I know. Many of us want to become a writer, a novelist, or a famous author and make tons of money, like Stephen King, James Patterson, Robert Jordan, Brad Meltzer and Jack Whyte, just to name a few. However, I am 52 years old and I realize for every Stephen King or Brad Meltzer out there, there are thousands of writers struggling to get published, noticed, or even put food on the table.
Thanks to Stephen King's book, On Writing, and
my own personal experiences writing. I know that it isn't easy. It's
something that takes a lot of time and work. I have done some writing over the
years, including keeping a diary or journal. Much of my more recent
writing has been short articles for Masonic Lodge Education and some for
Masonic blog publications.
It's not something that has been easy but
honestly, since I was about 9 years old, I have loved to tell stories.
Sometimes I even told stories about myself but embellished them a little
because I felt the true story wasn't interesting enough. Isn't that what story
tellers do anyway? Make the story interesting. In this blog, I am
not going to just sit back and tell you how long I worked on my book today, how
many paragraphs or pages I got done. I'm not going to tell you much about what
I am writing either. I'm not even going try and teach you about plot
development, character creation or how to write character conversations. Sure
there will be some hints about my story, or my character, or how I had some
weird break through today but really it's just going to be a record of my time
getting from aspiring to published, I hope.
I am not going to delude myself here. I am no
Stephen King, Robert Jordan, Brad Meltzer, or Jack Whyte. I am just
someone who really enjoys reading and writing, I think. It's been a long
time since I let myself just write for me and not for something at work, for an
article for someone's blog, or for a college assignment. I mean
other than my journal. I'm not even sure that tomorrow or next will get
another entry in my blog.
I just know that I have come to a decision to do it.
To sit down and write one story. Short or long doesn't matter. It
just matters that I am going to sit down and work on it, at least 1 hour a day.
Making that kind of goal is no more and no less than making that same goal of
exercising an hour a day. Look we have 24 hours in a day. In that day we need
to devote 8 hours to service, yourself, family, God, and worthy, distressed
members of our community, 8 hours to work, and 8 hours to rest and refreshment.
In that breakdown of our day it seems hard to find the 1 hour for exercise and
1 hour to work on writing a story or even 1 hour to read a story. However, it's
really all in hour you interpret what each of those categories mean. For
example rest and refreshment can include your exercise. Exercise is a
form of refreshment. Using your God given talent to write, could be construed
as service to God. So there you have it. Oh and writing this blog, service to
self or community.
Anyway. I hope you'll find my blog entertaining,
annoying, edifying and at the very least, not boring enough not to read.
Let's see if this journey takes us anywhere.
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