New Friends

Remember Theo, the student at my son's school who approached my daughter and asked her, "do you have a Perkins Brailler?"   This is a story about his father and how he introduced me to some new friends.

Drew, Theo's father, and I like to talk at school events.   We mill about at these events, and over the years, I've gotten to know quite a lot of them, Drew included.  I always enjoy talking to Drew, and at one of the events, I discovered he was working on writing a children's book.  For many years I've been thinking about writing a book myself and was excited to hear about Drew's writing.  It turned out both Drew and I preferred to write with a target audience of children in the 8-10 age range.   He and I also liked to write science fiction.   I asked Drew lots of questions: What was his writing process?  What was the book about?  When and how did he write?  How far along was he with his book?

Drew told me his sister-in-law was also a writer as well as several other friends of his, and would I be interested in a writers group where we got together and supported each other in whatever ways we needed.   Truthfully, I've never considered myself an actual writer.  True, I spend a portion of each day writing, but that's just here within this blog that I do anything writer-ish.  That being said, I'd definitely be interested in talking to others.  I would enjoy supporting others in their writing.  I wasn't sure what this entailed, but it sounded intriguing, and by nature, I like to help people.

Drew created a group online, and we scheduled a meeting, which happened last night.   Five of us met at coffee, beer, and wine bar and spent the next few hours talking about what and how we each wrote.   Three of the members were working on books, one of whom was working on the second and third books in a series with plans for additional books in a different series.   Another member, who turned out to be a friend I hadn't seen in several years as her children had moved on to another school, liked to write small things, enjoying something called, "prompt writing" that I'd never hear of but sounded intriguing.

I spoke about my blog writing here, and to my surprise, they said that qualified me as a "writer."   I've never felt particularly prolific before, but when we talked about it, and I explained I spent thirty minutes to an hour each day writing.  Last month Grammarly told me I'd written over thirteen thousand words (that being the number of words reviewed for me.   My new writer friends said it sounded like I could consider myself a writer.

A writer!  Me, the person who abhorred writing all through school, now a writer?  I sat in the chair with the others around me and thought about the implications.   Did I consider myself a writer? Admittedly, I wrote things, but I had never thought of myself as a writer.   Perhaps I was, or maybe I would begin to be one now with the support of my new friends.

We had gotten together to be supportive of each other.  We each talked about what we needed from the others in the group.   One of the members needed editing help.  Not spelling or grammar checking but reviewing of content and comments and suggestions on what we had read.  Not, "critiquing" so much as we all thought there was a negative connotation with that word.  Help, advice, suggestions.  I would very much like to help in that way.   What did I need, they asked?   And this is where I faltered.

I hadn't thought about that at all.   I write and press the post button.  I publish posts and then I'm done until the next day.   I try very much not to edit these posts because I've found once I start editing, I can spend as much if not more time than it did to write the content in the first place.   It's why you might notice misspellings, typos, and sentences with poor structure.   On occasion, I'll put the title of a post up first and once I start writing find I go in an entirely different direction and never get to the reason behind the title.   My writing goes like that sometimes.  My hope has been that over time, with experience and with more writing behind me my writing would improve.

I'm rather shy about this blog in general.  From the start, this was more my diary or personal journal of my life and a place to write down events as they happen in my children's lives.  Sharing the blog with others has always been a bit uncomfortable.  But share it I have, and over the years family and friends have followed me.  It continues to amaze me that someone would want to spend five minutes of their day reading about mine.   It has always been the highest compliment when I hear someone reads this blog.

What did I need help with, my new writing friends asked?  Would I like them to read some of the posts here and give me advice?  Suddenly, I was afraid.  Did I?  There comes a time when you have to be unafraid to take constructive criticism.  That time, I think has come.   Before our next meeting, I'm to pick out two posts for their review.  I'm anxiously looking forward to hearing their advice.  I want to be a better writer.

One of the other members of the group said she enjoyed the process of writing in and of itself.  It was a joy for her to spend time writing.  She liked prompt writing in which a prompt, or topic, is given with a short time limit such as five to fifteen minutes.  The topic could be on anything, fiction, or non-fiction.   For our next meeting, we'll each bring a topic, and we'll pick one to write about at the meeting.  Then we'll take turns reading aloud our work to the group and then afterward we'll discuss together.

I'm looking forward to this very much.   Almost everything I do here is non-fiction writing.   I'd love to write some small fiction works.   Whatever we write there, I'll likely publish here along with a summary of the advice I got from the group.

New friends.  New adventures in writing.

The Big Boy Update:  My som hasn't ever been much into puzzles.  I did one of those sneaky things parents do and set out on the table a simple puzzle he got as a present recently.  I started putting it together and then walked away.   A while later, I came back to find the puzzle complete.   I next put out a floor puzzle of the solar system with 48 pieces on that same table.   My son put that together in no time.   Then I put out another floor puzzle, again of the solar system, this time with 128 pieces.   It took two days, and I jumped in to work on it when he was around.  He came over and was pleased when we finished that puzzle tonight.  As he got in bed tonight, I pulled out a third puzzle, yet again of the solar system, this time with 500 pieces.  My son now has both confidence and interest in putting puzzles together.  He's looking forward to starting the new puzzle tomorrow.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I found a Valentine's card in my daughter's backpack today all the way in the bottom.   I was translating the braille but was having a hard time as some of her impressions were light, and I couldn't see the dots well.   When I asked her what it was, she said, "oh, this is a Valentine's Day card for you and dad."  She read,  "Happy Valentines Day X and O love blue grayed eyed Reese.  Mom and Dad,"  What's interesting about this is she mentions the color of her eyes.   She was born with light blue eyes.  When the infection injured her eyes, it affected her pupils, causing the delicate layers of the irises to fold over, forever hiding the grey under layer back and scaring it into place.  Today, the irises she has remaining are grey.