Month: August 2015

I’m not a great writer — I’ll never win a Pulitzer Prize, and I don’t expect to make a living through my writing. Glancing at this writing blog, you might think that I should slow things down, and post fewer items (of presumably higher quality). I don’t disagree.

But to put things in perspective:

• Most of what I’m now posting was written decades ago when I was young — over the course of many years. So even though I may be posting one or two posts a day, most of them are just old pieces that I’ve recently typed up. I’m not currently cranking out new writings that fast. (The ‘classic’ posts outnumber the ‘new’ posts 5 to 1.)
• Again, most of what I’m posting was written long ago. What I’m now writing shouldn’t be worse quality, and is likely better. (Compare my ‘new poetry‘ to my ‘classic poetry‘.)
• I have little patience. So rather than writing a 5000 word story with sophisticated, descriptive phrasing, I’m more inclined to write a 500 word bare-bones story that gets right to the point, with the knowledge that I may one day come back and expand it.
• I’ll never be a novelist. I’d rather write 100 short pieces (and publish the best 10?), than write one long piece (and possibly never get it published). I see myself as more of a poet and a (very) short story guy.

Every poem and story posted here has a tidy title. WordPress — the blog software for this site — works best when there is a title for each entry to click and link to. However, not all of my older stuff has titles. So sometimes I need to come up with a name for an entry that I may have written 30 years ago and not thought about since.
 
Not surprisingly, it can be difficult — but I’ve been successful so far. Only once or twice have I gone back and adjusted the title that occurred to me just before I clicked ‘publish’. I think part of that comes from reconnecting with the piece as I am typing it up on the computer.

I’ve updated the categories on this writing blog. It’s now easy to pick new or old (‘classic’) poems or stories. Plus unfinished poems and stories have their own categories.

Remember, ‘classic’ stuff was written before my marriage and before I moved to California — about 30 years ago or longer. New stuff was written within the last couple of months (mid-2015 and on) as I’ve gotten back into writing.

I’ve noticed that, now that I’m typing things up, I’ve gravitated away from ending my poem lines with punctuation. I find that the structure of seeing it all cleanly laid out in type on a computer screen seems to reduce the need to separate each line with specific punctuation. In my head, it’s as if each line ends in an implicit comma, and each verse ends in an implicit period.

Is this direction a good thing? I don’t know.