Monthly Archives: October 2009

It’s National Poetry Day

  By John Rea-Hedrick | October 8, 2009 - 4:51 pm | Poetry
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I’m home caring for a flu-ridden family today, but thanks to Twitter (and @heatherwpetty). I learned that today is National Poetry Day!

I blogged earlier this week that when I’m writing fiction and caught up in word dissection, I find switching to formal poetry helps me to get it out of my system.  It also leaves me with some new poetry.  So in the spirit of National Poetry Day I’ve decided I’d share some of my poetry here.

Your comments are welcome, just remember . . . I’m a poetry amateur so be gentle if you must be brutal!

Thanks!

If you want to follow my future poetry postings just click on the Poetry category link.

Powerful words

  By John Rea-Hedrick | October 7, 2009 - 11:45 am | Randomness
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I’ve always believed words have much more power in them than most people are willing to give them credit.

With that in mind, I broke new personal ground today by starting my own Wordly Wednesday "thing" (how’s that for a use of words) on Twitter.  Search: #wrdw.  For starters, I’ll be taking an often misused word I hear during the week and crafting a Tweet about it.  I’m not sure how this will turn out or how long it will last.  Consider it an experiment.  My first #wrdw Tweet was this morning.  Go and have a look.  :)

How ironic then that a coworker today posted these powerful words on his corporate blog. Unfortunately, they weren’t attributed so I can’t give proper credit. I wish they were mine, but they’re not. {sigh}  Anyway, here they are:

Watch your thoughts, they become your words.

Watch your words; they become your actions.

Watch your actions; they become your habits.

Watch your habits; they become your character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

There’s nothing more to say.

How writing poetry helps me write fiction

  By John Rea-Hedrick | October 7, 2009 - 7:44 am | My Writing, Writing, Writing Advice
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I am a stickler for words.  I’ve tried to pretend it’s not true, but it is.  For instance . . .

  • I hate it when people at the office chat over instant messaging in all lower case and and don’t bother to spell check. (NOT referring here to texting shorthand like ‘thx’ or ‘l8r’)
  • I cringe (just a little) when my 12YO says at the dinner table ‘Can I be excused?’, instead of ‘May I…’  (Of course she can, but whether or not I’ll let her is another matter.)
  • My hackles raise just a bit whenever anyone says to me ‘Why don’t you {fill in the blank}’.  (They’re not really asking me if I will do something; they’re asking me to tell them why I won’t.

I digress.

Often when I’m working on a story I find myself rewriting the same passages over and over again, trying to get the words just right.  (more…)

A quick RSS apology

  By John Rea-Hedrick | October 5, 2009 - 9:05 am | Randomness
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For anyone currently following my blog (although it’s looking pretty lonely out there), a quick apology for the recent BlogEngine.net posts which appeared AFTER my happy post about switching to WordPress.  No, I have not switched blogware again.

After switching to a UNIX platform so I could make the move to WordPress, I realized I didn’t have draft copies of my initial BlogEngine posts.  For consistency, and since they were the only two posts left behind, I decided to repost them.  Thanks to Google search cache I not only found the text, but the publication date/time. (Yay!)

So This morning when I checked Google Reader (yes, I subscribe to my own blog posts as any narcissistic, new blogger in the honeymoon of ‘Look at me! I’m blogging!’, may) I saw these two posts from September appear from yesterday. {sigh}

Lesson learned, RSS is from real-time updates.  It doesn’t care if you said something was older than it is by back dating it.  Rookie mistake.

Next time I’ll put a parenthetical (reposted from . . . ) as the first line.

Okay, back to my day job!