Well, here it is:  my first blog.  So I’ll be brief.  I first started keeping a journal in 1977 or thereabouts, long before PCs and smartphones and, well, the Internet itself.  Journal-keeping was a private venture 40 years ago, just me and my composition notebooks.  No audience of followers, no “likes”, no re-tweets.  Sounds quaint, right?  Still, I think there’s something to be said for the purity of the private thought and the sanctity of the unshared reflection.

But not here, I suppose.  After all, we ARE on the Internet.  And, after all, there’s nothing to stop any of us from buying a notebook and rocking the whole journal thing old-school.  (I promise I’ll stop saying things like that going forward.  I swear).  So even though I’ve spent most of my life in the 20th century, it’s time I join the 21st century and start blogging in earnest.  Sigh….

So why now?  Well, after 18 and 1/2 years at the same clerical job, at age 57, and with an abruptness that surprised even me, I quit to chase after an old flame I’d all but abandoned almost 23 years ago.  (I wrote a three-act play in 1995 and used it to amass a nice collection of rejection slips).  With enough money saved to take a year’s sabbatical, and a healthy mix of confidence and fear, I’m ready to return to writing — this time not as a hobbyist but as a (mostly) disciplined full-time professional.  Thanks to the rise of e-books and the relative ease of self-publishing, I feel the time really is ripe to finish the novel I started a few years back and see if there’s a market for my dreams.  Anyway, I have a little over a year to try.

In the meantime I have this blog.  My goal as a writer is to earn as much from my writing as I did in clerical work.  But I have no illusions about the task ahead.  If I’m going to have a chance, I’ll need to treat this like any full-time job.  Success is by no means assured.  But neither is failure.

And so it begins….