Writing Part 2: Dodging Bullets

In my experiences with publishing my writing, I feel that I dodged some bullets in that I failed to get published. Had I gotten published by a legacy publisher, I think I would have gone down a bumpy road of frustration, disappointment, and ultimately failure. Failing to get published was actually a good thing. Each failure on the road to publication was like dodging a bullet. Yes, some of those bullets might have missed me by inches and others by miles...but the important thing is that I didn't get hit.

Writing, Part 1: How my Teachers Crushed my Creativity

I started writing creatively in elementary school, but rarely finished anything.  I started a story about wild horses that was a few pages long, and I started a novel about "Will the Cat" that lasted a chapter or two before I lost interest. In any event, I didn't mention my extracurricular writing to my teachers. Looking at the scrapbook where my mother collected selected assignments, I can see that some of my school writing efforts received standard praise, but that's not what I remember about my experiences. Mostly I remember the rejections.

In Praise of the Kindle

Back in the early 2000s, I considering buying my first digital camera. I was leery of doing so, as all the photos I would take would end up on my computer, and how would I get prints? All of my family photos were in photos albums where I could feel nostalgic occasionally paging through them, provided I could get over the slightly musty smell. To be honest, only the oldest photos were in the albums--the more recent ones were more likely to be still in the envelopes from the local drugstore photo-developers.

I was already scanning some of the pictures I took after having them developed, and I could see doing more of that going forward, so I bit the bullet and bought a digital camera.

I never looked back.

Tiger Tank, Part 1

I see the incredible potential of airbrushes for model painting, but my experience is limited. Even so, I have managed some decent results, but getting them has not been without some frustration (this frustration is admittedly due to my unfamiliarity with airbrushing.

BoldrDash Winterdash

March 5, 2016
2016 got off to a rocky start OCR-wise.  After proving to myself in 2015 that I could do these races, I was determined to make 2016 a year in which I would “do them better.”  My first planned race was the Blizzard Blast at the end of January. I missed it because most of my family was sick and I had to take care of them.  By all accounts I missed a fun race. For most of February I was suffering from strep and then bronchitis, so my training essentially came to a halt. Most of the people I knew would not be attending this race, and although I know several New England Spahtens, none that I knew would be going to this particular race.