My qualifications as a writer, and dumb ideas to pass the time

Framed in on the wall of my office at work is a meme that has helped me come to grips with my life so far in more ways than I care to count. 

I went to bible college after high school, with aspirations of becoming a pastor. And the truth is I was a mediocre student and had terrible reasons for going to college. At the end of the day, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at college and met my wife of now 18 years. It was a net win in hindsight, but I didn't in fact graduate. The milestone of a college degree was left to fester and die as I left the school prematurely with enough credit hours to graduate but not enough of my program's courses completed. I was undisciplined. unfocused and most of all unfinished.

So no degree for me. Only a meme that reminds me that I will not be getting a degree any time soon.

Then I found writing. Not that there isn't a lot of writing in school. I found writing for the pursuit and joy of things I wanted to write about. And that is a school of thought I have never graduated from, nor do I want to.

The building block of writing is reading. Every writer will tell you so. So here is where I'm starting from and also where I have been so far. My nonfiction library. The red dots on the bottom of some of the spines are books I have read and put through my commonplace notecard system. More on that later. These are the bricks for my careers cathedral. My plan is to write about theology and writing itself. Autodidacticism in its finest and both of these fields in all the facets. Writing that my life reflects and to do so diligently and methodically so people can learn something.

I was a failure as a student because I stopped myself from being that student. Like a bicycle, I needed to keep pedaling to get where I wanted to go. The goal right now is to read every book I own. A daunting task when you have 100 books. I own close to 600. Several hundred are represented here with more elsewhere in my home and storage. Take a look if you like, send me suggestions if you want. There's a final line at the bottom of this post.

I might not have a degree but this is where I'm going to put my focus. 

Because now, I have one.