How on earth can someone who doesn’t actually have a job do the TGIF thing?

You may well ask…

This travel writing thing started out as a once-in-a-while idea.

We’d come home from a trip in those first months/years of being retired and I’d think about a funny part of our travels or something rather memorable, write a story and then try to find somewhere for it to live in the printed world.

As far as real travel writing, it would be considered to be doing it backwards. But I was having fun with reliving my trips by writing about them and that’s all that mattered then.

And then I took the course.

I recommend this SFU Harbourside series to everyone who says they want to be a travel writer…that is, the writing seminars taught by Daniel Wood on magazine article writing.  Some time after finishing those night classes, my approach started to change. I started to work it a little more and a little smarter.

And then it turns out, I’m a little-bit Type A.

I didn’t realize that until I met the then acting-editor at Shared Vision magazine when I was pitching my story about a ten-day silent retreat. After only spending about 15-minutes  with me over a coffee, he sent me an email and accepted my pitch, saying he’d love to read how a Type-A person like me could sit down and shut up for ten days. 

It made me laugh but I didn’t really know what he meant by Type A. I didn’t quite agree with what I found, but was astonished that this was his impression of me.

Self-awareness is a strange creature that mostly lives in the dark. 

So maybe there is some truth to it, because this writing thing has taken on a life of its own. This blog too, is morphing into something, though I’m not sure what that is. And the ongoing writing of my memoir grows each week. I just know that all various writing venues need feeding and tending and I like it all.

All this to say, that here I am, an apparently early retiree, finding myself doing the TGIF thing.  This is partly because by Friday the emails start to dwindle a little and I feel like I’m coming out of a little computer-generated whirl…but a good whirl.

Maybe it’s a little like a good load of laundry…a swirly, happy and satisfyingly swish in the bubbles of My Life.  And by the weekend, I’m just ready to hang on the line.

I can hear the groans from here. I’ll stop.

Happy TGIF!