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Showing posts with label new year. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new year. Show all posts

Thursday, January 02, 2025

My New Year Vow: An op-ed a week

Writing is my calling.  Writing is my gift, ever since my ninth grade English teacher told me that on our last day of class.  It is something that nobody could ever take away from me.  It is something of my very own, that was supposed to always be with me.

And I’ve neglected it horribly these past few years.

I’ve been spending so much of my waking moments keeping my head above water, trying to keep from drowning because of real life matters, that I’ve not devoted anything to my passion and true career.  It simply hasn’t figured at all in my life.  It’s been more than two years since I wrote an op-ed piece, and I had to give up a plum gig at The Western Journal, things became so rough on my end.

Life was so much better when I was working as a mental health professional.  I was going in every day, getting to truly help people have more fulfilling lives.  I was making a difference in this world.  And then I could go home and spend my own hours with my writing.  And that’s the way things would have stayed had the economy not turned so wretched and forced me to find higher paying employment elsewhere.  Employment that has been unreliable, it’s turned out.

So, for the past couple of years my writing has suffered.  And then this past August I decided it was time to finally complete the memoir that I began in 2014.  For three solid months if I wasn’t working or eating or sleeping or taking care of my dog, I was writing.  I went DAYS without showering, I was so “in the zone” with my manuscript.  Until finally in mid-November the first draft was completed.

It was a grand return to form.  And I don’t want it to stop.  I’m back in the saddle again and the last thing I want to do is to find myself slid out of it once more.

So I’m going to commit myself to something for 2025: writing a new op-ed piece every week.  Hopefully for publication elsewhere, but here on this blog if nowhere else.  I need to plunge back into the fray, and involve myself again in the larger world.  Maybe if I do that my writing chops will come back full-bore.  Maybe I can also overcome the indifference to things that I have come to feel.  Perhaps it will even improve my already existing manuscript: something I have been told is good already, but I know it can be better.  And I really do want to see it on a bookstore’s shelf someday.  A story about mental illness, swindling operations, how to make a movie, and twelve months crossing America deserves a shot at traditional publication and that’s going to be a goal for this year too.

I guess this is all a roundabout way of saying that y’all can expect some more writing here and elsewhere for awhile.  A few years ago I did a blog post each day for Lent.  If I can do that, I believe I can sit down and write a new opinion piece every week.  It may not be my best work especially just jumping back into battle… but it will be some movement forward.  And that’s what matters most.

Look for the first piece soon.

Wednesday, January 01, 2025

Happy New Year 2025

 


I've waited decades for tonight, to post this song...





"In The Year 2525" by Zager and Evans.


May 2025 be a good year for all of us.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Looking back on '22

Wow.  Blink and you miss it.  Seems like only yesterday we were celebrating the last normal holiday season before the COVID plague hit.  And that was three entire years ago.

"Time keeps on slipping into the future..."

This past year was a frustrating one, in too many ways.  For me, it was that so much corruption has become obvious in our society and government.  I used to believe that we could do something to change that.  That all it would take is to gain enough momentum and we could overcome the powers that be.

But as I've grown older the less that I see that happening.  People see the corruption and how pervasive it has become - and I'm looking you especially FBI and Department of Justice - that they simply give up trying.

Between that and our "elected leaders" spending money that was never really there, and obscenities like "transgender", and our schools and libraries becoming places of indoctrinating young minds with liberal bullcrap, and too much else, well...

It's going to take a hard fall for this country to come to its senses.  And when it does the really normal people had better be prepare to take up arms against those who brought us to this condition.  Liberalism has been tried and failed.  We can no longer afford give it any new chance of proving itself.

That's how I've come to look at things on the macro scale, more or less.

On a more personal level, I think this was an okay year.  Not overwhelmingly "great" but it's been far from the disaster that many years I've lived through have been.  And I think it could be argued that I made some astounding gains in my life this past 364 days.  My bipolar disorder has become much more manageable, to a degree I had never thought possible.  It's taken almost two decades to bring it under this much a modicum of control but at last it's not completely crushing my life.  That is a massive achievement.  One that I have to credit friends, counselors, and God toward helping me reach this place.

I became a writer at a highly respected website.  And I changed careers, to one that is paying much more while also giving me more time to address things that matter to me.  Although I would like to get back into the healthcare field.  That was a very rewarding experience, getting the chance to make others' lives better every day.

Speaking of writing, I was able to find "my muse" again.  Whether it was manic depression or the medications I take to control that, my ability to write had been robbed from me for a very long time.  I'm now finally making an earnest attempt at writing the book that Dad and many others have said I should compose.  Maybe there will be a finished first draft by the end of spring, if not sooner.

I suppose that 2022 was a year, no more and no less.  One has to accept it, good and bad alike.  But it most certainly could be said that it was a far improvement over what most of the past three years have been like.

Excelsior to 2023!


Friday, January 01, 2021

Yay! Happy New Year!

Now, let us NEVER do that again.


EDIT 12:30 am EST:  As an aside, this blog saw 69 posts made during 2020.  That's the most since 2015!  Yes, The Knight Shift IS thriving again :-)

Sunday, January 01, 2012

It's a new year!

Here's praying that 2012 will be a better one for each of us.