Tag: A Writer’s Biography

Wow, It Has Been Four Years Since I Started This Blog

Another stylized self-pic because I hate taking selfies and this looks cooler.

Although technically, I started this blog in late June 2017, I always consider this post on 7.2.2017 as the official start of this blog. Since then, it has been my home base on the Internet.

I apologize if I mentioned this sometime in the past, but I did try this blogging thing for the first time about… not quite 20 years ago, back sometime in the mid-Aughts. I know that blogging was the cool thing to do and I had just heard about a new browser called Mozilla Firefox. I decided to join the other anonymous keyboard warriors and put up my own personal blog on Blogger (I think Google had just acquired that company by that point).

I designed it myself, wrote under an alias and wrote about everything – politics, culture, anything that caught my fancy. That was back in the days when I had plenty of great ideas but hadn’t even begun to sort out how I would consistently bring them to life.

I was having fun… for about four months. Then, as with most writing projects in my earlier years, it got abandoned. Procrastination was always an issue for me, but I also think there were two other factors involved. First, there was the fact that I was writing anonymously. I started to get a little nervous about that idea of being too revealing about myself online. The other issue was that the topics I covered were basically a grab bag of what I found interesting, and I didn’t have a good focus about what the blog should be about. Without that focus, I just floundered.

Again, I might be repeating this part of the story, but anyways… the first seed of this web site actually happened around 2014. I had essentially come out of retirement from journalism to work full-time at my hometown newspaper, the Muscatine Journal. During that time, I was making good use of social media to try and keep up to date with readers and generate story ideas. To separate my personal social media and my “professional” social media, I set up a Facebook page to use and interact with people as a journalist. I did the same with a Twitter handle.

All good things come to an end, however, and my brief journalism comeback ended by the fall of 2015 when I returned to teaching as a special education teacher. However, I had these social media accounts, and I felt like I wanted to make use of them. I decided that they would be the focus of my interests in writing – posts about writing, sharing my thoughts about writing, reposting other interesting stuff about writing.

I did that relatively inconsistently for about two years. I still have both of those accounts – I crosspost both all the blogs you see here on both pages as well as some odds and ends I find on the Internet every once in a while. (On the Facebook page, I recently liveblogged watching an episode of the Ernest Hemingway documentary by Ken Burns.) I am particularly ambivalent about Facebook nowadays and if there was a better place to be on and reach people I would shut that down. Currently, however, there is not.

So, I was having some fund with those little posts, when I said to myself, “wait one minute. It would be cool to have something where I could write longer pieces about writing, about myself as a writer. I could even put out the odd poem, story, or excerpt of something I was writing as well. Plus, I might not be tied to a larger company (or at least a megacompany) for my online presence.

Wil Wheaton is a guy that I have admired for a while – we’re of about the same age and I grew up watching him in Stand By Me, Star Trek TNG, and other projects. (He looks a lot better for his age than I do to be honest.) I also really admired how he had gotten into writing and recast himself as a creative person. In looking over his blog back in 2017, I noticed that he was using WordPress as its platform.

I wound up getting an account, started toying around… and the result is what you see here, with a few small modifications to the look and feel of the place.

This was likely the first image I used on this site. In case any of you wondered what it was, this is the Norbert F. Beckey Bridge, which carries Iowa Highway 92 across the Mississippi River in my hometown of Muscatine, Iowa.

There’s been a few changes in my life since I started this blog. I continued my career in special education at several school districts, and I will soon be starting at the fifth school district I have ever taught at full-time. My two kids graduated high school, moved out for college and/or full-time work, and promptly moved back in due to COVID/real life stuff. We moved from Muscatine on the mighty Mississippi to the little community of Chariton in South Central Iowa… and it’s a nice little community. After a year of living here myself, I’m starting to get a feel for the place, as well as getting to know fellow writers in the greater Des Moines community.

One of the water towers where I live.

Finally, I wound up becoming a published novelist for the first time in my life. Although sales have been extremely modest to say the least (I think in part due to COVID and having to move), but it has been a tremendous experience that for a long time I did not think that I would ever achieve. It’s made me hungry for more success and more progress along the writing front.

The cover for my book…

So, what is next? I think that I want to continue to develop this blog more, to more consistently produce some good content for my page, and not just report on my writing totals for each week (even though that will continue to be a big part of this site, because it has helped me to stay consistent with writing and increase my general writing productivity). I want to try new techniques to promote this page and do things that might get people interested in it. Even though it will always be a writing blog, I want to get into a variety of writing subjects that I might not have touched on before or not discussed for some time. There might be some other ways to use this page to both promote my past and future writing projects and reach more people.

I’ll leave it at that for now and wish everyone a great weekend. Writers keep writing and everyone keep safe.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume III, Part 6: The importance of writing groups

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

A Writer’s Biography, Author’s Note: Is this beginning to turn into something… bigger?

[PHOTO NOTE: The featured pic is a 1913 picture by Oscar Grossheim of downtown Muscatine, Iowa, courtesy of the Musser Public Library’s collection. Since this is about my past, I decided to add an old photo of my hometown. It sort of fits, even though I didn’t move there for another 60 years or so after that was taken.]

It’s a bit freaky to me that it was almost four years ago since I wrote this blog entry. At the time, I wasn’t thinking too much about it. I was just thinking of the basic idea that I had to write about writing and my relationship to it over the years. In that post, I was talking about when I was a young kid first getting into the written word and starting to ponder the idea that I might be able to tell the type of stories I had been reading about.

Well, a couple of posts about the type of stuff I read as a kid turned into a few. They were coming hot and heavy for a while, but then continued, in dribs and drabs, throughout the lifespan of this blog. I finally put out a couple more of those posts after a seven-month hiatus. That prompted to me to wonder – how many of those have I actually written?

Well, I went ahead and looked at all of the posts I’ve now written under this Writer’s Biography title, and did some counting… and I have twenty different posts. With this post, that number is now twenty-one.

Those are about twenty different posts of me talking about myself and my life as a writer. Of those posts, 8 of them I have labeled as Volume I (covering my time as a kid and adolescent). Another 7 posts I’ve labeled Volume II (covering my time as a young adult). Finally, there were 5 posts labeled Volume III (covering things that have happened as I began to write again in middle age after an extended series of hiatuses). All of those stories were centered around either my writing or the influences of my writing (what I read). So, I didn’t think too much about it… until now. And now, there’s this story that you are reading now, when I finally sit down for a moment and contemplate what’s been happening.

To look back and see that I had been doing that much writing about myself… that was a bit of a surprise.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I’m not sure, but I think that this is, without any particular initial intent, becoming something more than just a few blog posts. I think I’ve somehow wound up with something that is approaching… a memoir.

There are more than a few old pieces of fiction and some of the columns I wrote for newspapers that would indulge my youthful, quixotic dreams of being a famous newspaper columnist that wind up being at least semi-autobiographical. I remember reading Charles Yeager and Miles Davis’ autobiography and was impressed by their stories. I loved Andre Agassi’s Open and thought it was brilliant, but I totally understood he needed a co-author to make it work. And, it was a great job that they did.

But me trying to write an autobiography? Why?

First, it’s not like I have that interesting of a life to talk about. I was an only child in eastern Iowa who read a lot of books, watched a lot of television, and played a lot of video games. I got into sci-fi geek culture, or as much as I could find out about it in the pre-Internet Midwest. I got married, had a couple kids, kicked around a few newspapers and got into teaching. I never did wind up getting arrested or had any major tragedies happen to me. It’s been a relatively quiet life.

And secondly, I always thought you had to remember a lot about your past. There’s not too many memories, or fully formed memories, of when I was a kid, at least not enough to fill an entire book. Likely, they wouldn’t be enough to fill in one of those self-published books of memoirs you see in local bookstores or fairs. I really related to how David Carr of the New York Times, when he wrote a memoir of his time as an addict, he wound up interviewing people in his life because he didn’t think that he could be relied on for the accuracy of his recollections.

It turns out, however, that I might have more to talk about than just a few stories. The series is turning into something of its own creature, something that is happening in spite of itself. I’m honestly not sure about whether I’d ever consider turning it into an actual book, or where it might lead.

I do know I still have more than a few of those types of stories to tell, however. So keep checking in – you’ll never know what I might remember next.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume III, Part 5: The Writing Environment

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume II, Part 7: Letting the past go

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume I, Part 8: The Old Mississippi

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

Writing Journal 7.26.2020: Moving my base of operations took a toll on my writing these past two weeks

So, after letting you know what was going on almost a year ago, the move’s finally happened.

I officially transferred the flag, so to speak, to the new home in South Central Iowa about three days ago. It’s all still a new experience to me. I like the new home, even though getting to the master bedroom is a bit of a climb. I do appreciate that it’s smaller and more easily maintainable than the place I lived in for 13 years.

This year is easily going to be the biggest “transition” year of my life for some time. I have one child living and working on his own and the other is preparing to head to college soon (what that will look like is soon to be determined). I am several weeks away from starting a new teaching assignment, though what that will look like is still up in the air, being new to the district and with the current pandemic.

Naturally, with emptying out the old place and cleaning it, and filling the new place and cleaning it, it took a toll on my writing time, especially this past week in the midst of the move. As always, I’ll post the weekly total (in this case, the two-week total) at the end.

Getting your writing environment right is a discussion within itself. I realize now after the fact that I had nailed down my old writing space where I’d spent many a night writing what turned out to be the majority of my written work. Now I am in the process of creating something that will meet my needs. How well I do that and how fast of a process it will take is, again, something yet to be determined.

The good news is that the move has been quite inspirational for me as far as blogging goes. For anyone that just started following this blog, I needed to give a bit of explanation. For as much as my memory can fade or be filled with other items, I never thought that I would be one of those ones who would ever be interested in doing a memoir. To be honest, my own life doesn’t really have the kind of excitement that would attract many readers.

Over the course of this blog, however, I ended up creating a Writer’s Biography of tales, essentially talking about things in my life that had to do with my life and evolution as a writer. In looking back at that collection of stories, however, it appears I have not written a new one in nearly a year. As of right now, this move seems to have inspired no less than three new posts, one for each of the volumes in the collection. (Volume I stories cover topics that had to do with or began during my childhood; Volume II stories cover topics of when I was a young adult, and Volume III stories are about what has happened roughly since I began rededicating myself to writing.)

So, you’ll see that, and likely another link to a video review of the next section of Lord of the Rings that I’ve read. I’m hoping to get all of it down by the time school starts up again.

Also, apparently, I passed the 300-post mark sometime during the past few weeks. Three years and 300 posts, both good numbers.

Anyway, here’s my joke of writing stats for the past two weeks. Enjoy and stay safe.

Week of July 12:
+6,859 words written.
Days writing: 5 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 1 of 7 for 60 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 5 of 7 days.

Week of July 19:
+153 words written.
Days writing: 1 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 0 of 7 for 0 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 0 of 7 days.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume II, Part 6: My obsession with soccer

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume III, Part 4: On Leaving an Author Behind

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume III, Part 3: About that writing journal

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.