Wow. I am having a hard time trying to think of something to write in my blog. Its been this way since the last time I wrote and tonight isn't much better. But I will not let the month of August go by with writing only four blog entries for this month. I will type out something -- even if it makes absolutely no sense, just so that I can have five entries for this month. Five per month is usually pretty good for me. I think the most I've written in one month was about nine or ten, that was back in October of last year when my favorite Major League Baseball team, the Detroit Tigers, were in the midst of a pennant race. There are some people that write blogs every single day. How do they do it?! I always run out of things to say, and sometimes when I think I have a decent idea for a blog, I end up trashing it shortly thereafter. Either I'm too critical of my ideas or don't them enough of a chance to flourish.
And you will notice that my blogs are usually never short. I consider three paragraphs to be short for me. I've seen blogs where people write a short paragraph, basically explaining how they feel and how their day has gone. I'm usually not that way, unless something tramatic has happened in my life and I prefer to keep it short. In fact, I probably won't even write if I feel that way. Thankfully that hasn't happened too much since I started this blog over a year ago (the other one was at WordPress). Overall, I have received a few nice comments from people since I started this blog. Some people just happened to come upon it and said I wrote real well. Others I've known for some time and really enjoyed what I had to say. See, at least I'm using my writing degree in some way.
One thing I have not yet discussed in my blog and something that I probably should explain is why I decided to pursue writing as a degree in college. It all dates back to high school, when I took an English course my sophmore year. We had to do an extensive amount of writing in that class - which I believe consisted of us writing journals. Mrs. Mattson was our teacher; and even though she made us write a lot (and I mean, a lot! Her tests were nicknamed "arm-burners" by the students), she became an influential person for me. She's the one that motivated me by giving me compliments on my writing and made me feel like I could do something even by jotting some ideas on a piece of paper. And although I never won that scholarship for my writing skills in high school and despite the fact that I was mostly an outsider then, she made me feel important. In college, I knew it was either going to be computers or something to do with English that I would focus my degree on. When I knew the computer route wasn't going to work, I decided to just focus on my liberal arts classes until I really figured out what I wanted to do. Teaching entered my mind, but I found out my GPA was much too low for me to take any teaching classes (for those non-believers out there, yes, I did struggle with certain classes early on in my college career). I even considered a possible career in business but ultimately nixed that. Then I focused my attention on writing and possibly journalism. And thus the start of my post-college career with writing. Journalism is no longer an option for me, seeing that I refused to join the college newspaper and have very little interest in hounding people for quotes.
People still ask me what I plan to do with my degree, even though I am settled in with a good paying job. Those dreams of being a best-selling novelist are still in the back of my head. Although I haven't done a lick of serious writing in about two years, I am still serious about those dreams. But I will never be a best-selling novelist if I don't actually start work on it. I have tossed around some ideas in my head and there is one idea I have generally focused on for a premise of my novel. Last winter I kept telling my mom, who is really pushing me into writing a book, that I was going to start writing last winter. Well, I never even typed a single word! But this winter I have promised to focus on my writing career. These are my goals: #1 - to develop a complete outline of the story I plan to write and develop chapters based on the outline; #2 - to write at least ten chapters by the end of the winter of 2007-08. Those are two modest goals for myself; goals that I think are easily achievable if I focus on the task at hand and stay motivated on what I want to complete. Motivation is what kills me most of the time, or the lack thereof, really. Well, I am looking to change that once the cold weather moves in.
Hmm, for someone having great difficulties in thinking up ideas for my blog, I think I did pretty well tonight. At first I was writing some pretty random stuff, but then I focused on a topic that really got me motivated to write about. Too bad I am about to end it right here, too. It just goes to show you that sometimes you really need to dig deep down inside yourself to come up with something. But it's down there. Once you reach it, it flourishes into something much grander than what you expected. And then you reach a point where you can't stop! I hope that's one thing that occurs once I start writing my novel. Stay tuned on the progress of my book in the months and years ahead!
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