You open a door, an ordinary looking door, and walk into a room where everything is made for giants. The furniture is huge. To sit on a chair would take mountain climbing gear. To cross the carpet would be like walking through a tangled mass of weeds higher than your head. No one is in the room. It's quiet and still. On the walls you notice portraits of fairly ordinary looking people. The room is a little too warm with the massive fire burning in the fireplace on wall to your left.

What would you do? Go in and investigate or leave through the same door?

If you stay in the room continue to read. But if you leave scroll down to the next paragraph and see what happens when you make that choice.

You walk farther into the room. The fire is crackling like a forest fire. To you, it is a forest fire since even the small pieces of wood look like enormous tree trunks. Under the big couch you see something small glitter in the firelight. Taking a chance that it's not a rodent looking for a snack you explore. It turns out to be a diamond. Massive and worth a fortune if you can manage to carry it back out with you. It's heavy but it won't roll so you struggle, panting and staggering around under it's weight. But, finally you make it to the small door you came in. You open the door and half lift, half push the diamond through. Once again you are in the world you know. But now you have a diamond that will make you rich for the rest of your life.

If you leave the large sized room without exploring...

You go back through the door but you aren't where you expected to be at all. Instead everything is tiny. The room is just barely big enough for you to squeeze in all scrunched over. There is a teensy table and chairs with a miniature tea set all laid out, ready for a tea party. The table is so close to you it's almost knocked over by your knee when you wriggle around trying to get comfortable. By accident your elbow knocks a bookshelf and all the books fall down to the floor like confetti at a wedding. Picking up one book you notice your own name on the front cover. The book is a story about you! Of course, its so small you need to squint to make out the printed words inside. You realize the book is about a birthday party you had two years ago. Picking up a few other books you discover they are all about you, recording your life from the time you were born until today. There is no one around to ask about the books, how they know so much about you and who wrote them. Finding the latest, most current book you carefully turn pages until you get to the end of the writing. The journal of your life is stopped at the moment you entered this room. How curious you are now. What happens to you next?

Being a writer is about using focus and angles. You keep your focus but you use up all the angles you can find.

For instance, take a topic like Christmas. How over done is that? Could you find something new to say about Christmas (a new angle) without forgetting who you are writing for and what you are writing about (your focus). Christmas would be a tough one but every year the magazines have flocks of articles for Christmas topics. Sure, many are the same old themes about not breaking your diet, coping with the stress of shopping, bills and family, etc. If you could come up with something new to pitch to the women's magazines your chances of making a sale increase if you have a new angle and have not lost focus on your market.

I don't seem to have trouble with angles. I enjoy being contrary, turning tables and looking at things in a new way. Focus, is where my trouble starts. I get looking at angles, some of them are way out there, and focus just gets lost in the brainstorm.

I like to think there are other writers out there with the opposite problem. They have all the focus keeping them grounded but they just can't think of all the angles. While they are still working on angles I might have a chance to slip my angle in first and see my name on another cheque. My name looks so wonderful on cheques, I really should get more of them.

You get a letter in the mail. It has your name on it, not your parent's or an older brother or sister or Grandmother or Grandfather, just you! Isn't it great to get a letter of your own?

Now, what would you most like to be inside that envelope? A letter from your favourite Grandmother? A coupon for a year of free candy? Free tickets for you and your family to travel to anywhere in the world? A letter from someone you like at school telling you they like you too? A nice cheque giving you money and a new bank account of your very own? A coupon from your family promising you a day where you can do everything you like to do, with all of them? A week off school, without any homework to catch up on later? What would be in your envelope?

When did you last write a letter to someone? It is so nice to get a letter from your family but it's also nice to send one to them too. It's fun to buy or make some fancy paper and envelopes, maybe even fancy pens to write with. You can find pens with coloured ink. I saw some this week at the mall. Make sure to test your pen before you buy it. The one I bought didn't work so I have to take it back to the store and see if they still have the same kind.

The next thing you need to do is get addresses for the people you want to write to. Your parents will likely have all the addresses for family. Or you can get a phone number or email address and get it from the very person you want to write to. Keep all the addresses written down. You might consider getting yourself an address book and add phone numbers, email addresses, birthdays as well as the snail mail address. If you have space and want to be really efficient you can even add details like each person's favourite colour, hobbies, things they like to collect and anything else that would be helpful to know when you are writing to them.

Letters are fun to write. Just think of what is going on in your own life and tell someone about it. Did you have a good day at school? Did you do something special on the weekend or during the week? Sometimes the everyday little things are just as nice to read about as something really special. Besides, it would take you a long time to write a letter if you only wrote about the big blockbuster things in your life and skipped all the everyday stuff. You can also write to ask them how they are doing. If they write to you look at their letter and ask them questions about things they wrote. That way they know you read and appreciated their letter. Everyone likes to be appreciated.

Have fun writing letters. You can send birthday and holiday cards too once you get into it. Letter writing is a nice hobby, it's not very expensive and you can make other people happy. Don't always expect a letter back, it's very nice to get one but not everyone finds it easy to write letters in return. If you have Grandparents or Great Grandparents they love a letter from family. You would make their whole day!

"I think most of us are torn. We have at least two people at war in our body. One person wants to retire and grow fabulous tomatoes, and the other wants to stand up on a pedestal and be worshipped and get bigger and bigger and bigger until she explodes." Bette Middler

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." Eleanor Roosevelt

"A true traveler is never intent on reaching a destination and knows that his best adventures are ususally found off the original path."

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength that can not be defeated." Helen Keller

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life." Anne Lamott

"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm." Willa Cather

"Some think its holding on that makes one strong; sometimes its letting go." Sylvia Robinson

"The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way, and that's heaven." Natalie Goldberg

"You must do the things you think you can not do." Eleanor Roosevelt

"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say." Sholem Asch

"The best way to get something done is to begin." Anonymous

"Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action." Benjamin Disraeli

"You may delay, but time will not." Benjamin Franklin

"Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." Ernst Hemingway

"We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds." Hanmer Parsons Grant

"Excellence is not an act but a habit." Aristotle

"Its the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time." Tallulah Bankhead

"To be loved is fortunate, but to be hated is to achieve distinction." Minna Thomas Antrim

"The freedom to speak is the freedom to lie."

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." Oscar Wilde

"Intelligence is the ability to change one's mind."

1. What is your current online diary's URL? (Please provide a link to your diary!)

2. When did you first start a diary, and why? What did you write about at first? How long have you kept diaries, and was that consistenly or just here and there?

3. Whether your first diary was electric or paper, do you still have it?

4. Do you read your old diaries? What do you think or feel when you read your really old entries?

5. What type of writing do you mostly do now? (examples: 1- talk about what happened to me recently, 2- talk about things I think about, 3- talk about relationships, 4- write down dreams, my art, or any other creative thing, 5- complain, 6- write down quotes and interesting things I find such as in the newspaper).

6. What is more important, the style of the diary or the actual content, and why? What do you like to see in a diary?

7. Do you edit your entries or do you just let loose and don't look back?

8. What are your pet peeves about diaries, such as things that bug you that you notice other people do with their diaries. What bothers you the most about what you tend to do in your diary?

9. Is your diary anonymous? Why or why not? Do any of your friends or family read your stuff and does that influence what you write about or how you express yourself?

10. What does keeping a diary do for you? Why do you think that you like it?

I started my first diary (on paper) when I was a little kid. I think my Mom got me going to practice my printing, writing and spelling. It is a good way to get lots of practice. My earliest diaries didn't say much. A few comments about the weather and a line about something going on that day. As I grew old my journal entries grew longer and more interesting.

I do read them, the old ones. Its nice to remember something that happened. Without a journal there are lots of things I would never think of a second time. Most of my diary writing now is just whatever I'm thinking about, a little about things going on in my life and ideas I get about life, the world and everything.

I have an online diary now. But I won't share the URL here. I'm not a kid, I have adult thoughts, experiences and feelings and those aren't things kids need to be reading about. Kids should just be having fun, going to school and all that good kid stuff that you will miss later when it's your turn to be the adult.

The main reason I keep a diary or journal, whichever you prefer to call it, is to have a place to keep my thoughts, ideas and all the little things I don't want to forget later. I also like the idea of a scrapbook but I use my weblog that way with anything that's online or digital.

If you have a diary, what do you think as you write? I used to think that someday an archaeologist would find my diary in a big dig and read about life in "the old days". Sometimes I think that my daughter will read it and other times I think I'm writing to a biographer who is researching my life to turn it into a book about the great woman I became. For me keeping a diary is a way of leaving something of my thoughts, experiences and what I did with my life behind. It's a way to keep a bit of me around even after I'm long gone.