was affecting my ability to construct a narrative. And then I went on to think about the how autism and decades of pretending to be someone I was not had affected me.
I decided it was time to own my authentic self and started to write about autism, creativity and related topics on the blog . For me, this meant no more pretending across the board. And so, in April of 2024, I set Writing On The Spectrum to public.
You can check out the blog at WritingOnTheSpectrum.com.
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