When I was a child my mother always put me to bed the night before my birthday by telling me, "Good night, little
four-year-old". When I awoke the next morning the first thing I heard was, "Good morning, little five-year-old".
I feel a bit like that now - this writeup will move me from Level One to Level Two.
I came to E2 after a lifetime of writing commercially : writing presentation copy for an ad agency in my early years, then business writing in an administrative capacity. I have always yearned to write creatively but somehow I never did.
I thought I would do so here but soon realized that self-indulgent creative writing is not the primary purpose of E2. Or maybe it is true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I continue to do what I have always done, what I call journeyman writing. Take a subject, find out as much as you can about it, serve it up in an appetizing manner, hope it is understood and accepted. Go on to the next subject. Do the same thing again. Do it again. And again.
My first writeup was two paragraphs for a node I found when surfing Random Node, a node on a subject I know something about. Amazingly, it was not nuked. My second writeup was more ambitious. Again, it was a subject I had known well in my childhood. I researched it to bring myself up to date, wrote and rewrote, then rewrote some more. The result was a C! and a respectable number of upvotes. I was on my way.
I have yet to tangle with Klaproth, although I have asked to have some of my writeups destroyed for one reason or another. I have had the great good fortune to have been encouraged and instructed by other noders far more experienced than myself. The number of upvotes on my first 24 writeups has been more consistent than the number of C! accolades.
I am forever amazed that a writeup I produce in a casual manner will sometimes garner more praise than another writeup I sincerely labor over. I have a "thing" writeup about the metric system that I wrote simply to expedite the linkage of another writeup on a "place" in France. I love that site in France; it is a spot I know intimately. I refined and polished the writeup until it was as perfect as I could make it. The "thingy" is a 2-C! piece with almost twice the upvotes of the writeup it was to have supported.
And so it goes. And will continue to go, I suppose. I am becoming philosophical about the vagrancies of others' taste and opinion. I find myself writing more for myself and less for you. I have discovered there are certain things I know something about, other things I want to learn more about, and that it is all grist for the mill. I am learning that I want to keep the mill turning. I am enjoying myself here.
Good night, Level One.