Tag: Living on the Senior Side

SPINNING MY WHEELS AND GETTING UP TO SPEED

S R Janssen

“IIi

“I ain’t dead yet!”

Although I am sure that the handful of my followers certainly think so because I haven’t posted for how long? Let me count the years: one, two. Think I will don the green eyeshades of self-delusion and pretend it hasn’t been longer. My “end of days” plan was to write, write and write even more. The plan execution was avoid writing, avoid writing and avoid writing even more.

Here I am (with new driving gloves) reeving the engine, pulling out of the driveway, and entering the fast lane. It has the be the fast lane because I must increase my speed to 75 miles an hour to catch up.

The Thanksgiving when I was seven, I suddenly announced to the tableful of relatives that I was going to marry when I was seventy. To this day, I haven’t the foggiest what prompted that declaration. Here I am, past seventy, rarely a bridesmaid, never a bride.

So here’s the deal. Having no grandchildren (Holy cow, I am at the age of great-grandchildren) to justify my existence to myself, needs must hustle my butt to claim a better epitaph than

SHE ARRIVED, SHE LEFT AND HAD NO FUN ALONG THE WAY

KICKING THE TIRES OF MONDAY AUGUST 22, 2021

S R Janssen

A 2021 Resolution Shot to H–!

The resolution was to post every day without fail as this was my personal record tracking my use of imagination as a means of tracking the third semester of my allotted “four score and ten.” Sigh! I couldn’t manage to string words into a sentence. Once upon a time, somewhere someone stated forcefully “there is no such thing as writer’s block.”

It’s true. I certainly can’t claim writer’s block. I lacked the stamina for noodling through half-baked ideas and pushing limp words into sentences until one morphs into a paragraph.

For seventy-four years, I asked myself “if I don’t write up to my standards, should I write at all?” If one can’t write deathless prose, what is the point of writing at all? Personally speaking, the point of “getting my hands dirty” putting  words on paper is that I learn to appreciate good writing. I have certainly stumbled across some great writing that will never appear on the curriculum of a university English. Except for mine of course.

There are books that I read three times for the story then five more times to analyze and admire how the author constructs sentences, or establishes a mood or arcs a small  recurring event through the story until it explodes as the turning point of the novel.

Here’s a thought. What fun it might be teaching my own English class, using my own favorite books as a curriculum.

Think about it!