John Micklos Jr. Writer

One of the joys of freelance writing is the variety of projects I get to do. Yesterday, for instance, I began my day by working on the first draft of this blog post, which I find a great way to get my creative juices flowing.

Next I spent a couple of hours working on a PowerPoint presentation pertaining to sentence structure for an educational publisher. I am refreshing a lot of knowledge that was for years buried deep in my subconscious. I know the difference between a dependent clause and an independent clause, but it’s been 35 years since I’ve had to try to explain it.

After that I shifted gears entirely and worked on my picture book of beach poems, which is nearing completion. At this point, I’m doing some final tweaks on the wording of a couple of poems and matching them with wonderful photographs taken by my friend Lisa Goodman. I have been exploring self-publishing this book through CreateSpace, an Amazon.com company.

At lunch came a trip to Newark Reservoir for a brisk walk and an opportunity to take a photograph of an airplane vapor trail to possibly accompany one of the beach poems. I noticed the last time I was walking up there that it was a great spot to see vapor trails, and I vowed to remember my camera the next time.

Yesterday afternoon found me focusing on sentence structure again, as today marks the deadline for turning in the first chunk of copy for that project. On the surface, such an assignment may sound dull, but it’s actually quite interesting and challenging to try to explain the concepts in kid-friendly terms and come up with interesting examples, exercises, and quizzes.

The day wound down with some research on AubreyPlaza, an actress from Parks and Recreation, who grew up in Delaware. I came across the reference to her Delaware roots in a Rolling Stone interview and thought that might make a good angle for an article for Delaware Today magazine. When I pitched the idea, editor Maria Hess told me she’d be very interested in such an article—if I can get an interview. So yesterday I watched a few video interviews with Aubrey and explored how best to make contact with her. I’ll keep you posted on what happens.

In the evening, I drafted a few letters to schools where I have contacts about the possibility of doing an author visit in 2012.

All in all, it was a pretty productive—and interesting—day!

Random Writing Thought of the Week: Several projects that I invested considerable time on are now turned in and awaiting final approval. There’s a real sense of pride and accomplishment when that happens.