Why a new site?

Some of you may be familiar with my first blog, Sojourner Mountain.  Since launching it in the fall of 2010, I’ve allowed Sojourner Mountain to evolve quite a bit.  In all honesty, I didn’t have a plan for it other than wanting it to be 1) a place to inspire creative writing and photography, and 2) a place I could showcase my own writing.  On the second point, I specifically wanted to document my own journey towards publication.

Since then, however, I’ve been learning a lot from the writing community that I had started connecting with through blogging and through Twitter.  I decided that I was trying to do too much with Sojourner Mountain, and so I needed to evolve it further still.  The original goal is still the same: to provide inspiration and resources to my fellow aspiring writers, but the creative writing blog will now be a lot cleaner. 

So that meant I needed to find a home for my personal writing.  That was actually a good thing, because there are a lot of limitations on the blogging platform (Tumblr) where Sojourner Mountain resides that frankly drive me insane.  So since I had to create a new online home anyway, why not find a blogging platform that was better suited to me? Ultimately I found WordPress to be the best fit, and so The Weathered Journal is now home.

Here’s what you can expect to see here:

• Articles on writing and publishing, by which I mean the lessons I learn (either from experience or as taught to me by the awesome writers I’ve met since beginning my writing journey).
• Articles that highlight useful resources that I come across while working to get my first novel published. These resources will be added to the resource links on Sojourner Mountain.
• Book reviews.  I’ve met a lot of great authors over the past few months, and I’m excited to read their work.  I’ll post the reviews here.
• Occasional photography. Though not so much these days, I’ve dabbled in photography for years. Since the US Air Force saw fit to send me all over the planet, I’ve taken some photos that I’m quite proud of, and I’ll probably just share them here periodically.
• CONTEST! More of this soon.  It’s sort of gimmicky, but it should be fun.  All I’ll say now is that you can win a “Writer’s Inspiration Kit.” More to follow soon.
• Anything else I find that I find interesting and relating to writing.  I’m hoping for some guest posts and interviews in the near future.

What you can expect to see on Sojourner Mountain:

• Visual Writing Prompts. These are picture prompts for those who like to exercise their writing skills with external prompts. 
• Self Publishing and Traditional Publishing Resources: links and hints on valuable resources for anyone looking to get published, regardless of the method of publication.
• Anything else that I dig up that fellow writers can use as they learn (like I am) what it takes to see their work get to publication.

Thanks for stopping by! My first article, called A Beginner’s Guide to Self Publishing and Traditional Publishing Resources, will be out in the next day or two.

W.E. Linde