Creative Writing

My wife and I signed up for some adult education classes at one of our local High Schools. My wife was going to take creative writing and I was to take a wood craving class. The first night we found out that the wood craving class was cancelled because there wasn't enough people signed up. I looked through the other available classes, and decided to take creative writing with my wife.

I found the class interesting and and I learned a lot with the writing prompts we worked with and stories that we tried writing. The class also helped with writing progress reports and edits to service manuals that I do for my job. So it was a benefit all around. At the time I enjoyed trying to write short stories for YA (Young Adults). I had several ideas during the class and some stories are in various states of progress which I may someday get back to.

Shortly after the class ended, I successfully wrote and published a how to article for Garden Railways magazine. The article covers construction of a panning video camera car and was published in the October 2010 issue. You can see more on my Garden trains page. This was my first published work. It was hard to believe, but I was being paid to write. It was suggested that I add a slice from that article as an example of my writing skills such as they are which shown below. I enjoy writing How-To articles and actually have a book that I am try to write on rain water collection.

We continued after the classes ended by joining a critique group at one of the local book store. This group was led by the same women, Kim Gore. She is a great teacher and writer herself. That group continues to this day and we still attend when we can.

We learned about a writer's conference from our critique group and attended it in 2015. This lead to exposure to much better writers and useful training. As a result of the conference, we learned about LCRW (Lilac City Rochester Writers) LCRWriters.org and joined that group soon after. My wife, Sally, is a much better writer and I try to be her editor, which she says helps her writing. As a result of joining LCRW, my wife has become a much better writer and I have learned to be a better editor and maybe improved my writing a bit too.