Learning to Write

I've been writing this blog since 2011, which is a bit shocking when I think about it considering I don't consider myself a writer.  In school, I loved math first and foremost because it's so succinct.  There are rules and when followed, you can do amazing things with numbers alone.  Science was my second favorite subject because scientists make our world better every day with discoveries and inventions scientists make.  But writing?

I remember fighting my parents when I was in junior high school about writing papers or doing anything related to writing more than one sentence at a time.  I just hated writing.  I thought English was boring and grammatical rules made no sense.   Also, I refused to learn to type.  At the time there wasn't a real benefit to learning to type in my opinion back in 1980.  There weren't people I could communicate with online (there was no online) if I could type.   There were only boring papers to be written via a typewriter.

And what was all the fuss with being able to type a certain number of words per minute?  That just made me less-inclined to learn touch typing.   I'm a master at making mistakes.  My favorite key on the keyboard for twenty-five years running is the backspace/delete key.   Bar none, hands down.   Take that single key away from me and I'd quit writing.

What confounds me is that for over two thousand nine hundred days I have sat down to write something here.   Or rather I usually sit down.  I'm not sure if I've written any posts standing up, but that's a lot of posts, maybe I have.  That's a lot of words for someone who doesn't like to write.

Only somewhere along the way, I started to like to write.  I became interested in grammar, like should two thousand nine hundred be written out or can it be put in 2900 number form?  If it's at the beginning of a sentence, it needs to be written out I just found out.  I've been stumbling through writing.   I think I'm better at writing now than when I started in 2011, but that's mostly been through sheer brute force of words over time.

I'd like to get better though.  I'm listening to an Audible book right now that was a free book of the month for Audible members about fiction writing.   I write very little fiction here, but a lot of the information from the speaker is good.   I just learned about past perfect tense on the way to a meeting tonight.   And for the first time, I think I understand it.

I also have been talking to a fellow parent at my son's school.   I found out about a year ago that he was writing a children's fiction book.  He and I get together at parent socials and events and I ask how it's going.  He knows I write this blog and we talk about that some.   He invited me to a writer's support group this past week.   I don't know how much I can help or how much help I'll need, but it sounds interesting.

The other three writers are working on fiction projects and all want to get together...only they're all busy so I think the first meeting will be next year.   I feel very under-qualified to be any advice at all on writing advice.  Maybe I'll get some as that will help me too.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has a field trip on Friday that is an annual thing.  He missed the last two years.  It's a big trip that will have him gone for over twelve hours.  His teacher told us when we picked him up today, "he has a little bit of a cough, make sure he gets some rest, we don't want him to miss the field trip on Friday!"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is loving her watch.   She's using it to play audiobooks as well as make phone calls.   I realize I'm being stereotypical here, buy man does she love to talk on the phone.   I can't imagine what her teenage years are going to be like/