Donn King's Corner

This is a small sampling of my writing. In the nearly 40 years I’ve been writing for pay (note: I was really, really young when I started), I’ve written dozens of newspaper and magazine articles, most of which are not available in an online format. If you would like photocopies of clips from standard magazines,and I’ll forward them to you. Credits have included, among others: Boardwatch, GEnie’s LiveWire, Storytelling magazine, East Tennessee Business Journal, Home Education Magazine, Home Business Journal, Tennessee Alumnus, Inkspot, Writing World, Metropulse, BabyZone.com, the Quips and Tips family of blogs, and others.

If you have questions, please. Thank you.

General online writing

• Stage Fright: Friend or Foe: Published by SpeakingAgent.com, a blog by agent Saul Farber, a program consultant with the Leading Authorities Speakers Bureau. Article focuses on the true nature of “stage fright” and how it can actually benefit a speaker.
• Pregnancy Meditation – How to Meditate and Get Pregnant: Published by Quips and Tips for Couples Coping With Infertility. “Learn how pregnancy meditation can help you conceive a baby without spending money on fertility supplements or treatments! Meditating can help your health in many other ways as well, which these tips will reveal.”
• Too Old to Have a Baby? Signs It’s a Good Time to Get Pregnant: Published by Quips and Tips for Couples Coping With Infertility. “If you happen to be over 40 and considering having a child, you know you have special things to think about. These tips should help you through that process.”
• Got Article Ideas? 6 Best Ways for Writers to Remember Ideas: Published by Quips and Tips for Successful Writers. “Finding book and article ideas isn’t the problem for most writers – retaining those ideas is! Here are some of the best ways for writers to remember ideas, and keep them alive long enough to develop them.”
• Miscarriage Support – 7 Tips for Coping With a Miscarriage: Published by Quips and Tips for Couples Coping With Infertility. “As I’m writing to this, I happen to be listening to “Obladi, Oblada, Life Goes On” by the Beatles. Following a miscarriage, it doesn’t seem that way. I can’t pretend to know from a woman’s standpoint, but it must be tremendously harder than it is for a man — and I can tell you it is awful for a man…. Here are several suggestions for surviving pregnancy loss…”
• Facing Down Life Block: You can find a lot of material about overcoming writer’s block. This article goes deeper, focusing on handling those situations life throws at us from time to time that bring everything to a complete halt.
• Coping With High-Risk Pregnancy: This article focuses on advice from doctors for a layperson about handling the diagnosis and practical aspects of high-risk pregnancy. It is based on our own experience as my wife and I received the news that our baby could have problems. Published on BabyZone.com.
• Speak Up For Your Writing: Article about using public speaking to support and promote your writing, published on Inkspot, one of the most respected Web sites for writers of all levels of experience. Inkspot was acquired by a corporation in late 2000 and ceased publication in March 2001 (see the next entry), so the link may die any time. [Note added October 2002: Since the link is definitely dead at this point, I've removed the reference. But I'm leaving the entry on this page because that's where the article went first, and I like to give proper credit.]
• Speak Up For Your Writing: When Inkspot folded because of a corporate merger (followed almost immediately by the Dot Com Bomb in early 2001), Inkspot managing editor Moira Allen bought the article to run at Writing World, her new online publication.

Blogs and Web pages

I started writing for pay at a county weekly newspaper that was less than five years away from printing with hot lead type. I have managed to stay with writing long enough to see at least two revolutions in the publication of the written word, from mechanical means of layout to electronic, and from paper-based production to Web-based.

Along the way I’ve learned how to create Web pages and blogs. Here are a few of them.

• Guiding Your Special Needs Child: The biggest change in our lives has been the birth and subsequent care for our daughter, who has a very rare chromosomal disorder. This blog chronicles her life as well as what we have learned along the way about taking care of special children. As her situation has stabilized, posts have mostly ceased, and news updates have folded into Kingly News.
• Kingly News: An eclectic mix of topics, Kingly News covers libertarian issues, communication skills, language, writing, family issues, spirituality, and whatever is involved in becoming human, as well as news about the family.
• Trisomy Kids Are Special: A clearinghouse of information for parents who have received a diagnose involving extra chromosomal material related to their child, and related conditions. Also a fund-raising site.
• King’s Corner: It’s Not Just Academic: A mostly academic blog with a pragmatic focus on communication (including speech, journalism, and public relations) as well as technology and teaching (especially the use of Second Life).

LiveWiremagazine

A note about LiveWire: GEnie’s LiveWire online magazine is no longer published, but until recently could still be accessed from GEnie’s site. The only files that exist on my server are those that somehow reflect my own writing; links to the original GEnie site still embedded in these files have been left there for archival purposes, but they appear to have expired recently.

• July 1995 column: In each issue, I wrote a monthly column for a very useful database service that was available through GEnie. The entries here labelled “column” each lead to that month’s ARTIST column.
• Opening page of August 1995 issue: Opening pages are included to give you some idea how the entire magazine was put together. For its time, LiveWire was one of the most ambitious online publishing projects. Note that links from opening pages refer back to the original location on GEnie’s computers, except where it leads to one of my articles. I copied my articles to my own server just in case the GEnie links ceased to function; they recently have.
• August 1995 column
• September 1995 column
• September 1995 feature for Educators: Usually I had the privilege of writing a more in-depth article about some aspect of GEnie every two months or so. This article, for instance, anchored the September issue, which had Back to School as its theme (every issue had a focus or theme).
• October 1995 column
• Opening page of November 1995 issue
• November 1995 editor’s page showing staff credit: The credits box looked basically the same in each issue; this page is included here as a sample.
• November 1995 column
• December 1995 column
• Going back even further, here’s a column from the February 1994 issue: This issue, as I recall, was published before LiveWire came out in an online edition, but after it began to be published in a downloadable electronic edition. In any case, this one is only available as a text file. Since it’s years old now, it’s the equivalent of middle ages history for computer publishing.