National Day on Writing 2026

2026-10-20

National Day on Writing 2026

There was a time when I viewed myself a writer. I wrote poetry, short stories, brief theatrical scenes — and all in all I was really tearing up the literary field from a standpoint of volume for a while in my younger days.

I had a brief Susan Sontag influenced era where I was all lofty and waxed somewhat misanthropic in retrospect.

Then I came to a great realization that writing was not paying the bills.

It was nice to show people all the fine things I had accumulated on paper, but no buyers meant I needed something marketable for which people would actually pay money.

I didn't want to be in it for the glory. I was only in it for the money.

This became that great schism in my life where I gave up writing (and most medical pursuits) for that which the people at large wanted. I became a systems generalist while most others were "specialists" and did hardware, software, and media instead the minute subsets taken on by my peers.

This was well before the advent of the PC and I found myself engaging the DEC VT series hardware running Unix, RT-11, TSX-11 as well as the Micro Vax running VAX/VMS and ULTRIX — whereby things immediately took an upward turn on the financial front.

Today is National Day on Writing.

It is observed each October 20 under the auspices of the National Council of Teachers of English here in the US since 2009 to highlight the vital role writing plays in everyday life. The genres include academic, professional, creative, informal, and digital writing and I'm afraid the blog is as far as I go anymore.

However a comfortable retirement with a home built like a fortress, a two server cluster atached to a gigabit broadband connection, and a gun safe full of weapons is not the worst ending you may suffer in this day and age.