I must admit that I feel very awkward asking all of my facebook friends to come and "like" my page and check out a blog that seems very vague in description. Since I have graduated in 2009 with my social studies degree, I have devoted my life to instilling a love and excitement for history in the kids that I have had the honor to teach. That journey has been something that deserves it own blog, but there has always been more that I wanted to accomplish in the history world. I immediately started in 2010 on my Master's degree in American history, it took 5 long years because of a multitude of things.
During the time of pursuing my master's, my wife lost our twins in her early 2nd trimester, we went through heartache and then the joy of the three children that we have today. Life was always spinning around me, but the one constant was the drive to just finish that degree and then do something with it! In November of 2015 I finally accomplished that goal, and it may have been one of the most proud moments of my life aside from the birth of two of my children and the adoption of my third.
For the last couple of months I have been toying with the idea of getting published in a historical publication, most likely a Civil War magazine. The Civil War has always been the catalyst to my love of history, it was the subject that set the fuse of my historical studies. So, I decided to contact some people through the civilwartalk.com message board, they have always been so helpful with my research for my master's program that I thought I could get some sound advice for how to begin possibly writing for publications.
I received much more than I could have ever asked of a stranger, a well-known author of Civil War works was nice enough to personally message me and offer to help me through the entire process. He offered to proofread, critique and send along any work that we deemed fit to editors that he knows personally. I must admit that I was quite blown away by the generosity, but it didn't stop there. This website is chocked-full of authors both famous and aspiring like myself and their advice has been fantastic. The advice that has been most echoed has been to blog to help my writing process and to constantly write about any historical topics that interest me. The thinking is that by constantly writing, even though it is not "scholarly" with sources and footnotes, that it will help me develop into a better writer. I plan on posting another blog later this weekend talking about my first goal as a writer and I welcome and would cherish any comments you would choose to make in the comments section on the blog.
Thanks,
Matt