February 18,2007

Dennis' mom came home from the hospital today. They will still monitor her blood pressure and her kidneys. She is very glad to be home.

Weather today was sunny and above freezing. We are expecting nice weather for a few days.

I was going through old computer disks - 3.5 floppys - to see if I could open any of them. They contain the small young adult novel and short stories I had written while in my 20s. I cannot get any of them to open. I had a word processor at the time, and my computer will not recognize the disks and keeps wanting to format them. I've been thinking about rewriting the book again, so I will probably have to retype the entire thing. I hope I have a hard copy in the attic...

I was able to open one disk and found a short bio I had composed, probably for one of my college classes. It was 16 years ago. Here it is:

"My name is Tim Tanz, and I am 24 years old. I am the oldest of four. My twin sisters are 23 years old, and my brother is 18 years old. I am a returning student who commutes from Uniontown, a small town about a half hour north from Cape Girardeau. I live in a two-story house with my brother and parents; both sisters are married. I have lived there my entire life, but I intend to be moving to Cape within the next couple of months. This is my first college course since the fall of 1987, when I withdrew from the university. I had been working toward a degree in commercial art at the time, but had to withdraw for personal reasons. I have now decided to work toward a two-year degree in printing technology/graphic arts. In the last two years, I have been concentrating on getting a novel I have written published. It is a small novel, only 117 pages in length, and was written for a young-adult reading audience. It took me about a year to finish the book, and I have rewritten it twice since then. I have had it at countless publishers with little success, receiving as many as five rejections a day. I have begun work on two more novels, second and third in the series, but have shelved them until I get the first novel published. My short stories have also gone relatively unnoticed. I have also been trying to get galleries and art publishers to look at my work. I have been interested in art for as long as I can remember, but it has only been the last couple of years since I have become serious at it. I have met with some success. Recently I won awards with two of my acrylic paintings in a regional competition. Janet Dailey, a novelist who resides in Branson, MO owns one of my paintings. Although I have approached galleries across the United States, none have shown interest in my work. I have met with as much success with the fine art publishers. For some time, this really bothered me. Daily rejections have a way of causing one to lose their self confidence, and mine was about shot. Here I had planned on making a career of writing and illustrating, and no one would even take notice of my work. I thought that if all these people were rejecting my work, it surely couldn't be any good. I would never be a writer or artist. I gave up, sinking into a deep depression that seemed to last for several months. Then, earlier this year, I decided to change my perspective. Little by little, day by day, I pulled myself out of the depression. I decided to return to school and receive a degree. I did not want to continue with the commercial art program. I know the kind of art work I want to do, and I can do that on my own time. I decided to work for a degree in printing so that I can gain the knowledge to someday publish my own work. My ultimate goal is to turn out one or two books a year, as well as limited-edition prints of my paintings. I have a feeling it's going to happen, maybe not in the next couple of years, but someday I will be published. "

I'm trying to decide how I feel after reading that bio. First of all, I feel really old. Where did those years go, and what happened to my dream? I haven't written and I haven't painted. I've thought about getting back into it over the years, but I haven't been able to focus. Am I that lazy? Or did I just lose the dream?