I’ve been out of school for so long it’s hard to remember things I learned at Goldonna High School and Northwestern State. The years have erased or toned down much of the “book learning” I was exposed to way back then.
There is one thing, however, that as a writer, I keep at the forefront of my mind and that’s working with my A, B, Cs. More specifically, I’m talking about writing Articles, Books and Columns.
I recently did an article for this publication about my 53-year career in writing columns for newspapers. That’s where my journalistic endeavors began. Later, I started dabbling into writing articles for magazines and thankfully have experienced some success in convincing editors that I could produce material their publication could use.
I look forward to this time of year for the past dozen or so years since LA Sportsman magazine asked me to locate, interview and write articles about big impressive bucks that deer hunters take around the state.
This has been, frankly, a bunch of fun. Someone informs me about a big buck taken, I contact them and in most cases, they are anxious to get their story told. I find out the hunter’s name and contact number, schedule the interview and then write the story. My main source of locating such hunters has been the internet as I daily scroll the pages of Facebook searching for successful hunters who are proud to post photos of the big buck they got.
Two years ago, I decided I wanted to complete my ABC’s and decided to try my hand at writing books. Here’s how that got started.
For a year, my daughter had asked me questions every month about my life – how I grew up, how I got into writing and such and unknown to me, had my answers published in a publication she gave me for Christmas. This triggered something in me that I could take what I had told her, add some stories to it and the end result was my book, “Bamboozled by a Bobcat” that was released two years ago.
With good results from this book, it occurred to me that I had 53 years of newspaper columns sitting dormant and I thought about turning some of those favorite columns into a book, and as a result, “Fathers, Sons and Old Guns” became a reality.
For the past several years, I had contributed to an on-line topic called “E-thoughts” where I wrote daily devotionals with scriptural references to things related to the outdoors. Again, another light came on in my brain as over the years, I had saved the devotionals I had written and thought why not put what I had written into a book. The result was my newest book, “Seasons – Connecting with God through the Year in His Great Outdoors.”
I still write weekly columns for several news outlets and during deer season, I am kept busy chasing down big bucks for LA Sportsman magazine. The fun thing for me now is promoting and selling my books, all of which are available at Amazon.com.
I suppose you’re never too old to get excited about still getting good use of what I learned early on in school, and that was my A, B, Cs.
Contact Glynn at glynnharris37@gmail.com
