I. The Wrong Hobby For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer of some kind. I didn’t start writing with the idea of submitting and selling pieces until my junior year in college. But even before then, I wrote. In third grade, I wrote a story about two friends who…
I successfully concluded a week of consecutive posting yesterday. In the space of a week I’ve managed to debut a new series on books, marvel at the art of sports writing, lament the limitations of e-books (or the joy of paper books, if you are a “half the book left” kind of person), provide yet another example of my flawed…
Later this year—October 25 to be precise—will be the 20th anniversary of this blog, if you can believe that. In its original incarnation, this blog started in LiveJournal and then migrated to WordPress a few years later. But the first post I sat down to write was written in LiveJournal, and having created my account, I wrote…
In the niches of writing, nestled somewhere under the heading of essay writer, is the sportswriter. It is, to me, an underrated artform as worthy of the name as any other form of writing. Reading a good piece can bring about all kinds of emotions, which is one sign of fine writing. I have on…
Yesterday, without much fanfare, I posted the first of a new series I’m writing called “Shelf-Life.” Each episode in the series is centered around a book on my bookshelf. The inaugural episode centers around Race Against Time by Piers Anthony. I was happy with how it turned out. If this is your cup of tea, check it out.…
Writing is a soothing balm for me. It soothes me. Like the Star of Elendil, it provides me with a light in dark places. I’ve been wanting to write more, and my favorite writing is the writing I do here. I especially like writing about books. Last year, I tried an (unsuccessful1) experiment to write…
“Give me any random idea and I can write a story from it.” This is how I used to think of myself back when I first started to write with an eye toward selling stories. I was twenty years old, and up to that point, the ability to write, such as it was, was the…
I Each morning, rain or shine, I go out for a walk. The time of my walk more or less follows sunrise throughout the year, with me getting out shortly after the first light appears in the east, but before the sun peeks above the horizon. My walk takes me through the park behind our…
I. The Fiction Writer There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but ther are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, tranform a yellow spot into the sun.— Pablo Picasso November has rolled into December and with it, a milestone on the road of my life is just ahead. December…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. In Episode 25, I described how I managed my “professional” writing in Obsidian. I also mentioned that I looked to Obsidian as the one place to do all of my writing. That includes the writing…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. Years before I began using Obsidian, I’d wanted to consolidate all of my writing into a single format–preferably text files. I wanted all of my old writing files accessible in plain text, and wanted…