Beginnings . . .

(photo by A. Keith Carreiro – 2012)

It is with excitement, fear, hope and anxiety that I begin this profile of a journey in writing that started in 2014. For instance, when it comes to setting up a business for myself, I seem to falter. I can do wonders for others, but in the past, in attempting a sole endeavor on my own effort, I fell apart. Even now, I feel self-confidence flying out the window and I am left shaken with various shadings of doubt, fear and trepidation. I can easily become useless. Shaken. Dismayed. Disgusted.

The purpose of this blog is to share with you the learning I have acquired in traveling on the self-publishing road. Over the course of my posting about this experience, I hope that you are at least somewhat entertained with my foibles, foolishness, foolhardiness and, yes, sometimes even small victories.

Given the caveats stated above, I have overcome them by putting one foot in front of the other. I haven’t often been able to walk very well. A lot of stumbling, falling and even running pell-mell away in retreat have occurred. Yet, I have kept getting back up on my feet.

Like the stepping stones I placed in my Japanese garden pictured above, I hope to set a path before me now in this weblog site. Perhaps by doing so, I can build another series of steps that help others walk into a place and time I have discovered.

I can’t just quit following the path of a writer on this topic of the Immortality Wars story, and in sharing with you about this experience. I have to keep going with it. I think it is important that I do so. I have a story to tell. I think it is an excellent one. It is powerful and haunting to be its chronicler. I am captured by it, and I think others will be as well. I wish to share this odyssey that I have begun with you, and to share with you, also, toward where it is leading me.

Thus, two years ago to this day, and on the cusp of the New Year heading into 2014, I made a resolution to go through all of the poetry I had written since 1965, update it, and gather it all together in computer files that could be easily retrievable. It took me all of the first four months of 2014 to complete this goal. I made sure that I had hard copies made of each poem and that I backed up every file onto an external disc drive.

I had poetry handwritten on the back of envelopes, scrawled across napkins, slapped hastily down on memo paper and even on the margins of old newspapers. Several poems were memorialized on paper dinner mats from eating at a wide variety of grills, delis, bistros and restaurants. Many others were actually typewritten and some were done in Microsoft Word format.

My goal was to attain a summative listing and a complete collection of all of my poetry. This endeavor included images, footnotes and a gathering of other sources that I could use in a poetry reading in order to share with my audience how each poem was conceived and, perhaps, to explain how the wellsprings of creativity helped shaped them into being.

When this project was done I felt a deep satisfaction and pride that I had indeed completed it. However, I suffered from a post-partum blues in conception. I figured that as I had successfully accomplished this task, I could do so on another writing task. Consequently, I turned my attention to writing a story about the future, about the past and, above all, about the present . . .

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© 31 December 2015 by A. Keith Carreiro

For information about my series, The Immortality Wars, please go to my home page: https://immortalitywars.com/