A reader, a blogger, a writer

Three-in-one interest fills my days with creativity

I often give thanks for my hobbies and interests, for they are highly portable and endlessly interesting. They keep me occupied without resorting to television.

First off, I am a reader. To put a finer point on it, I am a reader who writes.

Second off, I am a blogger. I have several blogs and a stable of currently viable domain names.

Numbers One and Two serve the Third category — I am a writer.

A reader who writes

I purchase all of the books that I read, and I tend to keep what I buy. This creates a backlog of physical and mental dimensions. When I consolidated my library when I moved to one floor of our vertical duplex, a time-tested housing type known in Buffalo, New York, as the double. We have lived here about 25 years, and a few years ago, we decided to take on a renter. That mean that I had to closer down my office on the first floor and store most of my books. At the time, I have about 3,000 volumes, with half of them books that were posted as used books for sale on Amaon.

The books from my office filled 48 boxes. The stack of boxes was four feet square and four feet tall Those books live in the attic now. When I pruned my for-sale books, we filled a rental van to the ceiling and took the lot to a library in an inner-ring suburb.

I say that I am a reader who writes. To have something to say when I write, I find it helpful to read. My understanding of fictional forms, characters, narration, and all the rest is more visceral than cerebral. I have been reading since i was a preschooler. When I was preaching Sunday to Sunday (I am retired now and home-bound by covid fears and cancer treatments that suppress my immune system) I read widely, and not just commentaries and theology, but also fiction and nonfiction.

I am a blogger

I have been blogging for as long as there have been blogs, and one of my early websites, which I built in Dreamweaer, an Adobe platform, included my own hand-built blog presence, which entailed a lot of cutting and pasting.

My interests are wide and deep, so the current wisdom of having one blog and one focus has never felt right to me. I tend to have one blog per interest zone, and at one time I was paying for hosting in several separate accounts. That was before I learned how to create subdomains. I now have two providers, both on probation. A third provider hosts the blog of the church that Cathy and I co-pastor on Grand Island, New York, in the woods and a stones-throw from the Niagara River.

My father was an independent truck owner, first as a logging truck driver and then as a double-belly-dump truck driver for a road-paving company. For the first 12 years of my life, he was independent, which meant that he worked from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. five days a week and spend Saturdays, and some of Sundays, if needed, repairing and maintaining his truck.

He was a whiz at fixing his truck and the family auto. as well. Now I build blogs and websites and am  a whiz at this in my own right. Sometimes I break ’em so I can fix ’em.

I am a writer

As the proud possessor of a master’s degree in divinity, and a minister of the word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A, and with strong ties to the United Church of Christ denomination, I have written newsletters, sermons, and term papers.

In my personal life, I am a writer, with three self-published novels in a single series taat constitutes one of the berst-kept secrets in publishing. I am working, through daily posts in two blogs, on a nonfiction book with the working title Of Person and Place.

One blog I post to daily, the Finnegans Wake 365, is a yearlong reading and reflecting on James Joyce’s most demanding text. One blog, Remainder Marks, is the platform for this and other daily blog posts on the theme of what makes my life sweet.

My portal page, Portkey-jrg, rounds up all the links to my web and social media presences.

Visit early and often!

Blessings and peace,

Jon

Note: This post first appeared on my blog RemainderMarks.