A couple more PAD poems

Today I completed Day 14's poem. I'm almost half-way through Robert Lee Brewer's November 2015 Poem a Day chapbook challenge. Though I'm not ecstatic about my product, I am happy that I'm writing a poem a day. My long-term consulting job and vacation took me out of my writing routine. This challenge seems to be helping me get back to it. Day 9 Write a work poem. For some folks, writing is work (great, huh?). For others, work is teaching, engineering, or delivering pizzas. Still others, dream of having work to help them pay the bills or go to all ages shows. Some don't want work, don't need work, and are glad to be free of the rat race. There are people who work out, work on problems, and well, I'll let you work out how to handle your poem today. Three things saved my life after my son died: writing, working out, and working. No, I don't consider writing work. It's my healing balm, whether I'm creating a poem or ranting in my journal, the more I write the better I … [Read more...]

My life changed in an instant

I started my long-awaited consulting job this past Wednesday and with that my life's daily routines  changed in an instant. I get up more than an hour earlier so I'll have enough time to workout before I have to be at work at 7:30 am!!!! Also, the amount of time I have to train for the Boston Overnight walk in June has been cut in half. I drive to work rather than walk downstairs to my home office. I need to be dressed in business clothes with makeup on rather than in my grubbies and no makeup when I work at home. I haven't watched any television for the last several days I sure miss my daily dose of Jeopardy nor have I read one word of any of the books stacked on my beside table. But most important of all, most of my writing time has been snatched away. So far I'm clinging to daily journaling usually right before I go to sleep, but my other writing has stopped. I was going great with the April Poem A Day prompts until this week. Though the prompts stopped on … [Read more...]

Ageism doesn’t apply

I'm Going Back to Work I wasn't looking for consulting work when I retired in April 2010 at the age of seventy. I was intent on working as a creative writer rather than a technical writer and proposal manager. For me it was either now or never. And I succeeded. In the last four and a half years I had my memoir published, I've written for several websites, I've written poems for two books of photography, and co-edited three poetry anthologies. Now I'm knee deep in revising my first novel. So really I have no time to work a day job, as they like to say. Actually, in the last couple of years I worked a couple of short-term consulting jobs helping a group of engineers write proposals to the U.S. government. And it was easy-going back. I found that once I walked in the door I got into the swing of the work immediately. It was like I'd never been gone. Of course after doing the kind of work I did for almost thirty years, I shouldn't have had any doubt that I could still … [Read more...]