Hi Beth, Sounds like you can go back to writing if you want as the younger children move out. Or, they are probably in school anyway. I don't know, but I'd guess that the writing part can be done from home, although to be a journalist you would probably have to get out. HD (heartland daughter), who is 21, wants to be a writer (or, is a writer but not a professional writer?), but is getting an ecology degree. She has an internship for an online magazine while she does her semester abroad in Santiago Chile.

I think my professional writing is not too bad. The rest of my early draft is not bad; it was the Intro that is not good. My writing was rather bad 20 years ago but I recognized that and worked on it. Posting on Earthwaves is in part writing/communicating practice. About 6 years ago I recognized that I could write but that it was dry/boring and so I took a shot at being creative. I wrote a Southern California Earthquake Center abstract and poster,with the first figure on the poster showing a 20 m-high wave being surfed at Cortes Bank (shown in movie "Step into Liquid"). Cortes Bank is the crest of a giant anticline far offshore, west of San Clemente Island. We (CN&RDF) are working with a Cal State Long Beach student on a thesis that includes this anticline. So, I said something like this is where the Pacific Ocean waves first meet land, and where the Pacific Plate first interacts with the North American Plate.

Posters require a good design and should be simple. They should have little text. Mine are OK but have too many figures. I saw a student poster (of someone I had earlier done a little work with) which had a single figure: a compilation of all the Bathymetry for the southwest Pacific. This was very successful (at AGU): she had a crowd around the poster.

I don't always bother to proofread here but since we are talking about writing, guess I better.
Chris