On the Eighteenth Day of 2025…

…I have broken the record from January 2024 by writing eighteen days in a row toward the goal of blogging every day during the first month of the new year, attempting each day to string together a few hundred to a thousand words that form coherent sentences and ideas. I’ve tried to vary the shoeContinue reading “On the Eighteenth Day of 2025…”

On the Seventeenth Day of 2025…

…you get up early to meet some guy who’s going to give you a bid on a walk-in shower install. It’s awful. Friendly enough, nice to the dogs, the guy talks and talks, gives you his whole history, compliments your house, looks at the bathroom, takes a number of measurements with a fancy laser gadget,Continue reading “On the Seventeenth Day of 2025…”

On the Fifteenth Day of 2025…

. . .You decide to write about yourself in the second person. You realize that’s an odd thing to do, even though, as most things a writer can do, it’s been done before hundreds of times. You’re mostly curious about how it feels. You’ve tried the first and the third, the first being the mostContinue reading “On the Fifteenth Day of 2025…”

On the Eighth Day of 2025. . .

. . . while my friends in the east and the middle are freezing off their nards, and my Southern California friends are guarding against wildfires, here in the Pacific Northwest, during a miraculous dry spell of three straight days and counting, I worked in the yard today wearing a t-shirt. Today was one ofContinue reading “On the Eighth Day of 2025. . .”

On the Third Day of 2025. . .

. . . I rose again out of bed and came downstairs to begin the day. I found my way to the meditation cushion this morning, but circuitously and late. One of my projects for myself post retirement (going on the third straight year and still not yet mastered) is the development of a routine,Continue reading “On the Third Day of 2025. . .”

The First Day of 2025. . .

. . . was spent doing all of the things (or most of the things) I love and want to do more of. To wit, a list: There could almost not be a more perfect day. I would have liked to have spent more time with my parter. But she was super engaged in herContinue reading “The First Day of 2025. . .”

Turning 60!

I’m writing on the occasion of my 60th birthday, December 4, 2024. We ascribe a special significance to those birthdays that begin a new decade. Something in us needs a marker, a milestone, a number with a zero at the end. We like that. I think it’s true that the last time I wrote aboutContinue reading “Turning 60!”

NaNoWriMo 2024: Adjusting My Expectations

The point of any kind of forced creativity experience or challenge is to simply do the creative thing you want to be doing but perhaps wouldn’t be doing otherwise. I am all for it. I’ve done more than a decade worth of a poem every day in April, I’ve participated in songwriting challenges that resultedContinue reading “NaNoWriMo 2024: Adjusting My Expectations”

It’s National Novel Writing Month!

Here we are on the precipice of another year of attempting to write 50,000 words in a single month for the ritual of NaNoWriMo. This will be my third effort. I go into it this year with a bit of trepidation. I worry that the politics of the nation will be too much of aContinue reading “It’s National Novel Writing Month!”

I’m Thinking About Giving Up on Writing Fiction on the Cusp of Another NANOWRIMO

In both Novembers of 2022 and 2023 I wrote 50,000 words for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. The results were two sloppy, hastily written rough drafts of novels. I would expect nothing less from such a challenge, the purpose of which is not to write a masterpiece, but to spill out as quickly asContinue reading “I’m Thinking About Giving Up on Writing Fiction on the Cusp of Another NANOWRIMO”