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I just had my four year anniversary. I’ve sat for 40 minutes a day every day. When I started doing meditation, I thought that after a few years I would be able to float off the floor, stay focused for the entire session, and have achieved nirvana. It didn’t turn out that way.

A little over a year after moving to HostGator, I’ve moved once again. I thought the hosting service would be an improvement over GoDaddy, which I had used for years. Instead, it was the same and an email spam nightmare.

In the 1850's, the Whig Party, who had previously seen two of its candidates elected president, fell apart because of deep internal divisions. Many of it members switched to the newly created Republican Party. Some moved to the short lived American Party while others quit politics altogether. Today, we are seeing divisions in the Republican Party and a declining membership. Should it fail to win the presidency in 2016, will it be the end of the party at the national level?

I’ve had my websites on GoDaddy for fifteen plus years. For most of my stay there, I had no real problems, but, lately, I started noticing slow response times on one of my websites. I was also in the process of rewriting a site using Ruby on Rails. GoDaddy doesn’t support it. It was time to move

Before I started using Day One to do my journaling, I made entries in a Microsoft Word document. Once I decided I was going to stay with the application, I wanted to import all my older entries so they would all be in one place. There is an automated import option, but it only supports MacJournal and Momento the last time I checked. I had to find another way. Cutting and pasting directly into the app a day at a time was out of the question as I had three and half years of daily entries. That’s when I looked into Day One command line option.

After about a year of enthusiastic fiction writing, I quit. I was tapped out. I couldn’t think of any new stories or flesh out the ones that I had. The ones that I had completed were still rough drafts. I couldn’t see anyway to improve them. I became frustrated and didn’t think I had it in me to be a writer, but I didn’t quit writing.

The song It Was a Very Good Year was written by Ervin Drake for the Kingston Trio, but it was Frank Sinatra that made it famous. The lyrics reminisce about different periods in a man’s life and the women he encountered. Are there very good years in your life or, if not good, significant ones? I’ll start with the ones in the song.

One problem I’ve had when I sit down to write is that my mind wanders off to other things. Instead of forcing myself back to waiting for a writing subject to come to me, I decided to take advantage of my wanderings as a writing exercise.

Just when I thought I was completely tapped out on ideas for blog entries, I’ve written a couple more. It must have been the lack of pressure that got the creative juices going. It’s too late in my publishing schedule to get one out this week so I’m just putting up this note.

New Years brings resolutions. They usually involve starting something or doing more of it. In the case of some bloggers, it is a time to stop.

I recently read that 95% of all blogs are abandoned. I abandoned one myself on a different subject. So I feel even a few months of blog entries on this blog makes me a survivor. I’ve also found that it has a nice side benefit.

In browsing the web on the subject of writing, I had seen links to sites of writing prompts, but never looked into them as I was doing pretty good without them at the time. Last week, while reading my Twitter feed, I saw a post for a writing prompt. It suggested writing from the point of view of an object involved in the story. I loved the idea and immediately wrote one. I decided another look at writing prompts was warranted.

Since I’ve been suffering from writer’s block of late, I decided to look into it on the Web. There’s nothing like the Web for getting help. I found it from one extreme to the other.

I’ve only been doing serious creative writing for a few months and already it has become a roller coaster affair. On September 11, I was enthusiastically celebrating my launch into creative writing with great plans for short stories and a novel. Two months later on 6 November, I was celebrating how I overcame a writing slump and great productivity was ahead of me. It didn’t last.

Does writing have any tools of the trade anymore? When writing first started, writers quite literally had tools: the hammer and chisel. For the more mundane, there was the stylus and the clay tablet. Writers were probably pretty particular about the chisel they used to write on stone tablets. One mistake and you had to start all over again. The quality of the stone was important too. You might whip out a rough draft in sandstone, but if you wanted it to last there was nothing like granite.

I’ve only been writing extensively on a regular basis for about seven months now. It took a lot less time than that to settle into a routine that works well for me. The three factors I addressed were time, frequency, and location.

Are you at a loss as to what to write? Is your current work uninspiring? Well, you should complain. You should bitch and moan and get it off your chest. Do it at your keyboard. That’s what I did and it felt great.

This is my second blog. I started one on photography a few years ago and only managed a few entries before I stopped. I just couldn’t think of anything to say that already hadn’t been said many times before by other bloggers. I told myself that if I ever started another blog, I wouldn’t abandon it.

Whenever I want to learn something new, I look for a books on the subject. In the case of writing, I first started searching the Internet for recommendations. There are several good lists out there. Here is one of them. So far, I finished four books on the subject. Here are my thoughts.

My Twitter feed has long ago grown beyond my capacity to read it all. Most of it is filled with tweets that I don’t care about or find irritating. I filter out what I can and skim over the rest in search of valuable content. It got me to thinking about what would be my ideal feed. Here's a list of what I would like to see:

For some writers, thinking of new story ideas may be easy. For me, it’s a struggle. I’m new at it so maybe it’s my approach. I sit down and try to think how a story might begin. A few interesting scenarios have come to me, but the problem is that I don’t know where to take them or they’re boring hero saves damsel in distress plots.

When I first started reading my Twitter feed, it didn’t take much time to read all the posts. I would only check in every few days. As people started following me and I followed them back, even checking in every day wasn’t enough to keep up. I began reading all my posts when I woke up in the morning, in the middle of the day, and when I went to bed at night. After I started following more than about 100 people, I would have to spend several hours a day keeping up with all the posts, which was more time than I wanted to devote. Something had to change.

Blog Have you ever edited something you wrote and knew it could be better, but just couldn’t see how? Maybe it needs a time out.

I’m working on a novel length piece of writing and I’m stuck. I have a beginning and an end written, but am bogged down in moving the story between those two points. I needed a way to layout and plan the story’s progress to aid me in filling in the missing pieces. Since I’m writing the piece using Scrivener, I figured there must be a feature to help me do that. This article is about what I found and how I used it.

I’ve been writing creatively for about six months now and it’s been an interesting experience. I had no specific plans about how I would go about becoming a writer when I started. I just plunged in. This is about how it has gone so far.

I’ve found Twitter to be a great place to learn about writing and meet other writers. While I’ve had a Twitter account for several years, it’s only been in the past few months that I’ve started following writers and the writing profession. This is a description of my initial experiences.

My first foray into creative writing was at an early age, but my attempts were quickly dashed. As a young boy in the throes of puberty, I some how managed to come across a copy of Fanny Hill — nothing like starting with a classic. The book had only just been published in the US and was immediately banned because of its pornographic content. In spite of attending the sex education class at school with my father, it was a complete revelation to me. Men and women did those things!

In over a little more than a year, I’ve gone through several writing applications as my needs changed. I also switched from a PC to a Mac. The change was unrelated to writing, but did give me access to some great apps that aren’t available on the PC. This is a brief overview of the software I used.

When I first started writing on a daily basis, doing anything creative with it never entered my mind. I had just wrapped up my long career in Information Technology and was free to do whatever I pleased. Doing nothing was a concern so I started a day book thinking the shame of saying I did nothing day to day would keep me active. It started out like this:

I am on a crash course. I’d like to think my life is careening about wildly from one hair raising experience to another destined for an tragic end in a wild and fiery crash, but unfortunately not. Instead, the crash course is learning to be a creative writer. The raison d’être or reason for being of this blog is to document that process.