Wow, It Has Been Four Years Since I Started This Blog

Although technically, I started this blog in late June 2017, I always consider this post on 7.2.2017 as the official start of this blog. Since then, it has been my home base on the Internet.

I apologize if I mentioned this sometime in the past, but I did try this blogging thing for the first time about… not quite 20 years ago, back sometime in the mid-Aughts. I know that blogging was the cool thing to do and I had just heard about a new browser called Mozilla Firefox. I decided to join the other anonymous keyboard warriors and put up my own personal blog on Blogger (I think Google had just acquired that company by that point).

I designed it myself, wrote under an alias and wrote about everything – politics, culture, anything that caught my fancy. That was back in the days when I had plenty of great ideas but hadn’t even begun to sort out how I would consistently bring them to life.

I was having fun… for about four months. Then, as with most writing projects in my earlier years, it got abandoned. Procrastination was always an issue for me, but I also think there were two other factors involved. First, there was the fact that I was writing anonymously. I started to get a little nervous about that idea of being too revealing about myself online. The other issue was that the topics I covered were basically a grab bag of what I found interesting, and I didn’t have a good focus about what the blog should be about. Without that focus, I just floundered.

Again, I might be repeating this part of the story, but anyways… the first seed of this web site actually happened around 2014. I had essentially come out of retirement from journalism to work full-time at my hometown newspaper, the Muscatine Journal. During that time, I was making good use of social media to try and keep up to date with readers and generate story ideas. To separate my personal social media and my “professional” social media, I set up a Facebook page to use and interact with people as a journalist. I did the same with a Twitter handle.

All good things come to an end, however, and my brief journalism comeback ended by the fall of 2015 when I returned to teaching as a special education teacher. However, I had these social media accounts, and I felt like I wanted to make use of them. I decided that they would be the focus of my interests in writing – posts about writing, sharing my thoughts about writing, reposting other interesting stuff about writing.

I did that relatively inconsistently for about two years. I still have both of those accounts – I crosspost both all the blogs you see here on both pages as well as some odds and ends I find on the Internet every once in a while. (On the Facebook page, I recently liveblogged watching an episode of the Ernest Hemingway documentary by Ken Burns.) I am particularly ambivalent about Facebook nowadays and if there was a better place to be on and reach people I would shut that down. Currently, however, there is not.

So, I was having some fund with those little posts, when I said to myself, “wait one minute. It would be cool to have something where I could write longer pieces about writing, about myself as a writer. I could even put out the odd poem, story, or excerpt of something I was writing as well. Plus, I might not be tied to a larger company (or at least a megacompany) for my online presence.

Wil Wheaton is a guy that I have admired for a while – we’re of about the same age and I grew up watching him in Stand By Me, Star Trek TNG, and other projects. (He looks a lot better for his age than I do to be honest.) I also really admired how he had gotten into writing and recast himself as a creative person. In looking over his blog back in 2017, I noticed that he was using WordPress as its platform.

I wound up getting an account, started toying around… and the result is what you see here, with a few small modifications to the look and feel of the place.

There’s been a few changes in my life since I started this blog. I continued my career in special education at several school districts, and I will soon be starting at the fifth school district I have ever taught at full-time. My two kids graduated high school, moved out for college and/or full-time work, and promptly moved back in due to COVID/real life stuff. We moved from Muscatine on the mighty Mississippi to the little community of Chariton in South Central Iowa… and it’s a nice little community. After a year of living here myself, I’m starting to get a feel for the place, as well as getting to know fellow writers in the greater Des Moines community.

Finally, I wound up becoming a published novelist for the first time in my life. Although sales have been extremely modest to say the least (I think in part due to COVID and having to move), but it has been a tremendous experience that for a long time I did not think that I would ever achieve. It’s made me hungry for more success and more progress along the writing front.

So, what is next? I think that I want to continue to develop this blog more, to more consistently produce some good content for my page, and not just report on my writing totals for each week (even though that will continue to be a big part of this site, because it has helped me to stay consistent with writing and increase my general writing productivity). I want to try new techniques to promote this page and do things that might get people interested in it. Even though it will always be a writing blog, I want to get into a variety of writing subjects that I might not have touched on before or not discussed for some time. There might be some other ways to use this page to both promote my past and future writing projects and reach more people.

I’ll leave it at that for now and wish everyone a great weekend. Writers keep writing and everyone keep safe.