Writer writer
The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps, of which I am a proud volunteer.

If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up when I was five years old, I would have said an author illustrator. If you had asked me when I was in fifth grade I would have said the same, and when I was a junior in high school and a sophomore in college. I don't remember when things changed and I started to think being a fiction author wasn't a viable career option. Maybe it was when my manuscript was rejected from the First Young Adult Novel Contest and I realized the winner had an MFA in creative writing. I didn't realize you could major in creative writing because it wasn't a major at any state schools. And I figured that if someone with an MFA had to win a contest to get their novel published maybe I didn't have much of a chance.

Last year I decided to write my autobiography as a cook book some time in the future.

Some friends of mine and I decided to start holding each other responsible for writing goals (some of them said 10 pages in a month - I personally set no page limits for myself) but I don't think any of did much personal writing this month. I for one, I hadn't even realized it had been a month and was still thinking about my personal writing. I wasn't even going to mention it in this blog until someone just brought it up.

What I was going to say though was that I've recently realized that about 89% of my job is writing - and I seem to be doing a lot more writing than usual lately. Sometimes I'm writing introductory emails to random people I've never met hoping that we can collaborate. Other times it's finely tuned letters stating this is what I want, this is why you should give it me. I've written more than three proposals in the last five months. Last week was a perfect example of finding out the funding is available on Monday, sending out a proposal on Wednesday. That felt good. And then there was writing the same letter 22 times to send to different people. Not so good.

In my down time between writing for work - I actually do write letters and postcards home. And when work is slow (or like next week when I'll be recovering from camp) I write to Congress. (I'm not kidding I actually write letters to my congressional representatives.)

I've got to go work on another proposal now, but even though this blog is not a good example of my best writing (sometimes) it's nice to think that maybe all my talents haven't gone to waste.