After I retired I had to find things to do to keep me from staying home and moping. I had joined a senior citizen group that meets at the Cultural Center in downtown Chicago when I turned 55, (the only Department of Aging Center that doesn’t require you to be 60 to join). Because I was still working, however, I could not take part in many of the activities I was interested in because my work schedule fluctuated. I would not always have the same day off to take a class with a regular schedule. Now I was able to get involved in such classes. I joined three writing groups, journal writing, poetry and one called Write Right. A friend of mine suggested that I should try to get into a correspondence course with Institute of Children’s Literature. He knew that I liked to write and liked children, especially very young ones He thought I would be good at writing for them. So, I sent for the information, took their aptitude test and was accepted.
When I completed the basic course, I was recommended by the instructor for the advanced course, which I also took. I tried to submit some of the course work to publishers, but all I got were rejections. I almost gave up again, but then I got inspiration for fairy tales, which I wrote in rhyme. I felt I had finally found my niche. Our lessons emphasized the need to find something that could become a specialty for our writings so we would receive more attention from publishers . I was not a teacher, historian, scientist or other professional with special knowledge to share so I couldn’t figure out what mine could be, but when these poems came to me so effortlessly, I felt that this must be it. The problem was that none of the markets I was researching were interested in fairy tales or rhymes. But, I knew kids were, so I felt maybe I could get together a series of them and self-publish a book. I have not done that yet, but maybe someday I will, unless I can find a publisher who would be interested in them.
In the meantime, I submitted a short story to a new magazine Institute of Children’s Literature introduced their students to in its newsletter. The story was accepted and appeared in the September, 2009 issue of Knowonder Magazine, which went out of print after three issues. They hope to return if they can find financing The magazine was a non paying market, so all I received was contributor copies, but my story The Catnapper was published and I can now call myself an author. I would like to go on but it is 12:15 AM now and I’m getting sleepy. Besides, I need more to tell about my background before I have to begin writing about what I do, or don’t do, in writing each day, (other than these entries).
IT'S NEVER TOO LATE! 
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