Today is Cindy’s birthday.

Happy birthday, baby!

You are the bestest friend I could ever hope to have.

This year is already great and getting better! Here’s to the best one yet!

Thank you.

Before I ever managed to make an online dollar, my primary currency was comments, compliments and the occasional email encouraging me to continue.

Though I was always willing to work hard, these kudos kept me going; digital high-fives from around the globe giving me gallons of gas when my tank might have otherwise run dry.

Thank you so much for the emails on that last post, “A Promise to My Family.” I was stunned. Your outpouring and outreach were overwhelming.

I’ve returned home and all is well. I saw both Dave and snow for the first time, but I also stared right in the eyes of one possible future and turned my head with a smile.

The people we will be working with are absolutely wonderful. A truly delightful group of highly intelligent, fiercely motivated and wonderfully funny women (with a gentleman here and there just to liven things up).

My Magic 8-Ball is no better than yours, but things feel as they should.

I have a lot of catching up to do so I’ll be scarce for a bit, but I promise I’ll back and better than ever soon.

Thank you again, all is well.

Weird.

I remember hearing a story a few years back (I think I’m getting old since a few years back was actually over 10 now that I think about it) where Ray Davies from the Kinks was in a small New York Club, listening to a punk trio blaze through their set.

There was one song in particular that seemed to tickle the ear of Mr. Davies. He found himself tapping his feet, bouncing his head and humming along at the club. The beat stayed with him and Ray found himself bopping his head to the same tune as he sang in the shower the following morning.

It wasn’t until two days later when the “Well Respected Man” finally realized that the song in his head was something he’d written some 20 years earlier.

I remember hearing that story and being filled with disbelief. “That’s impossible!” I thought,”how could anyone be so disconnected from their art?”

I had similar feelings when I read Stephen King’s on Writing and he talked about how he couldn’t remember writing a single page of Cujo. At least he offered an explanation. Seems at the time old Uncle Stevie was self medicating with about 87 different kinds of mostly illegal pharmaceuticals.

Still, how can you create something, be deeply committed to it in the moment, then barely remember it a couple of decades removed? Maybe that’s the way it was for other people, I thought, but surely not for me.

I was wrong.

I’ve been preparing something special lately. A present I’d like to give to the Writer Dad audience. No big deal really, I’ve just gathered a few reader favorites from the last year and a half. Those stories which have generated the most response, either in comments or emails received.

The weird thing was that as I was reading some of the posts, I had barely any memory of them. These were deep, intimate moments as I wrote them. Some even made me cry and yet the memory on the reread was distant enough to make me seriously wonder how well I would remember them 20 years later.

Phrases used, feelings captured, the way I once used a semi-colon; a nickname for my wife abandoned. Moments in time captured before they shifted, now forever frozen like a ship in a bottle.

Written or not, our human moments are soft, and subject to fading memory as the sun will bleach the ink in a photograph.

I’ve never been more appreciative of the man moments captured on the page.

Caca, poo-poo, pee-pee, dookie…

Ah, that felt good.

Longtime readers probably know where I’m going with this.

Thanks for being patient. :)

About a year back, Cindy, Dave and I decided to create our first info product.

And um… yeah, it was about poop.

It was called Potty Training Power and was designed to help parents make potty training an enriching, positive experience, rather than the purgatory of conflict it often is.

This was after we closed our preschool, but before all our students had left. We still had one in diapers, but had just finished training a dozen in a row. We were transitioning from running the preschool to facing a zero income scenario.

So we wrote the book, designed the site, and started to run it quietly in the background of our many other projects.

Sales were modest, but reasonably steady. Yet far more than the generated income, the site has afforded our company with a constant learning experience for learning how to build, market and continuously improve an online information product.

Early last summer we decided to overhaul Potty Training Power, relaunching it on Writer Dad’s first birthday. We transformed the product from a simple e-book into a full potty training system with several separate components, each designed to help parents potty train their children with minimal strife.

Publishing weekly content on potty training, in addition to helping a steady procession of parents get through the process, ballooned our knowledge base and further equipped us to solve customer concerns. Because each system came with full e-mail support, every family who bought the product helped us to make it better.

We continued to incorporate our customer’s experience, spending another six months refining the product.

Last week we launched Potty Training Power’s third version, which now includes phone support.

This project has been interesting for our business in many ways.

At first, Potty Training Power was designed to be a set-it-and forget-it enterprise. We wanted to write an e-book, build a site to host the sales, then move on. Yet Potty Training Power is slowly growing into what I believe will be a sustainable business over time, where we can continue to help families turn their potty training into a positive experience, while also delivering a product that is unique to the market place.

This is infinitely more rewarding.

Earlier this week there was a post on Copyblogger on a similar topic. Johnny Truant wrote about how he spent his first year trying to make money building niche sites targeting dollars from AdSense before finally realizing it was best to make money the old-fashioned way – by connecting to people and offering them something of value.

I’m done with set-it-and-forget-it.

Creating something of value, that I can continue to improve over time, is far more in alignment with my natural instincts and intrinsic values.

If you have a parenting blog where a mention of Potty Training Power might be a natural fit, I’d really appreciate a shout out.

If you’re a regular Writer Dad reader who happens to be potty training, drop a comment (before the end of this week) and we’ll set you up with a complimentary download.

Even if you’re not potty training, Dave’s awesome design deserves a look. The site is squeaky clean and easy to navigate.

I’ll leave you with this cute little commercial we made last summer.

As we say on the site…

Potty training power… AWAY!

Do you remember when you were five years old?

If there was a video game version of Star Wars what did it look like?

This is what mine looked like:

This is what my son’s looks like:

The game itself is older than him by three years, but still looks good enough to actually make him feel like Luke Skywalker as he blew the Death Star to Smithereens. He worked on this for about six weeks, constantly fine tuning his approach. He is very, very proud.

Congratulations buddy, I am too.

Writer Dad

I’ll answer questions tomorrow. Right now I’m sitting in my seat at the 140 Character Conference listening to Mark Victor Hanson (the Chicken Soup for the Soul dude) talk about Twitter. Fascinating stuff for sure. Most of the speakers have one thing in common – they’re talking about changing the world.

Here are my thoughts.

Changing the world is a steady endeavor.

Scrolling through history, it would be impossible to find a single soul who woke up, decided they would change the world, then celebrated with a glass of wine later that evening. Those who change the world do it drip by drip, like coffee into a pot until it’s full enough to pour.

You do not need to shift the plates of humanity in order to make a difference. Some people change the world by prodding along another who will one day introduce the planet to a thought it’s not yet had, or invent the widget the world’s been waiting for to nudge itself forward.

Often, those who change the world never set out to do so. Big or small, the next subtle shift could be triggered by you. Day by day, drop by drop, the future is undecided.

How much impact would you like to have?

Good Mood Gig from SAM-e

No, I’ve not yet written about Vegas yet. In fact, I’m still trying to get caught up on stuff I expected to do while there.

Yes, I actually thought I would get work done in Sin City.

I hope to have a Vegas post by tomorrow. For today I’m running an old favorite I ran across a couple of weeks ago, written late last summer after an entire three months of not gassing up the car.

Please think good thoughts for Blogger Dad and his family who are ill, and please vote for me for the Good Mood Blogger Gig. Yesterday was the best day so far and made me think we can do this, but we do have to work together. Votes can be cast once per day.

THANKS and I’ll see you tomorrow!

I had to gas up yesterday.

It made me sad.

It wasn’t because of the expense, though I did pay with a fifty and couldn’t quite tip the tank of the Toyota. It was because back in early June, Cindy and I made a bet with ourselves.

A bet we both lost.

Mia’s Immersion program is on the other side of town, as is Max’s pre-school. Our schedule requires us to burn through fuel even faster than coffee. With only two weeks left of schlepping, Cindy and I decided to see if we could go the entire summer without gassing up once.

Well we certainly tried and almost made it.

Though we did leave the house nearly every day, even Max could count the number of times we opened the car door. There is a wide array of reasons we opted not to roll through summer.

Here are a few

The price of gas is ridiculous. Last May, our gas budget swallowed our entertainment budget. That’s like buying a ticket to a show and waiting outside. Mia’s program is amazing, and free, so it’s easy enough to consider the cost of fuel as cheap tuition. That logic loses wings in summer.

Because we can. All eight of our legs are in perfect working order, and we live downtown in a reasonably sized city. We prefer to get all our laziness done on Sunday. Monday through Friday there isn’t any reason we can’t walk to 90% of the places we need to go. The grocery store, library, movie theater, book store, ice-cream, etc.

Miles are like dollars; sometimes they must felt. Just as constantly using a credit card dulls the concept of money, getting inside a vehicle to travel further than three blocks, distorts the space between A and B. In our family we rarely use credit cards and often prefer to walk. We want for our children to feel the distance, and understand it in terms that go well beyond the number of traffic lights.

Outside the car you witness the beauty of life through a different lens. Humanity looks different blurring by at thirty-five miles an hour. In a car you’re a tourist, but on the street a citizen. Behind the wheel I could never see the steam ascending a coffee cup as it loses it’s thick to the crisp air, sailing from the lips of a quiet man lost in solitude. I would miss shadows wrinkling as the electric train idles in front of city hall and pedestrians in suits, both cheap and expensive, express displeasure at having to wait.

Our children also see these things. I know because we discuss them.

Our walks are wonderful. We hold hands and look both ways. We ask questions and wait for answers. We anticipate our destination and feel the reward on arrival.

I’m glad we went the summer without waiting in line for gas. It made me wonder why we even need two cars. We most often travel in a tribe and the rare use of both vehicles at the same time reduces a necessity into a luxury.

There has been an awful lot of commotion about the mounting price of gas. Perhaps eight dollars a gallon wouldn’t be the end of the world. Maybe it would be a kind of new beginning.

Writer Dad

Please Vote! 4 seconds of your life could change mine!

Good Mood Gig from SAM-e

If you haven’t joined the Four Seasons community yet, what are you waiting for? Stories come once per month and it’s free. The following is an excerpt from June. Drop your email in the box at the bottom and get caught up with all six issues. The entire series will be assembled into a single story at the end of this year.

Enjoy!

Lemmin parted his lips, then closed them again.

“And if you have any hopes of that job of yours getting any better, well you can just keep dreaming, they’ve been putting out your fires since February.”

Lemmin swallowed hard at the memory. Not like it ever left, but vented through Sheryl it seemed to harbor a few extra barbs. January could have changed everything. He had come home that New Year’s almost jolly, swimming in the strongest deja vu he’d felt in more than half his own forever. He came home to see Sheryl sighing quietly under the sheets, went out running and came back an hour later to make her breakfast. They’d stared into each other’s eyes over pancakes, for maybe the first time in a year as she listened to his parade of promises. Everything would change he said, and she believed him. Every single word. And things had started to change, almost immediately, each great day falling right into a better one.

Until the unthinkable happened. It was the impossible that had opened a wound to the inevitable.

“Looks like the traffic’s making itself comfortable.” The words just sort of fell from Lemmin’s lips, directed at no one, except perhaps himself.

“You can’t just hand everyone a ticket.” Sheryl snorted the same snort he always hated yet seemed to almost miss when it wasn’t around. “Bet you miss that siren of yours right about now.”

Lemmin lifted his head to look at the overpass, as if an extra half inch would allow him to see past the hazy glare, through 100,000 tons of steel and into the tangled nucleus of whatever trouble was intent on turning his day from bad to worse. He saw nothing, but figured he could gas up, cross the tracks and grab the freeway a mile up, maybe leaping past the largest part of the gridlock.

A minute off the freeway, Lemmin spied a horse with wings jumping from the center of a faded blue circle, swore to himself that that particular brand of station had long since gone extinct, then flashed the blinker on the Mini Cooper and pulled up next to a washed out pump to fill his dying tank. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He didn’t look at Sheryl or invite her along.

The tinny ding as Lemmin entered the liquor store pulled his thoughts from Sheryl, though only for a second. Stepping behind a guy he probably could’ve smelled from outside, his mind drifted back to thirty years before and the constant thought that he’d always be alone. He spent an adolescence waiting for someone to ask him about the scar on his cheek or the one just above his eye. He practiced his answers in the mirror so they would sound polished when finally heard.

But nobody ever asked. Either nobody wanted to know or nobody wanted to be impolite. At least no one until Sheryl, curious as she was brash.

They had known one another for maybe five entire minutes before each was making promises neither one could keep, knowing they had just enough in common to keep things interesting. It was another good five years before her two main food groups turned to Slim Fast and Valium, and a decade before long intervals of regular silence papered their walls.

“What can I get you?”

…