In other words, I’m changing the title of my weekend “Week in Review” section.
When we talk about seasons of something, we’re talking about the whole series, not a feature of it. The title of this blog is “In Other Words,” so the weekly review becomes Season 2, Episode X, where equals the number of weeks since the beginning of the year. Q.E.D.
It’s been a difficult week for writing. I’m juggling several big projects, personal and professional. This includes a website edit and rebuild for a small international nonprofit and some volunteer communications for our church. The results so far are promising.
On a personal side, I’ve again taken up my family tree on Ancestry.com, partly to keep up with our son and daughter-in-law, who have tracked one part of our lineage back to Dutch East India Company settlers around 1610.
I continue to use my 1979 journal for writing prompts on the anniversary of my writing them down, although the ideas were coming fast and furious once I was living the life of a freelancer. The ideas are like seeds, but they have to be tended, brought to fruition, and harvested.
The “Animal House” proposal for TV Guide was my first major-market query, and although it was little more than an idea when I jotted it down, there was enough background that it made for a good post. I’m not sure how I documented its development in the journal, so we’ll just have to stay tuned as I read on ahead.
The post about creating a character based on a person I’d only just met seems like a “well, duh!” moment four decades later, but it was something I had never thought about as a novice writer.
I also jotted this note but didn’t think it was enough — yet — to post about:
Wrote about 3 pages of a humor piece for Student Lawyer, “Cole’s Law.”
Howard W. Fielding, “Journal, Volume II,” 13 January 1979
I had — still have — a tendency to put pun to paper whenever I could, hence the title. Student Lawyer magazine was a monthly publication of the student division of the American Bar Association. I was still a member even though I had put my second year of law school on hold for my great writing adventure. The magazine’s “Legal Fictions” section seemed a good outlet for my humor pieces. It was also a small enough market that the competition was light.
Was I successful? As with TV Guide, no spoilers! I’ll have more on both of them in the coming weeks.
In case you missed it …
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: Passing by the bar
Reading Time: 2 minutes I didn’t have the necessary devotion, interest, motivation, or drive to continue my legal studies. Had I subconsciously decided not to return to the law?
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Budding Writer, 1979: Shifting gears
Reading Time: 2 minutes Biking through the countryside gave me a new view of the paper’s coverage area, and time to think about the stories I wanted to tell.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: No strings attached
Reading Time: 2 minutes Does a reporter create a conflict of interest by accepting publicity work from the subject of a story? It could have become a tangled web.
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Budding Writer, 1978: ‘I Do Care’
Reading Time: < 1 minutes As a writer, I should care more about what other people think and less about what they think of me.
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