The Journey – Knowledge, Skills & Confidence

My last post about “The Journey” briefly described the re-development of the OS Wayfarer website – an ongoing exercise.  The other focus has been to gain the knowledge and skills, and ultimately the confidence to write, format and market  an eBook.

As I have mentioned before, I am on a journey – a transition to retirement – from full-time consultancy in international development assistance to becoming a writer about project monitoring and my increased holiday travel. I felt I had basic business-writing skills to support this new direction, but not necessarily adequate travel writing skills.  I had spent many years researching, developing, writing and submitting tenders, but were these the skills I needed? I decided I needed to do some training.

Fortunately, I discovered the Sydney Writers’  Centre. Over a period of some 10 months I completed quite a few courses which helped me figure out what skills I possessed and what I needed to learn.  The courses I completed were:

• Professional business writing (gave me confidence in my existing skills)
• Writing for the web (provided a good insight into the nature of writing for the web)
• Magazine writing stage 1 – online (very useful course that provided a broad range of skills)
• Travel memoir (really challenging course – caused me to rethink my writing future)
• Sell your eBook on Amazon (really good overview – too short)
• Travel writing (really enjoyed this course and it restored my confidence after the travel memoir course)