The day I finished this post on October 6th is the anniversary of Kristin and I moving to RI. The day that it is being published is on the 2nd anniversary of working at my job at St. Elizabeth Home. It’s been two years since leaving Massachusetts. I’m publishing this when I am so I can have my obligatory 2 posts I’ve dedicated to writing each week. If I published it on 10-6-23 I would have 3 posts that particular week and then I would have to strain my thinking cap in crafting another post.
What is Your Writing Goal for the Week and or Day?
When I’m not working, praying, sleeping and hanging out with my wife I am thinking about and actively researching or doing something that I can later write about on my blog. 2 years into my new home I want to change where I’m going in life and how I write. So it has led me to some questions and thoughts. So I’ll ask you the reader some of these questions and explain my brain and what is in it as I bable on.
Where do you get your writing ideas?
How do you choose which of these many ideas to pursue?
Photo by Cristian Carrara
As I was walking around my condo I constructed an articulate essay answering these very questions. The text in my head seemed to be flowing pretty well and swell. As I sat down at my computer I had the writers hope that I could remember at least the minimum gist of it, cause in it, I was expressing very clearly the point I wanted to make in my next blog post, which is this blog post your reading. It is the idea I wanted to pursue. However the initial composition I was writing mentally, might be lost in the recesses of my brain.
Do you ever have an idea flow freely in your brain like that?
Does it get lost before the pen hits the paper
or does it flow out like you thought it would?
I’m sharing my thoughts publically with whomever wants to read this, but this Catholic Bard entry is more of a post written to myself about my goals, dreams and aspirations. My hope is that typing it all out in the open will spur me to proactive action and set me on a more focused writing trajectory then I’m currently on.
What gets your train rolling down the tracks?
What Are You Writing Now?
Here’s What I’m Writing Now
I try to write 2 blog posts a week. One is my Week In Review called Last Week in Life. I scan the last 7 days of history and fill it with historical trivia, whatever Catholic feast day it is, links to Fr. Mike Schmitz 2 Years broadcasts, current news and events and a video relating to something that was released that week or one that corresponds to one off the historical events that happened on a particular day. Last Week In Life Easy Access Portal
Friday August 18, 2023
Day 230: A New Heart — The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) – YouTube
Day 230: A New Heart — The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) – YouTube
- 1572 – The Huguenot King Henry III of Navarre marries the Catholic Margaret of Valois, ostensibly to reconcile the feuding Protestants and Catholics of France.
- 1590 – John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.
- 1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.
- 2023-Dolly Parton Covers ‘Let It Be’ With Paul McCartney And Ringo Starr
- 2023- American–Japanese–Korean trilateral pact: The United States, Japan, and South Korea agree to sign a trilateral pact.
Quote of the Day
Pope Francis@Pontifex (Aug 18, 2023) To be children of the Father and to build a fraternal world, the real challenge is to learn how to love everyone, even our enemies. Concretely, this means choosing not to have enemies, seeing in others not an obstacle to be overcome, but a brother or sister to be loved.
Colorado Day 3
We drive an hour to Canon city where we go whitewater rafting. We then go to the Royal Gorge Bridge and go ziplining over the gorge. We then go to the museum of Colorado prisons and then to mass at a chapel in a mall.
The 2nd post is either a movie review, spiritual reflection, writing advice, something personal, commentary about some current news item or something about history. The two projects I’ve started working on recently and gathered some info on include ‘Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious Timeline‘ which is a timeline off all most every event in historical order talked about in Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World podcast. The other project is ‘A Heck Of A Ride Around The Sun‘, where I take a particular year or years and talk about all the interesting cool historical things that happen in that time frame as the earth went around the sun at that particular time in the cosmos. I recently did one of 1775 and was working on 1800 – 1809. I have a lot of info on some other years where I’ve collected a lot of interesting data including 1885, 1889 and 1977 in which several people who were born in 1885 died in 1977.
The only trouble is that gathering info for all this is exhausting. While I’m working on these projects I’m letting some other things go.
What Do You Put Aside So You Can Work On?
I signed up for Amazon Kindle. With AK I can easily read independent Catholic Sci-Fi authors and critique their stuff for the blog. But I neglect what I’ve paid for and return to browsing the internet for facts and trivia to add to my historical posts. It’s not bad to concentrate on those posts but I’ll never write those other reviews I also want to write if I don’t spend the time to actually read anything but quick bits of information off Wikipedia.
I have been thinking of abandoning at least temporarily surfing the internet, looking at social media as frequently so I can focus in on a particular book, movie or other thing that would allow me to write more detailed movie reviews and thoughts about the spiritual life. I have been thinking about signing up for Word on Fire Institute which offers lots of great classes that would not only give me topics to write about, but would also help enhance my spiritual life. But I always resort back to browsing the net and going on social media. So if I sign up for it would it be abandoned like I did Amazon Kindle?
In August Kristin and I went to Colorado and in September we went to see the Irish band The High Kings in concert. I wanted to write about them and still could. But I was distracted by collecting data for my history writing projects.
And scrolling social media.
Going on Twitter alerted me to this event happening near me.
It gives me the Quote of the Day for my Week in Review
Stuff that makes me want to argue.
Sometimes someone will answer for me.
Going on social media as much as I do takes away from writing.
It takes away from doing the research I could do to write better.
What Takes Distracts You From Writing The Way You Should?
Besides deciding on what to spend my time writing on I should…
- Visit Friends I haven’t Seen In A While.
- Schedule a time off with my few remaining vacation days from work.
- Put Up a new shower curtain I bought a few weeks ago.
- Find a new job that is satisfying and fulfills me better and also gives me more time to do certain things.
- Develop a more deep prayer life.
Not sure if I explained everything that was rolling around in my cranium. I have some more ideas I haven’t mentioned. But it’s now after 7 AM. I have to go to Mass at 8:30AM, work on filling out info on my health app, look at social media and go to work. And decide what time to set aside to get what kind material to write about. Not sure if this post helped me but maybe it did and maybe it helped you also.
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