On Writing

I’ve always liked to write. Over the years I’ve taken the time and made the effort to write but never kept it up enough to accomplish anything. Lots of ramblings here and there but no coherent and sustained project. Eventually all I ever wrote were reports for work which I actually liked doing and I think were well done. Then I retired and I thought I would get back into writing for myself which I did a little every day. I was doing more writing but there was no pattern. No real organized effort. Just random writings here and there scattered over many documents on a computer.

About a year into retirement I started using my old blog for writing. It originally was mostly used to organize my music mixes and to have a place where they were available to see all in one place. I started also using it for observations and memories but it was still mostly random ideas.

Last year I started trying to be a little more organized in my various writings and started keeping directories of documents containing anything and everything that I had been writing down including social media posts and comments. These were now in the cloud and available from any device. I would always try to write serious post in a document and edit a couple of times before posting online. All of those writings were saved in a directory on a drive.

Then came the pandemic of 2020 and all that came with it including the stay at home quarantine orders. It was then that I got serious about the writing and the organizing of thoughts and observations. I also realized I was writing about more and different topics. My niece Marissa had been asking me about family history and that I should be writing down memories. She was right. I had been doing some but they were totally random and not in a usable format.

In addition to family memories I was writing more about books, movies, music and in different categories about each. I was posting a lot on Facebook about these subjects as some kind of pandemic exercise. I was also writing more about traveling and different places, about different beers I've tasted, our gardens, politics and my time in the Navy. And of course I’ve been writing about making my mixes.

I then got very organized in using the blog for my writings. I was backdating some blog entries to correspond when I wrote something I found in my older documents. I was putting them in the context of the time I wrote them. I was also using a feature of Facebook to go back and see posts from a particular time period. I was editing them, elaborating on something, fleshing it out, expanding on it and fine tuning a document. I’ve done the same with Instagram posts and my Untappd check ins.

Interesting times.