In high school when I was in tenth grade the adults around me started telling me that I should engage in a lot of extracurricular activities such as Spanish Club and Debate Club because it would look good on my record when I eventually applied to colleges.  I joined a few of these things but it mostly seemed pretty silly to me and I wasn’t getting much out of it.  I liked taking classes out of school and I took classes in dance, visual art and writing.  Joining associations has never really been something that I do unless prompted and even when I was prompted it wasn’t a fit for me.  I went to a couple of meetings of the Spanish club and it wasn’t like anyone was learning more Spanish there, they were just socializing and I preferred to socialize with different people or to be off reading or writing.

Writing for an association was something I was interested in however.  Association writers for newspapers and magazines seemed to have a good monthly gig going with lots of author interviews.  I started watching what association writers wrote to see if I should work on doing some of that sort of writing.  A woman I knew was a painter and has a master’s degree as a city planner.  She did some extra writing here and there for city planning associations.  She had to travel to towns around Washington and write an informative article on the town.  This is what the association wanted her to do.  She didn’t get paid for this, but she said it gave her necessary exposure and may have helped her to get a job.

I helped her edit the article she wrote about the first town she did this for because I had more experience editing than she did.  She was thankful.  I had another friend who would write articles for newspapers when the regular writers were on strike.  I wasn’t sure what I thought about that, but I read the writing she did as well.  Seeing the articles that both of these people produced, taught me that I wasn’t the best fit to do that sort of writing myself.  I found it tedious.  So even though I had first thought I might become a part-time association writer, I ended up turning away from it.

What is your favorite genre of music? If you go onto one of the popular “community” sites these days and explore the interests that people have listed in the area where they can tell about their favorite bands, it’s kind of crazy how much stuff is out there. A lot of it is mediocre I find, and that’s probably mostly because just about anyone can be a recording engineer these days. I have several favorite genres and it seems that I am not alone. There are people who list how much they like metal and rock but then they also like old style country music and film scores.

Listening to music is lots of fun. Listening to radio online free is one way that you can expose yourself to a remarkable variety of different music. This technology has branched out so much in recent years that anyone with any list of musical tastes can probably find themselves some satisfying radio online free. There are sites that specialize in one type of music of course, and then there are plenty of local radio stations that have a service available where you can just listen to that station whenever you want and hear your favorite radio shows.

One of the things I like best about internet technology is how physical time is not usually an issue. Some online radio sites have a feature where you can listen to past shows as well as present shows. It’s pretty amazing if you think about it. Going back to favorite music genres, this is a great time to appreciate diversity. All I have to do is go online and search on the genre I like to have scads of possibilities arise for listening to free radio online. If you store up the possibilities then sometime when you are busy at work and wish to add some spice to your task, you can just pull up an online station and pick something to hear for background music.

I get tired of paperwork.  Modern living is full of unwanted bills and red tape.  You have to carefully arrange your life to avoid this and it’s still hard to do.  Writing is a wonderful communication tool and while I hate bills and bureaucratic paperwork, I love books.  If you love books like I do it makes sense that you will start to think about writers, about the individuals who wrote the books you like best.  Of late I have been thinking about author interviews as usual but mostly about three writers.  One is a science fiction author, one a fantasy writer who I’ve loved since childhood and one is a modern novel writer who was one of the reasons I ended up in Washington State for college.

A friend of my Mother’s introduced me to him in my last year of high school and he has a gift with language unlike any I’ve seen before.  People used to bring snatches of his writing in to a poetry class I was in once, and he is definitely a poet though the form his writing takes is the long novel.

Weirdly, my boyfriend grew up in the same town where this writer lives and its close by to where we are living now.  They are both redheads also.  It is interesting to me to think about coincidences and about writers and how their writing can change our lives.  I ended up in this state after all much because of this writer, and now my boyfriend is carrying on a correspondence with him.  I think he is very lucky to be doing this.  The writer is rather retired these days.  He wrote his most popular books in the 1980s and 1990s and now though he’s still writing I think he is mostly enjoying the fruits of his labor.  My boyfriend fell in love with his books when he just discovered them recently and I think because they have similarly wacky minds and ways they use language, when he wrote the man to tell him how much he loves his books, he actually got written back.  At first we were putting his letters up on our refrigerator with magnets but then we realized they can get food spills on them there, so we’ve been filing them away in a safer place.

Young people these days don’t buy music at the store in the same way that people did in the 1970s or 1980s.  They don’t have to.  I think it is unfortunate for the artists a lot of times because it makes the whole business of selling music for a living less lucrative for the person who created it.  I try to pay for my favorite musicians’ albums as they come out because I know that it’s important.  These days it’s hard to make sense out of the process sometimes because I do believe in free information and freedom of speech at the same time.  It could be argued that it’s unfair to the bands to burn a huge collection of CDs to your computer for free. I’ve had plenty of burned CDs in my collection as well, and it’s very convenient to be able to do this.

I’ve also never had much money to spend on extras so it’s kind of a hard decision to make. By this I mean deciding whether you will support the artist no matter what, or if you’ll use convenient ways available these days to get past having to pay cash money for a musical project.  Then there is free radio online.  I don’t know how the financial end of this works for the artist at all, but I do know that times I personally have engaged in online radio listening it does introduce me to artists that I would not have heard otherwise.

When I spent time logged into a free radio station while at work I found at least ten bands that I hadn’t heard much before because of the way that radio station creates mixes for you based on what they know you like. They pick bands from the same genres and mix them in. I was very pleased with this process. I don’t know how an artist gets paid due to these online stations, but it definitely seems to have a positive effect anyway because of the exposure it creates for bands.

Ever since I was a little kid I have absolutely loved reading. My Mom was a head start teacher and she read to me a lot when I was tiny. I remember wanting to be able to do it myself so I didn’t have to wait for her to decide to read to me. I was determined and I learned to read when I was three and a half. One of my first favorite famous authors was Dr. Seuss or Theodore Geisel.

I  read his books over and over again as kids will often do. I read ‘Hop On Pop’ and I gave my Grandpa a nickname that stuck from it because I figured if my Dad was my ‘Pop’ then my Grandpa was my ‘Pop Pop’ so he was Grandpa Pop Pop Bob to everyone in the family after that.

I thought about books constantly and I fell in love with authors and read everything they had written. This is a practice I still continue and I still like to reread the books I like best.

Madeline L’Engle was another one of my first favorite famous authors. She had won a couple of Nobel prizes and since my Mom bought books that had won for me as a matter of course, I ended up with a couple of hers.  Her fantasy books changed the way I thought about things and I couldn’t get enough.

Even before I discovered L’Engle I was a huge fan of fairy tales and anything fantastic. Another one of the famous authors I fell in love with was C. S. Lewis. I heard an author interview about his Narnia series and in fact I still reread it today as an adult, probably every other year or so.

I decided pretty early on that I wanted to be a writer myself and I used to get in trouble at school for reading too much when the teacher thought I should be socializing.

My family lived down the street from another famous author, Jim Harrison who has written a bunch of novels and great poetry plus screenplays like ‘Legends of the Fall’. It seemed to me if there was a well known author so close by who I talked to once or twice and later wrote to and he wrote me back, that the concept of becoming a writer wasn’t really such a far away dream.

I was thankful even at a young age to be able to read such wonderful books and to be able to imagine worlds along with these gifted authors. I still haven’t found anything else that compares as far as being an enjoyable experience that is also very educational in that it alters the mind, thoughts and ideas.

I once met a retired librarian.  She had been a New York City librarian for fifty years and in her eighty-seventh year she had just moved to Seattle so she could be close to her daughter. She was frail by that point and her health was going downhill. She died a year after I met her, and I was sad about it, but thankful that I had gotten to meet her.

I often have worked doing temporary projects for people in their homes so when she needed to go through her book collection and get rid of a bunch of it, her granddaughter thought of me.  I lived close to her apartment, so for a couple of months I walked over there several times a week for five hours a day.  We sorted through her entire book collection with me doing the heavy lifting, and physical aspects of the project.

Ruth was her name.  She was fascinating to talk to.  I asked her if she still read as much as she had in years past, and she said, “Oh honey, I’d go crazy if I couldn’t read.”  She was not a big fan of the local branch of our city library. She thought they had a bad collection, and it was true they did. It was hard for her to spend the time in the catalogue and to order the books to be sent to her than it would have been for a younger person.  So it was probably good that she had such a huge collection of her favorite books that she could dip into at any time. She was fascinating to talk to about authors too and she had met many authors in her time.

I asked her about authors as we went through her books. I got lucky because if she could tell I liked an author, and she wasn’t keeping everything she had by that author, she gave it to me.  I loved the job I was doing for her, mostly because I liked her a lot, but I was very happy to have obtained some wonderful books from her as well.  These days I try not to collect books since I don’t own a home of my own, but in some of my precious boxes of my favorite books that I’ve kept because I love them, I still have several of the books she gave to me.