Fakin’ it ’til I make it?  Perhaps.  But I have been writing since I was a very young adult.  Informal writing, to be sure.  Love letters to sweethearts (or potential sweethearts), poems for close friends and family celebrating special events, and pleadings for prayer and guidance from even closer friends and counselors during hard times in my life — I have been putting pen to paper (or, after a certain point in time, Helvetica to screen) for more than 30 of my 50 years on this orb.

Now, none of that makes me a writer, necessarily, I will readily admit.  However, several years back, when I stopped trying to write like a college freshman attempting to fill space in an essay in a style that would make even a college professor puke, I began receiving unsolicited and unexpected compliments.  That is to say, I really didn’t even want to hear compliments — only answers to the questions or problems I was presenting — but I would be told, instead, how clearly I expressed the issues I was contemplating in my messages.

At that point, however, it never occurred to me to write as a vocation.  After all, who would want to hire/pay a man to write about his thoughts in a conversational tone?  Enter the blogosphere.  It’s a new day.  Gone are the gatekeepers that once kept us from sharing with each other whatever knowledge we have to impart, feelings we want to express, or perhaps even fiction we invent for the fun and/or release of doing so.  It is, indeed, a new day.

“But what does this have to do with learning Spanish?”  Very little, I suppose.  Except that in Rocket Spanish lesson 1.5, “What do you do for a Living?”, Amy and Mauricio discuss various career paths, and “escritor” is one of those mentioned.  It made me think about how much I would like to be able to say one day, with confidence, “Soy escritor,” and prove it — en either Ingles o Español.

A quick aside:  For those of you reading this who aspire to be writers, I want to plug a product for which I receive absolutely no compensation but truly do enjoy using — WordPress.  This blog is powered by WordPress, and it is a very user-friendly, yet powerful and extensible, blogging platform.  If anyone is interested in getting started with it, please leave comments, and I’ll be happy to elaborate.  However, at this point, I’m moving on!

As of this weekend, I have completed 5 of the dozen or so lessons in Module 1 of my first level of Rocket Spanish.  It’s a long road ahead!  But I’m looking forward to it, really.  It excites me to think that I will, within a year or so, likely be able to compose an article like this using a language that, today, I speak like a kindergartener!  However, for now, I must be content to trudge through the basics, training my ear and tongue with words and phrases I must relearn after all these years.  To keep me both inspired and placated in the meantime, Lupita has introduced me to some Latin music recently, and I’ll write a little about that next week.

One last note:  Since last week’s post I added a Resources page, which can be found in the navigation menu at the top (currently) of this site.  On that page I have compiled (and am still compiling) a list of sites that I am finding helpful to me en este viaje.  Please don’t hesitate to suggest others, though, if you, too, are enjoying a journey toward fluency in Spanish.  I’ll give them a look, and possibly add them to the list.

Thanks for reading, and…

¡Hasta la próxima vez!

2 thoughts on “Yo Soy Escritor

  1. Hermano Joaquin, you are such a beautiful soul! I love that you are so dedicated to learning this awesome language. I see and hear you speak and write it everyday. I am so impressed on how much you learn everyday. As I always say “Smarty Pants”. Talk to you soon hermano Joaquin…..
    P.S. Happy learning!!!

  2. Querida Lupita, if I’m a beautiful soul, then that makes two of us, “alma gemela”. 🙂

    Thanks, again, for your encouragement in my learning process and the chronicling thereof. And you’re correct — it really is an awesome language! We’ve talked before about all the aspects of Español I enjoy so much, and perhaps I’ll share them with our readers one day soon.

    Happy tutoring!
    ~Smarty Pants
    😉

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