Timer set. Ready, set, go!
I’ve decided to give the Daily Post’s “Writing 101: Build a Blogging Habit” a shot. Hopefully, it will help me unlock my block and get me to write again. Not so much for money (which I have done for more than twenty years), but just for the sheer joy and experience of writing.
The first exercise is simple enough. Take twenty minutes and free write – a stream of consciousness. I’m doing this right now. I’m writing freely about not being able to write freely. Right? I am hoping to use “Writing 101” a catharsis.
I used to to belong to a blog site a few years ago. It was called Open Salon, and it was part of Salon.com. I don’t know if any of you ever ventured into Open Salon (or OS or Open as most of us called it), but it was great. You can write about anything you wanted. Sometimes, the editors would provide topics or prompts to help motivate the members. The editors would select some of the articles they deemed worthy and feature them on OS’s Front Page (the layout resembled a newspaper). I was able to make the front page only a few times, but I still enjoyed writing there. After awhile, OS was inundated by a swarm of spam, and the editors were not able to do anything about it (or they didn’t have the budget or the inclination to do something about it). In the end, Open Salon was closed down by Salon’s management, and just like that it vanished. In case anyone reading this was a former OSer, I went by Trudge164. I was too shy to use my real name back then.
But enough about them. Now, let’s get back to me. As I mentioned before I have written professionally for many years. By professionally, I mean as a copywriter. I have written for retail, specialty insurance, post-secondary education (higher learning) or simply a university, a pet pharmacy, and a medical device company. In addition, I have managed and created social media content.
Damn! Times up.
End of Exercise #1.
So how did I do?
Jose R. Alonso 