CelticBear’s Musings

So my ENG 500 class, Professional Writing, is pretty imposing. The first half we’re actually writing and editing and publishing a book. And edition of Civil War era documents from and concerning the Campbell family, founders of Springfield, Missouri. Pretty fascinating, amazing!

But the second half of the class we’ll be working on our own projects–and I have no idea what to work on. I have several fiction works, novels, novellas, short stories, and role-playing games that I’ll have no problem choosing from to work on for my ENG 501 Fiction Writing class next year…but what in the world will I do for Professional Writing? All I’m good at is reading other peoples’ works and making inane comments. I’m obsessively interested in religion, social politics, skepticism…but there’s nothing about these topics that I can add to the discourse. Nothing unique that I have to say.

I figure what I’d like to do is write an article worthy of printing in Skeptic or Skeptical Inquirer magazines, but what?!

Every once in a while I output my blog to a text file, and just counting posts and no comments, formatted with 1″ margins and double-spaced, I have 421 pages of blog. Taking out redundant posts and pointlessness, I probably have about 250 pages. Then properly edited I may have 150 pages something vaguely interesting. OK, maybe 100. That could be a chapter of something larger. Maybe a review and criticism of religion and pseudoscience in online culture. Eh. OK, I may really have a 20 page journal article’s worth of potential material. Anyway, I need to think of something I’m actually qualified in writing about. =/