My wife has faithfully typed my blogs for the past three years, being 95 blogs in total, because I was too inexperienced with the computer or in too much pain due to fibromyalgia to do it myself. I am in less pain while typing now and would like to do it myself. I need to become more experienced with the computer at any rate and finally move into the twenty-first century. So my many thanks to my wife for doing this task.
I am just completing a family history, which revolves around the story of a general store which my great-grandparents began in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1900 and four generations of the family ran it as a department store for ninety years. My parents had given me all of this memorabilia which they had saved on the store and I felt I had to do more with it than just let it sit in a cardboard box in the garage. The story is an interesting one in its own right, and I weave many other family stories of unique individuals and occurrences into it while linking it to the history of our country during that century. I hope to find a publisher and publish it this year, so keep a look-out. I will let you know when it is published.
A second thing I am completing is a small volume of poetry, comprised of poems I have written for the past 41 years. It is only 54 poems, most of them short, which I only wrote during a few periods of my life when I had the time and felt inspired by something. I will seek to have it published either through a contest or by query letter to a publisher. The chances of getting published are very slim, as few people read poetry. I published a number of these poems on this blog, but then withdrew them upon learning that typing a poem on the internet is considered a form of publishing, and traditional publishers do not like to publish poetry which has already been published.
I will close now and would like to thank the handful of people who actually read this blog for your support. Hopefully I will be more faithful to this in the future and my typing skills will improve.
Allan Spiegler 