My "Job"

Now that my physical energy is not what it used to be, and I stay home most of the time, I found an interesting new activity which gives me a lot of satisfaction.

Some time ago I discovered on the Web a Hungarian News Web Page, which seemed to me as a good quality daily News Letter. I wrote to them and offered my services as their correspondent from France and I sent in a manuscript titled Letter from France. They accepted and published it. Since than (this was a year and a half ago) I admitted 34 articles, and out of these 33 were published. The reaction to my articles was favorable. I got messages from all over the word and they praised mostly the clarity of my writing and found the subjects interesting. This really surprised me, because for more than 35 years I hardly ever wrote in Hungarian and also seldom had the chance to speak this language. But then I remembered that some 50 years ago I went through a very hard and successful training as a news writer with Radio Free Europe in Munich Germany. The Hungarian broadcast had hourly 10 minutes news programs, we had to find the news and write it and had a deadline every hour. It was such hard work, that you hardly had the time to even blow your nose. On the night shift, which was responsible for the 10, 11 12, and the 6-oclock morning news, we worked alone, no editor, not even a typist to help us. The pressure and the responsibility was tremendous, but it taught us a skill which stayed with us, apparently, for a life time.

Fortunately in this new "job" there is no deadline, no pressure. The editor, who called me an "experienced old fox" told me that he does not have to give me instructions, I can write the way I want and about what I want. In this free environment, I felt that my writing really blossomed out. I also got a lot of help from the new Internet related tools available now via a computer. Google, for example has a service called Google Alert, where you type in the subject you are interested in, and they will e-mail you all the articles from around the world on this subject. I also found a free Hungarian spell checking program in Open Office, and with my Hungarian keyboard, I picked up in Budapest a few years ago, I am writing these articles with the greatest ease. If time allows it and I will have enough material for a book I will try to publish it.

All this shows that ma ilnes did not affect my brain and my mental energy is the same as in the past.