For those tuning in late, this is the end of the second month of the second year of this blog as a real series. I’m treating each year as a season and each week as an episode. If you want to carry on that analogy, I guess each post becomes a scene, or segment.
This site dates back farther than that, though, to my retirement from newspapers in 2018. After 35 years of daily deadlines, I figured I would spin out occasional essays and fiction when I felt like it. It took me three years to realize that’s no way to run a blog, or a business, for that matter.
I wasn’t spending enough time with my creative writing projects. I wasn’t accounting for myself as a writer. And honestly, I wasn’t giving myself any direction, or any credit for the work I actually accomplished. So these weekly reviews are my tool to remind myself — and you — of the progress.
The audience — that’s you — and deadlines are crucial to this writer’s experience. Thank you for the views, likes, and comments. That’s what kept me going for years as a local journalist and columnist — dialog with the community.
I started this series as part of my research into my book about writing a play, “Harry Houdini and the Witch of Beacon Hill.” I have the beginning and the end. Next I have to fill in the middle, which is the real question: Why did it take me 40 years to write? I turned to my collection of old correspondence, notes, and journals.
The journals took me on another track — my breakout year as a freelance writer, and what I’ve learned from it. We’re in the middle of that series now, and it’s about to take a turn. I still haven’t come to any mention of the play, but I see a story unfolding. It may be of interest to others just starting in their careers — or just ending them.
In 1979, I took about a week off for travel with friends, including a cold weekend in a Vermont cabin. Coincidentally, (or was it serendipity again?) one of those friends contacted me today through this blog for the first time. A fellow writer, she had a question about how I organize my projects. Because the journal entries will be quiet for a few days, I’ll try to answer in a post this week.
Meanwhile, I’ll ask those of you who are writers the same question: How do you organize your projects when you seem to have more ideas than you have time?
Let me know in the comments below or in an email to howard@ (you know this part but the spambots don’t) hwfielding.com, and I’ll share them!
Until next time, thanks for stopping by!
Howard
In case you missed it …
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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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Journeyman Journalist: Bridging the gap
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes the hats of journalist and fiction writer can overlap. Covering a local disaster led to ideas for a short story.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: Turning back
Reading Time: 2 minutes It took much longer to develop a news sense than to come up with ideas for make-believe stories that died on the vine.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1979: Settling in
Reading Time: 2 minutes With a brown-and-yellow bathroom theme, I was no interior decorator. And that Woody Allen poster was a bad role model for a writer.