It's been over a year since I posted here, don't know what I want to say, but I guess I'll just ramble on for whatever it's worth.

I turn 80 at the end of this year. Hard to believe -- until I think back to all the years I've been alive in this world, all the lives I've lived, all the jobs I've had, farm boy, college student, Navy journalist, university student on the GI Bill, then newspaper reporter, magazine editor, high school janitor, urban mail carrier, golf course groundskeeper, back-to-the-lander, husband, father, grandfather. And writer, always a writer, beginning when I was still in high school and never stopping, though only on a part-time basis, through most of the years of my working life (until I was able to retire in 1998. Sixteen years ago! Since then I've been writing full time -- that is two to four hours every day except when interrupted (my wife and I hike with a group one day each week, sometimes take a trip, and occasionally I have to stop writing to do some housework or work in the garden or chop and stack firewood).

So what have I got to show for all my years as a writer, would-be and otherwise? Not much: a lot of unpublished and some published short stories, quite a few published book and movie reviews (in the 1980s and '90s), a memoir I took years to write and was finally published in 2007 (mentioned a number of times in this blog), and a novel I took years to write and for which I'm now looking, without much hope, for a publisher.

I may have to publish it myself, finally.