About Lynne

---

My blog title is “Late Bloomer in a Small Pond.” It’s a mixed metaphor, but it describes me. A lot of things in my life happened late: becoming a single mother (my daughter Nora, who blogs as “The Rockin’ Runner,” helped me get started on my blog); stumbling into a teaching career; and discovering what I most like to do. I’m retired now, so I can do those things. One of them is writing. After working with Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way when I turned fifty, I realized that if I want to write, I can write– even if I’m not working on the “Great American Novel.”

That’s the late bloomer part. The small pond part is because I didn’t move to Hollywood or New York, and I didn’t become rich and famous. I found a small town in Southern Illinois and fell in love with it. The area is pretty, with rolling hills, bluffs, and small lakes—and ponds. I have the relatively simple life I’ve wanted here.

This blog, though, might wander all over the map for a while, before it finds a place to settle down. I’m starting it because I happily wrote articles for Yahoo Voices for several years, but when that site shut down in August 2014, I suddenly lost my online home.

I wrote about a variety of subjects—local attractions like Campus Lake at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and the annual Southern Illinois Music Festival; continuing education options for retired people in the area; travel articles about free things to do in Florence and how to rent a vacation apartment in Rome; the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD at movie theaters; how to save money; how to lose weight; how to learn vocabulary in a foreign language; and my guilty pleasures, the Bachelor and Bachelorette TV series—among others.

I loved writing those articles and felt I had found my niche. But things change, so here I am hoping to find another place that will let me write what I want, when I want to.

You probably won’t find any recipes here or craft projects or articles about rock music. Then again, I can’t say that for sure, because I don’t know what’s going to happen here. I’ll find out where I’m going by going there—my usual way. I hope you’ll follow along!