Authors Electric

I recently met a group of neighbors.   I sat next to the city Mayor but it was the woman seated on the other side of me who teaches at Pasadena City College (PCC) that asked me about writing.   I described my writing background. It goes back to scribbling notes as a child for my mother, to writing for the middle school newspaper to writing in journalism classes.   Writers don’t need a degree to write, but I should add that had I majored in journalism I would have had the sheer discipline required to write sooner. The skill of turning out stories people would want to read, stories that were carefully structured, grammatically correct with no spelling mistakes, factually correct and reader-friendly. I had a love hate relationship with writing until I found journalism, which was a perfect outlet because I then had a concrete goal, could be compensated and I pursued it with a passion. I never turned a story in on time, they were always early but it required hard w...

I generally try to stay out of politics on this blog as much as possible. I do enough ranting and raving on my private Facebook page that, to be fair, if the current administration was actually enforcing a pogrom on political dissidents, I'd already be calling dibs on the top bunk of a FEMA camp/artist "colony." To be fair, the medical care there is top notch, I hear. We even get first dibs on experimental treatments. However, after last week's release of Trump's budget proposal , especially it's elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities , I feel like I need to speak up. It's not even that I am surprised a conservative president wants to cut resources for these two programs, as far as I can tell, every conservative president since the programs were enacted fifty years ago has wanted to restrict their funding out of some kind of belief that supporting the arts does not add much to the country...