Writing

I have been writing since I was 12, journals, poetry, columns and finally a book or two.  I’ve been interested in words. I’ve enjoyed sentences. Paragraphs bored me once. I tried various kinds of punctuation. I had editors and publishers. I miss the editors. So much work for one writer alone.

I loved the organizations. The writer groups and the writer societies.  Canadian Authors Association was always so inspirational.  

I loved the Surrey Writer’s Fest, meeting the greats and finding out that they were pretty much like you or me.  Except they write. They write hard. They’re focused. They have ideas.  They put their ideas on paper or now in a digital format. 

Also they have a business sense and accept promotional consideration. I lack that to some extent. I have a vocation. Writing is my avocation. I became a blogger and it suited me to have a format where I could post my photos and share my thoughts.  I’m planning on writing several books. Chapters and research has been done but I feel I need a clear space. I laugh and think of the year long sabbaticals I would have been entitled to if I’d stayed in academia, attended those soul destroying committee meetings and kow towed to tedious administration.  I admire those who rise above that.  There are wonderful people there who bypass the skullduggery and soul sucking. The creative theft is not all academia is about though I believe it was once more shiny and vibrant. I’m thankful for it and wish it well though I’ve departed. I’ve gone a road less travelled. I’ve veered off into the wilderness.  It’s lonely out here. It’s unnecessary. I don’t need to write any more than I need to itch a peculiar place that distracts me from the more athletic hedonist pursuits of life.  

I like writing. I even imagined fame one day.  Some sort of recognition.  I’ve had awards. But what I liked was being asked to share. I guess,I miss teaching. I taught at the university and elsewhere but I don’t really care to teach. That’s not it. I could expand my Utube channel if I really wanted  to do that.  I can’t say I do. Maybe one day.  

McLuhan said the Medium is the Message. I’ve worried the blog and played with the book and once enjoyed the bohemian beat poetry standing on stage with my guitar and rapping out the rhymes long before that became popular in the mainstream.  I was an aside to the folk rock era.  I even wrote songs.  It was always with a sense of discovery. Like those early days when I wrote haiku and iambic pentameter. Then later I’d write opinion pieces and reports.  The real money was in legal documents. I didn’t even get paid for my pieces presented to parliament.  

Now I blog.  It’s writing.  I like it.  That’s what most counts.  I enjoy writing like riding a bicycle. These days its more like riding  a Harley or a Vespa..  Now I must get to my ‘real work’.  The real work is differentiated from my writing because it ‘pays’ and there’s a paying audience and real demand.  It is seductive.  Writing has never paid for my taste in sailboats or  holidays.  I’d like it to. It just hasn’t and I’ve lacked confidence to see that it did.  Instead I write on the sly. I don’t approach critics or publishers. I don’t conform to the known pathways, those places where readers prefer to tread. Instead I’m self indulgent.  Writing here in this medium because it’s easy and now it suits me. It’s like doing laps of the pool or the gym as a way to keep my mind in.  Perhaps one day I’ll swim in an ocean, write in a more competitive and acknowledged genre. 

For now what counts is I write.  Writers write. It’s a bit like breathing. It’s truly what keeps the spirit alive. Blogs are good for daily exercise.  They’re more than that but if that were all they were that would be enough. Other artists , musicians for instance, do scales and practice.  Writing is practice.  I’m reading and I’m writing. It’s what writers do.