Pen, Sword and Book

A few days ago I realized I am a lean, mean, writing machine. Take a look at my writing projects from just the past two weeks:

• articles about the Boston-Haifa Connection (been doing PR for the Boston federation)
• Heeb magazine profile of the new GLBT Jerusalem Open House director, Noa Sattath
• op-eds related to the "Pride" controversy for Jerusalem Post and Jewschool.com
• this blog
• personal journal (since 1992)
• an op-ed published today on Ynetnews.com about the role of North American Jews in building Israel (link below)

For me, writing is not an end in itself, but a tool for activism and the end-product of exploring, questioning and learning. Almost everything I write is meant to promote my version of social justice, or at least explain why the Muffin is a great little life coach. Going through the list above, I realized I should at least attempt to have writing pay my bills.

I dislike being confined to straight news writing or employer dictates, so newspapers, magazines and traditional PR outlets are not likely to cut it. My scheme is to write a book of essays related to the themes of identity, politics and holiness. These are both my themes and Jerusalem's themes, so there's some fodder here.

Literally two days after envisioning this project, an Email arrived from my graduate program about a creative writing tutorial (small, personalized course) being offered this semester. I signed up and plan to use it as both a laboratory for essays and rationalization for possible (likely?) non-publication of my book - "Well, at least I got three credits for all that work," I will guffaw.

Fear not, readers. I will continue to post blog entries and provide links to other publishing. For instance, here is the link to my op-ed today about Israel-Diaspora relations:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3329063,00.html

Your homework: based on this blog and what you know about its author and Israel/Jerusalem, what topics would you like to see addressed in a book of essays on the themes of identity, politics and holiness?