Morning Writing Report

--Yesterday's post led me all sorts of places.  I used the same pictures, but transformed the text into a more spiritual meditation in this blog post on my theology blog.

--I wrote a poem.  I took these lines: I've built an altar out of abandoned houses of crustaceans.  I added to the sentence:  and corals calcified into rocks.  I made a poem that talks about the oceans voracious appetite for our valuables.  I used the image of the detritus from cruise ships.

--It felt good to write again, to have a poem that has potential.

--I also wrote a bit for my online class.  It's their first essay, which requires them to argue for a change in law or policy.  I wanted to give an example of how points could overlap and what to do.

Here's what I wrote:

"Your thesis statement will clearly state the change.  For example:

Undergraduate education should be free to everyone who pays taxes.

Then you need to come up with three or more reasons why this change will benefit more people than it hurts:

--Free education means that more people could go to school.
--Free education opens up opportunities to more people.
--Free education means that poor people aren't excluded.

Now, take a look at those 3 points that I just constructed.  Clearly, I have more work to do.  They could be separate and complete points, but right now, they overlap too much.  Let me try again:

--Free education means that more people could go to school, since a student wouldn't need the cash to pay the tuition.
--Free education means that people could return to school to get further training or to open up new doors in terms of careers.
--Free education would strengthen the economy, since businesses that need their workers to get trained wouldn't have to pay for it.  It would also provide more opportunities for teachers and everyone else connected to the education field.

There's still some danger of overlap with these three points, but as long as I'm careful, I could proceed."

--I also wrote an early e-mail to my dean, who wanted us to choose 2-3 processes that could be made more efficient, and to give 2-3 possible solutions.  He set a Tuesday deadline but didn't give a time.  I decided to get it done.  At one point I tried to delete something and deleted the whole thing, just as I was almost finished.  Grr.  I wrote it again.  Since the processes are so unique to our institution, I won't post them here.  But that task did take almost an hour.

--I wrote a page of my short story.  I remember years ago when I could write 20 pages of a short story at a time.  Those days are not these days.   But I'm happy that I'm writing at all.