I am a published author…

All my life, penmanship has been a sore spot in my written communication. As a kid in school, I was lead to believe the heart of my written communication problems was my innate lack of writing ability. Thanks to a delayed start on college, I go to use a PC to write all term papers and upper-division lab reports. The difference between being able to edit with a word-processor (WordStar 3.3) and having to turn in hand-written was probably good for at least a one-letter grade improvement in classes requiring lots of papers.

My penmanship has improved slightly since then. Focusing on gratitude has helped me to realize a huge part of the problem is due to my lack of ‘mindfulness’ in paying attention to what I am doing. In hindsight, that same lack of mindfulness was an early indicator of substance abuse problems to come.

In October, I have used desktop publishing (edited?) to put together a 16 page booklet of short stories on gratitude, an article for a Western Washington Area newsletter on gratitude and another gratitude article for an Intergroup newsletter, along with this 27^th and last gratitude article for my blog. That is a lot of writing I would not have done without the miracle of PC word processing.

Being able to communicate via email with the world at large is a huge benefit in my relationships with others. Aside from a conference call put on by attorneys last week, I have not spoken with my sister in years. Thanks to email and this blog, we communicate now more than ever before in our lives.

I am grateful to be able to communicate via the written word and of having nearly eliminated the problem of poor penmanship thanks to relatively inexpensive word processing tools including PCs with MS Office or free word processing applications such as LibreOffice and Google Docs.