The Wolves

November 28, 2025

The wolves are at my door again, barking, barking. Do this but you must do that first, but you forgot this. Don't write the next sentence in the story because you need to make the SEO correctly to do something. My brain is not big enough to do all that needs to be done. I have taken lessons on SEO and still don't get it, me the brainy person in the family. There is no time left to think about my friend who had surgery or the one who is struggling with moving along from day to day. I too, am struggling from day to day and the struggle is too much. I am thinking beyond thinking and all I want to do is write. Is the wolf at my door me, myself, I? It is time for me to stop or a bit.

Being a Success

November 22,2025

We want to write. To begin we sit ourselves down and put a few words on paper. Right away we see we don't know enough. We pour through books, reading and analyzing., take classes. Teachers give us a grade and by this grade we rate ourselves. We try and try and after many failures, we get something published. Yeah we are a writer. No, we are not-quite. We have learned how to open a piece, how to develop characters, how to plot, and on and on, but no one can teach us how to express ourselves on paper to make it our own.
If we are painting and trees we know are green and we want the tree to be orange or red or something else or we want to make the tree square we can. We must make the rest of the picture match the color or shape we choose so others can see a tree without a doubt. We must write the way we wish to express it. We make our characters real the way we want them to be real and the conversations real the way we hear them. We use one sentence paragraphs or go on for a page and a half on one paragraph and make it so people want to read it. Then it is ours and we have succeeded.

Turkey Day

November 19, 2025

Tomorrow is turkey day at our place, one of two days set aside. to be thankful. It is suppose to be a day to think about what we have and not about what we do not have. It is not a day to wake up and ask yourself what you are going to be in a rage about today. In other words it is not a day to be a bully, to complain, or to throw a fit. But there are those who will do just that, complain and cause a ruckus. It is best for those of us who can stand our ground and still be pleasant, to do that, to continue to stay calm in the midst of confusion, unhappiness, and rebellion. I can not always remain calm and serene. I am me, and me does not tolerate bad behavior unless I am doing the bad stuff. So for you who can, please forgive me on this one day. Be tolerant. Be kind. I will not act like a child if I can stop myself. Please and thank you

Perceptions Under Stress

Say you are the last person alive. You awaken in a world devastated by something that obliterates everything, people, houses, cars, freeways, everything. You are alone, with no sounds, nothing to see but grayness. What would you do? Look for another person? Look for food? Look for something you recognize? Look for wounds on self? What would be your first actions? To holler for help? To holler for some other person? Would you stumble around just looking at the debris? If you were the last person alive, how long would you want to live: being alone with no person to talk to, with no one but yourself?

Why Do I Write

November 12, 2025

Why do I write? Good question, but I don't know the answer. I know several reasons that I have convinced myself are the reason, but are they the real reason? I don't want to read my work once it is finished. I tire of reading it to edit the stuff. So, I don't write for myself---but do I, for sure do I? Writing unloads from my brain of all the turmoil and presents matters in a simplified form. When in my mind, things seem muddled and copious, on paper they are squished down to less than I perceived them to be and simpler to resolve.
That was how I started to write, but then once I figured out that mess, I began to write for others, hoping that people could see their problems identified through my writings and that would help them solve their problems, and now that I write this down, that isn't the reason at all. I simply write because....

Writing as a Career

November 9, 2025

To be a writer, first you must sit down to write. Following that, once you find you don't know what to write, you will spend a good deal of time thinking about it. And then if you are serious, you will write a little. Now, you realize reading isn't enough to give you knowledge of writing so you take lessons. After which you write and toss what you have written or show your writing to others expecting, hoping, for encouraging words.
There will be tons of writing before you start sending stuff off to editors, magazines or a contest. Next are the rejections. They start to build up. You continue to write though you have enough rejections to paper your walls. Finally you get something published and you want the world to see it, but no one you know reads what it is published in. You wave it at friends, neighbors and relatives trying to get them interested.
At last you are getting some material published, just a smidgeon. If it is a book you are writing, you have to decided on publishing it yourself or going with a traditional publisher. Either way, there will be marketing that takes up your time and energy.
Maybe this is the way anything you do becomes a success, but with writing, you don't get paid until you make it at least this far and then not always. And, a biggie, you don't get laughed at for trying and not succeeding for so long a time.

Voice

November 7, 2025

I'm just really finding out what voice is. I was coming back from breakfast and thought about writing. In amongst those deep thoughts, it came to me that we each speak differently, use different words, different sayings, put our words in particular order, use the same phrases over and over again, and react the same way to events. All these actions and speech affects come out in our writing. That is part of voice. Another aspect is how each of us think and evolve ideas into action, or in this case, writing. We analyze, observe and deduct, or vacillate or procrastinate. Our writing shows these also.
Our voice shows, then, in dialogue, in the type of characters we choose, the plots and how we develop them, and the narrative style of our writing. No two of us will have all these same traits in our writing.

October 25, 2025

Ads, we are inundated with them, Surveys, too. You cannot read something or answer emails without suffering many of each. They become important as sayings after a bit. Ads for web pages, for designing web pages, in which they, the creators of the ad use language I don't often understand and letters and initials that I ty to fit with my own words. I don't like shortcut initials instead of words but I use shortcuts, can't and doesn't, shortcuts for words. What's my problem. I can't figure out what all the initials stand for. That's my problem.

Ads are becoming more prominent than writing. They seem to take up more space. Ads, not only to get business for products, but more business for about everything. Or a survey to see if you were treated well, better than average, or if the product or service was done well, or better than average.

I use ads and reviews. I have to if I want to make money. So, around and around we go, ever increasing ads, surveys, reviews and such. Has our society improved or just moved sideways?

What It Takes to Be the Best

Ingenuous What?

Tuesday October 21,2025

An agent once said my writing was too ingenuous. What the heck did she mean. Even after looking up the word I wasn't able to pin point what she was trying to get me to change. It is forty years later and I've finally figured it out.
In fairy tales they say "He lived happily ever after. In life we don't live happily ever after. We just keep trekking on. We think about a problem and come to several conclusions and usually let it settle a bit before making a decision without ever being sure the decision was right.
I want to make conclusions. There aren't any. They are too entangled with many different threads and we must make the best choice possible, right or wrong. That is what she was trying to tell me.

Bluebirds in Action

Friday October 17, 2025

I looked out the window and saw seven bluebirds sitting on the fence looking down at one spot on the ground. Below them, one bird was flopping around madly, trying to flap it's wings, one wing stretched out, but just raising a dust storm. It was injured. More birds joined them, and I saw that they were all concerned about the one bird on the ground.
What surprised me was the interest of the other birds for one of their own. I didn't think birds had that kind of empathy. Also, there weren't other kinds of birds on the fence, only bluebirds. No finches, crows or robins. Although they fly individually, they obviously stick together, like to like. And they fly south together, one kind of bird in a triangular formation, not a mixture of birds going south.
Can I learn something from this?

My Story

I have a short story coming out in a magazine soon. The magazine is Adelaide and the story is Retribution. It is honestly one of the best things I've written and will be entered in the pushcart contest, submitted by the magazine.
Meanwhile, here is the long link to my latest book, The Machiavellian Man.hhttps://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=lqsPJrJgQOKKDHgVuSrtfuLmDUJkCSB0XIkSbmAlX4pttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FMNZGG6V. Or just go to Amazon and type in my name and it will bring up all my books, I write about incidents and people in my life that have presented obstacles. I have survived them and each of you can survive similar ones. We have to be strong to live through life. If you are alive you are fighting a good fight. So, I salute you, my fellow men and women.

Thanks

Continued

I didn't know what it would be like to live in assisted living. I thought it would be one large group of people brought together all happy to be joined. That is so to a point. We are all supportive of each other, but still there is an adjustment period.
Most of us had two weeks to get ready to move, to settle up with the landlord, to decided what to take and what to leave behind. All those knick-knacks you've kept, old memories of someone, someplace or sometime will have to be discarded. We hold onto things, because we can't hold onto time or people. People move away, friendships dissolve, family dies.
We can't go back. We have no place to go back to. We must make the adjustment. Sometimes it puts us in the hospital for a day or a week. It is one hard adjustment.

At the End