The Daily Journal of An Aspiring Writer

       Today, I got my nephew’s, who’s in the Ohio National Guard, mailing address, at Basic Training. It got me to thinking that now that I am writing I should be writing letters to people, like my nephew. Now the terrible part is I will, most likely, type them. I hand write in my journal and of course that helps make it better but if I begin writing these letters, I want everyone to be able to read them. So, I will type them.      Now certainly, I will begin writing letters to my friends, nephews and my daughter but who I was really thinking of writing to were politicians and celebrities. Now I am not really talking about TV and Movie stars.   I like their work but most of them, no offense intended, but I am not all that concerned about conversing with them. Politicians that’s a no brainer my writing them will be to share my perspective on the current bills before them or the current crisis and how I think they should fix it, as if I really ha...

        Today, I had the day off from work, at my job. So, I decided to work on writing my story.  As I was typing away, I noticed the number count and wow! I have to tell you, it reminded me of when I was in sixth grade and my teacher, Mrs. Cherry, unknowingly, destroyed my passion for writing. I had had a passion for writing as was evidenced by my creative writing work in fifth grade, but I digress.      Mrs. Cherry, unknown to her, had destroyed my passion for writing. I admit to my own part in this because what she did was punishments for my acting out in class.   What she had done was to assign essays. The first essay was a 100-word essay and each new punishment would go up by 50 words. Now these were not the kind like you see Bart Simpson writing, I will not whatever 100 times.      These essays would be on a topic and you could just copy word for word right out of the encyclopedia up to the number of words necessary....

       So today, I got thinking about this. How many writers are there among my friends and family following this. I'm not just talking about those that have published works but those that keep a journal, write small research papers for the clubs or lodges, write short stories and send them to magazines, or are you an editor for a publication, famous or not?  The reason I ask is because I haven't actually been what I would have called a writer, until now but I have done a bit of writing over the last 10 years.  I have written research papers for college, I have had a short story published in a club magazine, I have had several articles published in several group related publications, I have on and off written a research paper for Masonic Lodges, and I have on and off kept a journal, or diary.      In the end I ask because one of the ways that I was most discouraged, in the past, about trying to be a writer was that I was constantly told, "wri...

             I just realized that I had forgotten something in regard to this undertaking and as a Freemason, it’s really a pretty big mistake. Especially since I do try to live my life as a Freemason, in everything I do. I forgot to invoke the blessings of deity. I’ll be honest that has not always been my way but since joining the Freemasons, it has been. I was shocked to realize that I had forgotten to do that here. My guess is that I really hadn’t thought of this a great and important undertaking because as seriously as I have been taking it, I haven’t made writing a career choice.   Honestly, I am working hard on becoming a writer. I have re-worked my office to make it more comfortable to work in.   I have, funny as it might sound created a playlist on Amazon Music to allow my Alexa to shuffle and play while I am writing. I did all of this before I read the chapter in, The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, that ta...

  This week my wife and I were cleaning out our barn loft, closets and crawlspace.  We have lived in our house for 10 years now and it was deemed to be necessary to clean it out and get rid of anything that, as Marie Kondo says, doesn't give us pleasure. In doing this, I finally went through stuff that I had had for 40 plus years. I had letters from old girlfriends and what made me laugh was that I usually got all of these letters but I never really wrote to them. I didn't believe that I had the talent for writing back then. I had no idea what I was failing to do by not writing to them.  Anyway, I finally threw all of that stuff out.  However, I didn't do it without going through it all.  After high school and some point after I had decided to quit college, I had decided that I wanted to be a writer and for one of the most obvious of reasons, not writing, I didn't become one but I had been given an article, that apparently I had kept and found during all of this...

 Okay, it’s been a few days since I last put anything out here and I promised that one hour a day I would spend working writing.  In fact I have.  I have been either reading The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing or I have been thinking about how to formulate all the disparate pieces of my story.  How to bring them into a complete and cohesive structure. On top of that I have also been writing stuff for an episode of The Masonic Roundtable. I am going to be a little honest here.   The one piece that I have the most difficulty with is not so much creating the idea of each of my characters and in some cases bringing them almost to life but naming them. I mean, I know some names that I might associate with bullies and want to use that but I get that naming association with people in my real life and the last thing I want is for them to figure out I created a character, even loosely, based on them. I know, I’ll work it out eventually and most likely won’t run into...