There's a good question for me to try to answer for myself, but more, it's my question to others about me, about my abilities, about the things I enjoy reading about, the things I like to write about and the venue I prefer to use for whatever writing talents I may possess.

I've loved to read since I was a very small child - I learned to read when I was about 3-4 years old through my Grandfather reading children's books to me and apparently - or so my mother told me - I learned the words so well, I knew when Grandpa changed the text on me. I don't know for sure there, just know I knew how to read and loved books and magazines, newspapers even, by the time I started first grade and over 50 years later, my love of reading has only diminished due to my needing new glasses to be able to see the text better!

Can I write? Well, that might be debatable.

I have for the past 3 years now, dabbled with writing. I found a small publication, local to my area, supposed to be published as a small, freebie type, newsletter for this area's residents and contacted the editor/publisher about submitting articles to her, just to see if she was interested, and she liked the essay I had sent her as a sample of my so-called talent and I've been doing, on average, two articles about local topics with almost every edition of this publication since then. I've also established a good relationship with the editor/publisher who is a very talented lady, good writer and editor but she and I share two traits that aren't exactly conducive to good busines -we're both quite disorganized and we both are extremely talented when it comes to procrastination!

I'm currently involved in a project doing research of our local daily newspaper through one of the subscription services online (historic newspapers thing) and have been trying to glean articles from that particular local publication about the village where I live, neighboring little villages in our Township and things that happened here that were newsworthy for the publication between 1913 and 1975. My goal is to then organize this data I have found and publish it as an aid for folks researching their family roots or something for people like me who just enjoy reading little snippets of this area's history from that newspaper's perspective.

It's quite a daunting task as I have to transcribe every article I come across in the newspaper about my hometown and these other villages - very time consuming. My hope now is simply that I live long enough to complete this project!

I suppose because I tend to be somewhat of an opinionated person a lot of the time, I enjoy writing essays more than anything. Putting MY personal thoughts down about various current events topics, things from my life, well virtually anything, is what I lean towards most of the time in my writings.

Is there a market for these "opinion" pieces of mine for openers and do I have enough ability to think others would actually enjoy reading what I have to say on a given subject?

I'm just working my way through all these questions in my mind so if anyone cares to comment to me about these thoughts, please feel free to do so!

Jeni