About Constance Barr Corbett

I am a writer who has had some success being published. My main impediment to a successful writing career has been raising three sons alone and working a full-time day job.

I’ve taken a few Writing Courses and found all of them to be helpful. I’ve been advised by two instructors to find an agent.

I thoroughly enjoy writing. I enjoy research. I enjoy people watching. Often when I pass people I wonder about them. I also wonder “what if?”, which is said to be an excellent story generator. What does it look like they’re doing? What if they are actually doing this?

I try to notice details of places and people and events. While action drives a story, details help people feel as if they are really there.

This blog is to help me write daily about my writing career. I tend to be a perfectionist and will linger on one part of an idea until I’m sure it’s correct. This helps me get it “right”, but it also slows down my progress.

Each day I will write something about my writing career.  This will hold me accountable for doing something with it daily. Hopefully by this time next year, it will be my main job. My current main job interests me a great deal as well. I am a teacher. Sometimes I write about teaching.  My most recent article about teaching was published in Teachers of Vision Magazine and can be seen here  https://ceai.org/resources/member/teachers-of-vision.html on page 4 of the TOV Fall 2012 issue.

Addendum:

I’ve actually now had another article published in Teachers of Vision Magazine. The first one was about The Classroom Read Aloud; the latest one was “How to Get Your Students to Write More!”, but I can’t find an online link to it.

I’ve also had a Letter to the Editor about the Presidential Election published in Poets & Writers Magazine, Nov/Dec 2016 issue. http://www.pw.org/content/letters_60

While I began this blog writing about the writing process, I have evolved into writing about other things that interest me. Today I wrote about Donald J. Trump winning the White House.

In 2015, I became ill and had to quit my job. It is late 2016 and I am beginning to improve. (I was hospitalized for a week in March 2016. Less than a week after getting out of the hospital, my little 15 year old dog was attacked by a Pit bull and when I pulled him off her, he decided to attack me as well. Back to the hospital I went. She survived, although she also needed expensive medical attention.)

I’m still a writer, but have slowed down a bit due to health issues. As I improve, I write more.

I bought James Patterson’s course on Writing and in going through it, I realized “I know this”, so my studying the craft is over, and I will continue to write and hope someone somewhere reads and enjoys the things I write.

In September of 2018 I self-published a book titled Bow Wow! Meow! (available on Amazon.com)  It contains 23 poems I’ve written about my pets. Some of the poems have been published in magazines/newspapers, which include Grit, The Morris Report, Cats Magazine, Sleuthhound, and others. I’ve had other poems published that aren’t pet related in other magazines. They include 2 am, Alcoholism, the National Magazine, Writer’s Gazette, and others.

If anyone read Dennis Rogers’ column in The News and Observer (Raleigh NC), in the 1980’s, I was frequently published in his Friday “Letters and Leftovers” column.

I’ve had a second Letter to the Editor published in Poet’s and Writer’s 2018 Nov/Dec issue. It was on their Reactions Page (page 11) and was about the article I read in their magazine called “Breaking the Rules: When to Ignore Good Advice” by Lenore Myka.