Category Archives: Writing

Took a Day Off

Yes, yesterday I took a day off from writing. Having finished this round of edits of Doctor Luke’s Assistant, and with the television coverage of the Iowa caucuses, I decided to spend the evening in a combination of relaxing, balancing the checkbook, and filing family financial papers. I’m not saying DLA is done, for I’m always open to improvement, but I will not re-read it or do any more edits except in response to comments from others, be they beta readers, editors, agents, whoever.

For the next few days, I will have about four writing-related tasks. First, file the mark-ups for DLA. I have a bunch of them, not just from this round, but from the previous as well. Second, print a copy for file and beta readers. Third, critique two different bits of writing from two authors I’ve met either on-line or at conferences. One of these I have already made extensive mark-ups for, and just need to type them in a Word file and mail them. I have found that critiquing the work of others is one of the best ways of improving my craft. Fourth, begin (again) marketing research for Documenting America. That will be the subject of my next post.

I Blog, Therefore I Am

Herein I enter the Blogosphere, with my personal blog that will, hopefully, deal with my writing life as it develops, as well as other interests. With time, I may find that splitting this into different blogs is the better way to go. A separate blog for writing, for genealogy, for politics, for Christian interests. We’ll see how this goes.

At first, I will write some posts about my proposed newspaper column, Documenting America. This may be the first work I am able to get published. The Benton County Daily Record published four of these in 2003-2004 in the guest editorial program, which tells me it is probably a viable concept.

Later, I’ll talk about my fiction ideas, still later some non-fiction ideas, and of course poetry. Should anything I write appear to be nearing publication, I’ll talk about it more.

This blog will be the first piece of my web presence, later to be joined by a home page, specific, non-blog pages for specific items, and hopefully message boards for specific documents. Of course, at present all of this is pie-in-the-sky, but better to get the basics going now and build everything slowly as success demands. If nothing else, making frequent posts will be writing practice and discipline buildings. Having the blog to feed might just help me break the computer game habit. Possibly I’ll even add some engineering stuff.

Time to add a post I prepared a few weeks ago about Documenting America.