Dunkirk NY – NaMenWriMo (National Meniscus Writing Month) comes to a close today with this post. My knee is not 100% healed, and probably won’t be for another 3-4 weeks or so. My date with the doctor is December 20th for the final verdict, but I think it’s pretty safe to day that I am, let’s say, 85% mended. I still know I had an operation 3+ weeks ago, but it is rather amazing to think how well the recovery has gone in such a short amount of time. I still have a few weeks of PT and icing to go, but I feel safe in saying the worst is over. Yesterday I walked to and from the hospital for PT, and no real pain issues. No more baby aspirin after tomorrow, which means the specter of blood clots is probably gone. So it’s good timing; the end of daily blogging comes just as the knee is pretty much healed.
What next? As a general rule, I don’t write that much in this blog. I like to write when I believe I have something to say, which isn’t often. And as you can tell by my refusal to take comments, I don’t write this blog for clicks and giggles. I write for myself, not for others, and given the general tenor of the internet these days, I do not feel it’s safe to put much out there.
Neither is it that I don’t have strong opinions about issues. I do. Just last night my son, who is a concierge at a major urban hotel, and I got into a fascinating discussion about the practice of tipping. He’s for it, of course, while I, while not completely against it, feel the practice is uneven at best. I do like spirited discussions in person, but with reasonable people whom I can speak with fact to face.
I think one of the things I am going to try is to write a quarterly newsletter for people, so as the holiday season approached, I am going to send out holiday cards with the address of my quarterly newsletter. I’ve got one set up through Tiny Letter, a format I actually like. Writing letters is one of my favorite forms of writing, and setting up a tiny letter as a quarterly newsletter seems like the best way for me to stay in touch with others. Inviting them via a holiday card is also the best way to reach directly people I don’t see often or ever. I sort of see it as a substitute for Facebook in some ways. Subscribers get four emails a year with some news and pictures so as to keep up, and I don’t have to get on social media. I think it’s a fair bargain, and will be another incentive to write.
I want to be a writer in my retirement years, but I am not interested in pursuing the usual goals of writing. I don’t care if people read what I write, and I am not interested in interacting with anyone who does read what I write via the web. My all-time favorite blog is this one. I like it because the author writes about his passion for scooters (one I share), but at the same time he probably has a very minimal footprint on the web. His writing has a personal style, but he shares his personal life and experiences always through the lens (pun intended; he’s a photographer) of his scooter. That is what I need to find, that personal lens. If I can find that lens for myself, I think I’d become a better writer.
If you’ve been reading all these posts this month, thanks. They won’t be as frequent at this point, but hopefully they will be more frequent than before. Getting into the writing habit is of course the goal of any “national writing month,” and this is no exception. There is another one I am interested in – National Haiku Writing Month in February – and I may give that a shot. In the meantime, we plunge into the heart of the winter darkness. With two good knees. -twl