Who Knew . . . ?

Who knew a blogger could get writer’s block?  I seem to have had that for the past week or more.  Ideas would come bubbling forth, but the words would not follow.  I have started two or three efforts in that time, but I ran out of words after only a paragraph or two.  Here I am hoping to post a blog every few days, and this happens.  This is not performance.

Then thinking about it, I thought about the whole question of writing.  Not business letters or reports.  I’ve done hundreds of those over my professional career.  Plans, presentations and critiques I’ve done by the dozens.  No, I was thinking of creative writing, either fiction or non, including this blog.

My desire to write goes back many years. I even talked about it in university.  The thought never really left me, but most of the time I was too busy writing those plans, letters, reports and presentations.  I concentrated my left over time to reading.  I read hundreds of books over the years, mostly history or mystery.  Still, I kept telling myself I could one day do it myself.  I finally got started when I retired from full time work.

My opportunity came when I attended a reunion with the men with whom I survived a terrible calamity in the Navy.  They kept asking when someone was going to capture their story.  So, forty years after the event I undertook that task.  The result, after a year of effort was the book “We Are as One”, the story of the worst peacetime disaster in the history of the Canadian Navy.  It even got published and it was well received by its primary audience – my survivor shipmates.  It felt good to do something original and tell an unknown story.  I must admit I felt proud of my accomplishments.

But once you have tasted the fruit of success, you want to do more.  You don’t want to stop at just one.  So after that, I looked for additional ideas and tried my hand a few short stories, one of which, “Retirement Age” appeared in an earlier posting on this site.  I think I also wrote the shortest short story ever created, one paragraph, which hasn’t seen the light of day outside my computer yet.  Maybe one day, I’ll get brave and post it on this blog, but I warn you, it isn’t pretty.

I find writing a wonderful avenue for exploring ideas and expressing yourself.  With the word processing capability of the modern PC, you can write, edit, put aside and even delete just about anything you want.  You can start an idea and put it aside until you come up with additional words or thoughts to change or enhance it.  Maybe some of the ideas that I started over the last couple of weeks, but ran out of words, will yet show up on this blog.

And that brings me to the latest iteration of my writing endeavors, this blog on JGForbes@blogspot.ca.  With the byline, “You Can’t Have it Both Ways”, it is a way for me to express and hopefully share some of my ideas and ideals.  I hope that you, dear readers, will indulge me in that and perhaps find something interesting along the way. For that indulgence, I thank you.  Here’s hoping that I don’t run out of words very often.