Good Essay Question

What is the difference between intelligence and wisdom? or What is the difference between being smart and being wise?

Stranger Things Have Happened

A very strange thing happen this summer. The two letters that are pictured here were returned to me as undeliverable. The part that makes this unusual is that the letters were sent in 1983. Can you see the postmark and the 20 cent stamps? That means they were sent 28 years ago, yet only returned to me this past June. I opened them up and discovered that the first letter was one I had written to an editor, asking if she might be interested in an article I was writing. The second letter was a follow up, asking if she had received the first letter. Obviously, my writing was never published in that magazine. Even though the editor never received my query, I'm sure that receiving no response felt like a rejection to me.

I learned early that one has to have a thick skin when trying to publish. Often a writer will receive rejection after rejection with no reasons given. Frankly, I always thought it was easier on my ego to be rejected by editors who I never met--and it's rare that a writer ever meets the editors since most everything is accomplished through correspondence.

Follow Me on My Journey of Writing

I decided to start this blog for a couple of reasons. I am hoping that it will help to keep me on task with my writing goals. I also think it might create discussions among those who teach writing or write themselves.

I plan to reflect on my interest in writing, chronicle the projects on which I am working, talk about my personal process of writing, and try to sort out obstacles as they arise.

There are a number of writing projects that interest me. We’ll see how I juggle them.

Joel McIntosh, publisher of Prufrock Press, has given me permission to use the content of the 6 ½ years of weekly blogs that I wrote for Prufrock’s Gifted Child Information Blog. I would like to rearrange that material, eliminate outdated information, and create a “best of” resource for parents and/or teachers. I won’t know quite what format that will take until I play around with it a bit.

For several years, I have wanted to write something special for my two grown sons. This project falls under the umbrella of memoir, though I plan to create it in a non-traditional manner. I envision a series of thematic essays that tell the family stories. (And there are some great family stories.) I want the family stories to live on long after I am gone. Hopefully, I will be able to refine this project enough so that it will be worthy of publishing for the general public.

There are always topics that come up in daily living that make me want to write. That’s what drove me to publish as a freelance writer when my kids were young. A subject would come up that was interesting, so I would research it. I figured as long as it was of interest to me, it would probably also be interesting to others, so I would write it up and submit it to a magazine or newspaper.






My final area of interest is fiction. I have never written fiction and don’t know if I have the talent it requires, but I would like to at least make the attempt.






I hope you will follow along with me as I pursue my interest in writing.