A Post a Day in May #7: Getting where I'm going

I have pledged to write a new post for this blog every day in May. 

“Life is an experiment in which you may fail or succeed. Explore more, expect least.” 

Santosh Kalvar

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has he courage to lose sight of the shore.” 

Andre Gide 

“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.” 

Ursula K. Le Guin 

I regularly read the Jungle Red Writers blog by a group of mystery writers whose work I enjoy. While I don’t write fiction and don’t aspire to (although, never say never), their daily posts have often pointed me to authors and writers whose work is applicable to my interest in creative non-fiction. It is through a guest post on JRW that I discovered Jane Friedman and her terrific book The Business of Being a Writer, which I began reading last March. 

By early April, I had come up with the idea for this Five Years a Writer blog and by mid-April I had put the rudimentary structure online through Blogger. I published a placeholder post and did nothing more with it until September. 

In the intervening months, I began to have a regular Saturday morning coffee with my friend Deborah, who was embarking on a new piece of fiction writing. Together, we talked writing and individually, we planned, plotted and wrote, then came together again to share our writing, critique each other’s, and carry on with this cycle. It was a lot of fun. And we decided we wanted to do something together — a workshop on writing, maybe. 

By the end of the summer, we had sketched out a 4-session offering that we fantasized about delivering through McNally Robinson, Winnipeg’s fabulous independent bookstore. By October, we had drafted a proposal and submitted it. We were on tenterhooks until January when we finally heard they were interested, and in February we signed the contract. 

Now, here I am in May, writing A Post a Day on my blog, which was a mere idea just over a year ago. 

Next February, I will turn 60. Thereafter sometime, I can step away from full-time work; while the timeline for retirement is not yet plotted, I am inexorably moving towards it. Before I get there, I want to have a self-managed website established, from which I can run a more user-friendly blog (comments should be easier for readers to post!). Deborah and I will have run our workshop at McNally (presuming anyone signs up, of course) and, with luck, we’ll be working on our next collaboration. 

I don’t know exactly where I’m going, but I am getting more and more confident that I’ll arrive there in the end — and I'm definitely enjoying the journey! 

We are in the McNally Robinson Community Classroom catalogue! 

Thanks for reading. 

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Writers want to be read; at least, this writer wants to be read, so comments, rebuttals and feedback are all welcome. Subscribe to the blog to receive the posts direct into your email inbox.