I rarely talk about personal things on this blog, but today’s musings touch on this blog’s future, as well as my own.  Turning 70 today is for me a big event, and over the past three months, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make the most of the next decade of my life.  You see, I think it will turn out to be my most important decade.  I intend to use it well.

Becoming A Writer Seriously figures prominently into my thinking.

Quite honestly, I was thinking seriously about pulling the plug on the blog to make more time for other pressing projects.  I’ve more-or-less accomplished my original goals:  to uncover the major tools available to writers and to understand the various routes to publication.  For those of you new to this blog, the answers to those questions are all here if you dig through the Table of Contents or the Archives tab.

However, I’ve also developed a kind of loyalty to the blog’s readership.  According to my statistics from my blog host, Becoming A Writer Seriously receives about 5,500 unique visitors a month, viewing over 17,000 pages.  Ninety percent arrive directly from bookmarks, personal RSS feeds or our URL typed into one’s browser.  Only ten percent arrived via Google or Yahoo searches.  That’s quite a readership — and I feel a real obligation to all of you.

Thus, you have a rejuvenated blog:  new look, new direction, new partner.

I chose Eva Hunter as my partner for very personal reasons.  I am one of those writers who is stuck in mid-project on a number of fronts.  And her specialty is guiding writers to project completion.  I expect to learn a lot from her weekly posts.

If you want to give me a 70th  birthday present, just recommend this blog to all of your writerly friends.  Our readership has been stalled out at 5000 for the past nine months.  I want to see our readership grow to 10,000 a month within the next year or two.

I have a number of other major projects that I hope to carry to completion over this next decade.  Like a birthday present, I received good news about two of them just this past week.

• The Wellcome Foundation has confirmed that all arrangements are now in place for publication of a major book on the history of medicine in Southeast Asia by spring 2010.  The book will contain a chapter by me that has already cleared peer-review.

• I also received word from the British Museum of Natural History that my proposal for a research and publication project has moved an important step forward.  I’ve uncovered a here-to-fore unknown, handwritten, 200-year-old journal about the Philippines.  I’ve put together a team of international researchers to study the journal and to write essays about it from various perspectives.  This project has many more steps to it,  several years of work and some good luck before it’s done.

• I’m still awaiting further word about a third writing project.  Another research article has been short-listed for potential inclusion in the International Journal of Maritime History.  Hopefully, it will be accepted and published within the next two years.

The projects above have all grown out of my biggest project of all:  a book about the first world-spanning public health expedition in history.  I’ve been doing research in European, North American and Asian archives and libraries for over six years now.  Two US-based literary agents have already expressed interest in it.  Now the challenge is to finish writing a major part of the book for submission to these agents by next February, when I expect to meet with them in San Francisco.  I’m hoping Eva’s counsel will push me forward.  And perhaps some of you readers will occasionally give me a kick in the rear via comments on the blog or email.

There are other projects as well.

• I’ve been documenting monuments and statues all over the Philippines since 1995.  I learned about two more just this morning from local newspapers.  I’m planning an online directory and maybe even a coffee table book or two.  My task this year is to continue inputting data and photos already gathered into the database.  I hope to schedule 2-3 hours a week for this task.

• As some of you may know, my other passion, besides writing and history, is music.  I’ve been playing harmonica for years and along the way have devised a new system of teaching music theory and the harmonica simultaneously in a method that is full of fun.  I hope to produce a DVD series aimed at Filipino children.  The small diatonic harmonica is perhaps the least-expensive instrument there is that is so rich in musical capability.  A decent beginner’s harmonica costs less than five dollars.  I intend to team up with a local music store chain to make a DVD-harmonica set available to children throughout the country.  For those of you that might be curious, you can catch one of my performances with Filipino blues band LAMPANO ALLEY in a major concert in Singapore on YouTube.

I also on rare occasions look back at times past.  I suspect that my generation of Americans will go down as those who benefitted most from the country’s Golden Age.  I’ve had an absolutely incredible life, with so many unexpected twists and turns.  Perhaps most importantly, I’ve discovered my spiritual home here in the Philippines, where I’ve been living for most of the last 23 years.  But I still get to spend time in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and in the US, mostly on the west coast.

A close friend of mine, who knows many of the unusual tales from my life, keeps urging me to write them down.  Darn, I tell him — yet another project?  But there are days when I think maybe I should.  The changes my life, my country, my surrounding society, my world have gone through in such a short span of time are astonishing.  And, we so often forget, so often fail to put things into perspective.  Maybe I should write up those memoirs as well.

That’s a platter full of projects for the next decade.  As you can deduce from my descriptions above, I tend to take the long view on things, am willing to plug away invisibly year and year.  But now, finally, I hear the clock ticking.  It’s time to get on with it and bring this work to satisfying conclusion.  Please wish me well.

*****

Tom Colvin is a free-lance writer and musician who splits his time between the Philippines and Mexico.  His personal website is at words-sounds-images.

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