Teachers of serious writing will often tell you… or more correctly, give you the Word of God, “You want to be a good writer? You have to write every single day.” And having been a teacher of writing at the high school and middle school level, I am committed to passing that on to you also as the inviolable Word of God. You see, I have long been, well, not a serious writer exactly, more of a dedicated writer with warped notions of reality and a tendency towards goofiness. You can see by the view of my WordPress insights page that I have steadily, in five years’ time, been noticed and looked at by increasing amounts of thoroughly duped WordPress viewers.
10,373 visitors have viewed something on my blog 17,383 times in 2017. And I know that most are looking at the pictures and moving on. That’s how I get away with writing some of the stupid stuff I post on my blog. But there’s a secret to that too. I drew or painted a lot of the pictures I use on this blog myself. You would think that sooner or later some expert psychologist would trace violence in the streets back to my pictures as the ultimate cause, but that hasn’t happened yet. I am sure that is mostly because not even the psychologists can muck their way through my paragraphs of purple paisley prose. You see, I most often use my writing on this blog to commit atrocities of humor and wit. I only rarely dabble in things intended to be uplifting, spiritual, politically challenging, or sentimental. I complain on my blog a lot. It is also a place for expressing my inherent grumpiness and old-man dyspeptic irritations with life. But viewers tend to take my humor seriously and only laugh at the stuff I am most embarrassed about.
I was supposed to be doing this blog as way to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star, for I-Universe Publishing. They set it up for me. But, as they don’t pay me anything for the work I put into it, and it doesn’t really impact sales anyway, I use it now as writing practice. I have as a personal goal to write 500 words a day. The blog counts. So it means that some days, the 500 words I write in my blog are the only words I get written that day. Though, now that I am retired, 500 words of blog writing plus 500 words of novel writing can get me well past writing 1000 words in a day. It doesn’t take long at that rate to build up an awful lot of words. I shudder to think what would happen if the word dam were to suddenly give way, releasing a word-flood of monumental proportions. Half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex would drown in Mickian words if that were to happen.
So, do I think that you should write every day? Do I think it makes you a better writer? Do I actually follow my own advice? Yes! To all three. And as I have passed the 500 word mark yet again, I can stop now.
Ged Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids. He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings. He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal. He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good. The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.
