Friends,
My first query letter pitching The Lonely Arena went out to a potential agent last week. Somewhere in the coming couple of weeks I hope to send out five more. First, I need to do some research on potential agents to see who would best fit the project. I’ll be sharing that letter with you sometime soon, and you will get to see what I’m writing about.
As for the second thing mentioned in the title of this post, I’m taking a page out of Steve for the Deaf’s playbook and announcing that this site will be coming to an end. I’m not sure of the exact date, but it will be sometime in the fall. Despite knowing nothing about setting up a website when I started, this site has served my purpose well and inspired me to produce many writings that I’m so proud to lay claim to. I’m so pleased with the overall results.
Still, I didn’t know what I was doing, and the site can never rise above that. sometime in the future I will be creating another site. I’ll know what I’m doing then–I’ve learned so much!–and the site should be able to maintain itself indefinitely. I’ll be doing everything I can to inform those who have supported this site of the location of the new site.
I can’t say enough how much I appreciate all of those who have supported these efforts. We may not have set the world on fire here, but I’ve had fun and I’ve grown as a professional writer; I hope that you’ve taken good things from it as well.
As always, my friends, thank you so much for stopping by and looking into my mind for a few minutes. It truly does mean so much to me. I love each and every one of you, even those of you I’ve never met. I have a Christian love for you and an understanding of your human struggle. I hope that something on these pages has in some way helped you carry the weight of the stone.
I’ll see you back here sometime soon.
Paulelmo's Blog 
Ohhhh. This is like the music in a movie scene changing before the inciting incident. Exciting stuff.
Yeah, I’m pretty excited. I began the actual writing of the book yesterday. They say you don’t write a nonfiction book until you have acceptance, but I want to write this book, and writing it is more important to me than getting back into periodical publishing. I’ll post that first query letter in the next few days, which will add further explanation. The long and short of it is that I’m 53, I’ve got 20 years in with the company (tomorrow, in fact), and have come to the decision that I’ll be fine retiring as “just a bartender.” I do well; if I didn’t I would have gotten out long ago. This is my U2 Zooropa moment; I always respected albums like Bryan Adams’s Into the Fire, that point where an artist just decides they’re going to say “Damn it all; I’m just gonna do the work that I want to do.” Quite liberating, and I’m healthier and freer in my life than I’ve ever been. Not a shabby place at all. I always value your friendship, sir, whether it’s the 21st Century kind or not. Keep rockin’…like Dokken.
So excited for you. I am anxious to see what the future holds for you.
Thank you. I am too. Stay tuned. Here in the next few days you’re going to see what a drastic turn my writing is about to take.