(600 words – 3 min read)

Happy Birthday America!

I did get back to writing and enjoyed it as much as before my slump, maybe even more. Where this love takes me is the most amazing part of it!

When work was very slow last year and I was feeling confused, one of the thoughts came to my mind was the possibility of career change. I thought about so many different jobs. One of them was web design. I even looked for online training and found a few good ones but never felt motivated to pursue it.

A few months passed and my thoughts and concerns led me back to writing my book. I started writing seriously and fell in love with it. Did I say that already a thousand times? Then I felt I needed to share this love with others and was inspired by other bloggers to create my blog. WordPress was highly recommended and I started my blog in WordPress then I got stuck at using advanced features. I am NOT very computer savvy. I can do the simple maneuvering to post my blogs and use the basic design however WordPress offers a lot more for blogging that I don’t know. I started searching to learn more about WordPress. Through my explorations, I gained a little knowledge about web design.

The projects I am involved in at work are mostly software development and I have so many good SW engineers to ask questions of. I surprisingly found myself being able to ask questions about behind the scenes of my blog and html capabilities and even understand their answers. Before, when I attended technical meetings as a project performance analyst, I would be mostly lost in details of the SW development process. This time I volunteered to join more weekly technical meetings. I started understanding better and I have even used that information in my work for better performance measurement analysis. I started learning more about web design via W3schools.com introduced by a coworker and that increased my enjoyment at work. I am really excited that my passion for writing helped me engage, and led to more fulfillment at work. Love brings Love!

During the past week, I have written almost 2000 more words, mostly about 2008 stories and have done a lot of grooming on some previous chapters.

I focused on describing the scenes. What helped me to start working on this part of my writing skills was attending an online seminar about describing the scenes provided by NAMW. I wrote about a trip Mike and I had to southwest Virginia in 2008 for Valentine’s Day. We stayed in a Bed and Breakfast that was in a beautiful colonial style building built in 1901. I tried to explain the scenes and give a sense of “show vs tell” to this part of the story. I looked at the pictures we had from that trip and started explaining the building structure, the interior design, and anything I remembered from there. It was a fairly good first try and I am encouraged to work on it more. My biggest fear about explaining the scenes is much less now.

Writing about 2008 stories, I also came across the concept of self-actualization that I started learning deeply in 2008. This concept was introduced by psychologist Abraham Maslow in the early 40s. I searched the subject to refresh my mind about what I was learning back then and came across a couple of good articles and would like to share them.

 

Maslow: The 12 Characteristics of a Self-Actualized Person by David Sze

 

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs by Saul McLeod 

 

Celebrate life!

Shabnam

Editing Credit: M. Curtis

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com