Writing Without a Niche

January 6, 2009 By 45 Comments

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”

~ Isaac Asimov

without a nicheWriting without a niche is like cooking without a recipe, instinct outweighing instruction.  An excellent chef can easily surpass the written recipe by twisting his ingredients to the tang of his individual taste.  However, though cooking outside the lines stretches the possibilities of the palette, it is also probable that some people will not care for what is set upon their table.

Writing without a niche for the last half year has been the most extraordinary experience I never saw coming.  At least my children each gave me nine full months to prepare.  I’ve enjoyed the majority of the minutes, even with a few culinary complications.  Regardless of the compliments pinging my inbox on any given day, they always share space with dissimilar sentiments.

“My favorite posts are when you talk about your family,” are followed by “Is there any way you can make this less of a family blog?”

“I love the way you write,” is often followed by, “Can you tell me how do you do it?”

The freedom of writing without a niche is like the freedom found wondering around a lush island missing its harbor.

I love to banter about starting a blog, treasure tales of my family, and adore dissection of the written word, but many people wish to read my words, minus the details of my family’s day.

I’ve sorted it out.  As you know, Eric and I are sharing office space over at the Blueprint; my new home to discuss blogging, voice, and other general matters of business.  Soon, I’ll be sharing studio space with Dave in an endeavor equally exciting.

This leaves the best writer on the net ready for its most certain direction since the day I uploaded Thesis.

I have a fair idea about where I’d like to go and how I plan to get there, but I didn’t arrive at this spot without assistance and don’t intend to walk without friends beside me. Writer Dad was built on community and the insight of this community is something I give tremendous value.

We share a winding road.  If you have ideas or suggestions, please feel free to share.  I look forward to listening.

Also, giant thanks to everyone who spread the word about the Blueprint.  Our turnout was everything we hoped for.  Looks like I’ll be writing without a niche at WD for a while.

Writer Dad

Ghostwriter Dad still has to write with a niche.

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A Booster Shot For Your Blog

December 5, 2008 By 38 Comments

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”

~Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Eric and I have been talking.  The two of us have a lot in common, not just in age, life, and perspective, but within the common tide of our blogging experience. Blogopolis has been good to both of us so far, and each day we each receive emails plump from comparable questions:

How did you get all your subscribers?
How did you get that guest post at…?
How can I do it too?

There are no easy answers to these queries.  Eric and I read more than our share of content, contributing where appropriate.  We take the writing part of our blogging serious and deliver each of our posts as though they will be remembered forever rather than buried within a week.

You here the echo everywhere: content is king and social media necessary, content is king and social media necessary, content is king and social media necessary, content is king and social media necessary.

We all know it isn’t enough.

One thing, we agree, made an immediate difference: a professional look gleaming our blog from the beginning.  I started out on Blogspot, but only felt at home with Thesis. Though I do believe it was the quality of my writing that pushed me forward, I’m also sure there is a contingent of readers who glance first and read second.

Superficial, yes.  Reality, absolutely.

The information highway is not only congested with traffic, it is raving in repetition.  New sites surface daily.  A billion blogs will mean a billion voices.

How will yours stand out?

If your blog is your business, it is vital for your design to stand vivid amongst the masses.  Whether your blog is in birth or rebirth, a few tweaks will make a tremendous difference.  From sprucing up subscription icons to adding a custom logo, limits rest only in imagination.

With a unique look, you won’t squander subscribers by sending the message that you are only an echo.  User experience is critical, and it’s the little things such as accessibility and ease of use that are key.  A helping hand ensures users will navigate your site with ease.

Bland can happen within the pages of your theme whether it’s free or premium.  That doesn’t mean you have to let it find you.

A successful blogger should stand strong from the swarm.

The key is in customization.

Eric and I would like to help.  We have a large enterprise under development, this isn’t it.  This is a project we’ve teamed to do for a restricted period of time.  Eric has a decade of tech experience, and has run his own consulting firm for half that time.  I’m a writer with perfect pitch and a precise eye for detail.  Together, we will give your blog not only a premium glow, but an individual fingerprint as well.

Click here for more details, and we hope to hear from you.  Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you Monday.

Writer Dad

If you enjoyed these words, please subscribe (for free) by RSS or Email.  Click here to hire me.  Thanks.

Special thanks to Blogger Dad for my wonderful logo. It’s awesome and one.

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Scads of Ads? Not Here.

October 7, 2008 By 83 Comments

This is part II of a four part series. Click here for part one.

Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn’t have to advertise it.

~Will Rogers

We canceled cable two years back; in our house, it’s DVD’s or downloads.  We rarely listen to radio; too much trash cluttering the silence between notes.  In our car, it’s CD’s or conversation.

Our children are exposed to advertising, of course.  They are not deaf or blind, and we do occasionally leave the house.  But their exposure is remarkably thin, especially considering the times we live.

I can’t weave the worldwide web without constant commercial assault; my eyes spammed at every other click.

I’d like for Writer Dad to offer asylum.

Allow me to state clearly before I proceed:

I’ve no issue with advertisers or advertising on blogs.  Bloggers have every right to mine as many dollars as they can from the countless hours they pour into their online enterprise.  If I had no product of my own, I would sell ad space, and I’m positive that I’ll have sites in the future which will harbor ads.

For now, here, I would prefer to design something different.

Our world is littered with advertising.  Online, it’s worse.  It’s embarrassing, we all know it.  I shudder to think what our more civilized progeny, several hundred years from tomorrow, might think as they comb through these, our present histories.

On Writer Dad, I’ll have my own words to shill.  I needn’t subject a loyal audience to supplemental promotion.

However, I am moving toward writing full time, and must leverage Writer Dad in a way that will generate income.

A few methods:

  • I’ll use Writer Dad to further spread my voice, and promote my services.  This is paramount to my future as a writer, whether I freelance or publish.  At Writer Dad I can meet new people and potential partners.  Fellow writers, artists, editors, agents, publishers, etc..  I adore the knights already around the table, and there’s plenty room for more.
  • I plan to peddle a lot of my language; WeeBooks and otherwise.  We’ll discuss this one in more depth mañana, but I don’t see why writers must always maintain middle men between themselves and their patrons.  Why sell a short story to a magazine, who will fill their magazines with ads, if I have the means to deliver directly to an audience, should they be inclined to download.  Sometimes, dissemination should be as simple as a handshake.
  • I’d love to keep our white space free from ads.  If this objective grows unreasonable, and I do add paid color to the sidebar, it will fly in only two varieties: affiliate products from people I believe in, or ads for services which relate directly to the plurality of the Writer Dad audience.  These will have long term placement, so our space doesn’t mutate with every refresh.

Without ads, audience participation is crucial.  Even without purchase, readers are patrons.  Links and comments are two ways to help without a wallet.  Reader creativity, I’m sure will help breed others.

This is our blog, and it will be exactly as excellent as we make it.

Writer Dad

If you enjoyed my words, please subscribe (for free) by RSS or Email.  If you’re a Stumbler, please consider Stumbling.  Thanks.

The uber observant of you may have noticed my new header and RSS splash, along with my groovy Stumble and Twitter buttons in the Sidebar.  These were the splendid work of Eric Hamm at “Motivate Thyself.”  How awesome is Eric?  He did it for me just to be a nice guy.  He was probably still glowing from the guest post he got from Leo at Zen Habits.  Congratulations, Eric.

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Are You Questioning Me?

September 15, 2008 By 59 Comments

“I keep six honest serving-men, They taught me all I knew; Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.”

~Rudyard Kipling

Happy Monday.

Big thanks to everyone for their help/patience on Friday.  I noticed all the return visits, and appreciated your anticipation.  

 

Sorry I couldn’t post sooner.

If you missed the video, you can see it here.  If you’d like to leave a comment on YouTube, you can do that, here.

Onward.

I’ve so far avoided tags and memes, but Blogger Dad tagged me, so I couldn’t say no.

These are the questions I’m supposed to answer.  They have nothing whatsoever to do with our interview, which I believe is posting a week from Wednesday.  

1) Where were you ten years ago?
  • Managing a flower shop.  My specialty was purchasing roses, which our shop imported, mostly from Ecuador.  I also booked the weddings.  
  • I’d already met the love of my life, and was two weeks away from signing a lease on our tiny two bedroom house.
2) What’s on your to do list today?
  • Prepare the pre-school for children.
  • Use any available windows during the day, no matter how small, to answer emails and comment.
  • Teach pre-school.
  • Take my own children to school.
  • Teach pre-school.
  • Pick up my son from school.
  • Teach pre-school.
  • Pick up my daughter from school.
  • Teach pre-school.
  • Soak brain from too much pre-school.
  • Enjoy my children without sharing them (Dancing, reading, and game time mandatory).
  • Put my children to bed knowing that if I wasn’t sharing them, I wouldn’t have had as much time with them as I did.
  • Write.  
  • Daisy.
  • Rest.
3) What if you were a Billionaire?
  • I’d sit down and attempt to gather in my mind, every person who had ever impacted my life in any measurable way.  Then imagine a way to quietly reward each of them.  
  • I’d ensure that every member of my family had everything they, or their progeny would ever need.
  • I’d spend my days writing, using my words to pull the world forward, rather than myself ahead.  
  • As these needs were met, I’d pour the remainder into privately designed individual education for high functioning children, imprisoned in difficult circumstance.  
4) Five places you have lived?
  • An apartment above a garage
  • A small two bedroom house
  • A one bedroom condo
  • A two bedroom condo (though this was actually the same condo.  We bought the studio next door and made a door.)  
  • A one-hundred year old Victorian
5) Three bad habits?
  • I drink way too much coffee.
  • I Stay up way too late writing.
  • I Work on too many things at once.
6) Snacks you like?
  • M&M’s (both kinds, but peanut are better)
  • Raw almonds
  • Dark chocolate
7) Who will you tag?
  • Everyone.  Please feel free to answer one or all the questions below.

Writer Dad

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Hello, This is Me

September 10, 2008 By 87 Comments

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging them to bring out their music. 

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Before we get started, I’d like to pass around a minty fresh box of, 

“You’ve got nothing to worry about.”  

There was a tittle of concern yesterday, in comments, contact, and email, that I’d be shifting the style of Writer Dad to something, perhaps a bit saltier.  

I’ve no intention of changing anything about Writer Dad, except for all the little things along the way, which naturally amount to make things better.

I soberly swear on my Macbook (and everything stored in it’s beautiful little brain) that my eight letter words shall not be divided in half.

Onward.

Today I had my first interview.  

Ever.  

I’ve never applied for a job, and no, I never went to college.

Writer Dad!  You never told us you were a deadbeat.

I’m not.  I’ve worked at least forty hours a week, often far more, since I was seventeen, without once taking a two week vacation.  

I’ve been in interviews more times than I can count, I’ve just never been the one answering questions.

I was surprisingly nervous.

The hard part was coordinating time.  The interview had to be at precisely lunch or rest, these being the only two times of day when I can somewhat guarantee my attention for thirty minutes.  

This used to be when I’d stand just out of the children’s sight, and make funny faces so that Daisy would laugh, and maybe drop a box of crayons.  

It’s messy, but fun (for me) to watch when all the colors are rolling in different directions.  

The appointment was settled with a few quick emails, and I was reminded for the millionth time about the life changing beauty of such an elegant innovation. 

The phone rang at exactly 11:30 this afternoon.

The following is a loose transcript of the interview.

WD:  Hello.

Interviewer:  Hello WD.  We’re interested in you.  Can you talk about yourself.

WD: ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.

Interviewer:  That’s fascinating.  Tell us more.

WD: ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.

Interviewer:  You’re really interesting.  The proof is that I’m still talking to you, it’s been half an hour, and I haven’t said a thing about myself.  Is there anything else you’d like to add?

WD: Sure.  ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.

Being interviewed is amazing.  I highly recommend it to everyone.

Your phone rings, You answer.  You expound on a series of questions, where the only correct answers are talking about yourself, without interruption, and then are graciously thanked for your time.

Most conversations at least pretend to exist in dialogue, even when both parties know full well that it’s just two intersecting speeches.  

An interview makes no such pretense.

This one was a lot of fun.  It’s for an e-zine that’ll drop sometime in November.  

But there’s another one coming first.

Writer Dad’s good friend Blogger Dad sent an email, about three weeks ago.  He introduced himself, told his story, and asked for an interview.  I said I wanted to stay quiet for a few weeks.  He could choose his interview.  Partial now, full later  

He opted for a full.  

I’m going to answer his questions this weekend, and you’ll see them real soon.

Writer Dad

If you enjoyed my words, please subscribe by RSS or email.  If you’re a Stumbler, please consider Stumbling.

 

If you liked this, you’ll probably love, “No, No, No.  I Said I Didn’t Want to be a Chooch,” or “The Great Equalizer.”

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I Link You!

September 8, 2008 By 86 Comments

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind. 

~Walter Bagehot

Something cool happened at Writer Dad this weekend:

We hit a thousand comments.  

I’m only responsible for about fifty, so really it’s you, and I should say thanks.  

If you glance to your right, you’ll see two additions.  

The first, is a comment counter.  A thousand comments off three dozen posts is cause to celebrate, but I couldn’t find a way to float balloons on the blog, so I went with a chiclet instead.  

The second is also a comment counter, but with a wider smile.  It lists the ten commentators who’ve made the biggest difference in the first six weeks of Writer Dad’s infancy.

In order of comment count:

Sal, from Everyday Thoughts From Life, is evolving quickly, in both his writing and the layout of his words. I can see where he’s pulled a few cues, and I must admit, he has excellent taste.  Like Writer Dad, he wants to exchange the grind for the life of a freelancer.  Best of luck, Sal.  

Rita, from Bloggrrl is…. well, we’ll start with feisty.  Upon meeting, during my Pollyannah post about the Olympics, I thought her argumentative.  In the month since, she’s done nothing to prove me wrong.  However, I knew by the end of that first day, that Rita had all the integrity you’d ever want from the person on the other end of an argument.  Though she’s been sighted snorting capital letters, wrangling unsuspecting publishers into book deals, and coercing bloggers into theological discussion, she has acumen in abundance, and is a valuable addition to any dialogue.

Vered, I’m sure by now, is done with hearing me say that she was my first commenter, on my very first day, but it’s true.  Vered is the type of person who makes community possible.  Her RSS reader must be swollen, yet she always makes time for everyone.  I know she chews on my words, despite the fact that I serve them five days a week.  The constant community that swirls around Momgrind is testimony to her affability.  Her comments are direct, rendering it effortless to believe every word she says.

Bamboo Forest, from Pun Intended, always makes me laugh.  I look forward to his comments, nearly as much as his posts.  His blog, run with his brother, Flying Llama fish, is one of the most unique sites I’ve stumbled on.  It’s quirky, yet ripe with sincerity.  If his posts can’t make you smile, check yourself.

Lance’s, Jungle of Life is as wonderfully thoughtful as its author.  Every Sunday, I look forward to a simple picture, placed above a complimenting quote.  Lance doesn’t promote himself as an expert on anything, yet his sound words are beautifully built from the billion bits of his experience.

Barbara Swafford’s, Blogging Without a Blog is an invaluable resource for any freshman blogger.  When I found her site, she was in the middle of a series with Lorelle on WordPress.  I was new to blogging, and found myself looking forward to every entry.  Each week, Barbara knights a “New Blog of the Week.”  Her taste is excellent.  Last week it was Writer Dad; this week, Pun Intended.

Marelisa’s, Abundance Blog is a rare breed.  It serves the same purpose as many others, yet feels fully individual.  Perhaps it’s because her genuine smile and appreciation for life, shine from behind every word she writes.  Her topics might be comparable, but her approach isn’t.  Her attention to detail is evident in every post, from the borders around her pictures to the layout of her text.  She can nudge be to eat chocolate and make guacamole any time.

Alex isn’t only responsible for putting Bloggrrl and I together, he’s also the envy of Writer Dad for packing it up and moving to Spain.  His site, “Someday Syndrome,” deals with shedding the procrastination we all carry like a heartbeat.  His recent series with the lab rats is exhaustive, and well worth the minutes.

Dave Fowler is tirelessly supportive.  He not only started commenting daily, a full month before he had his own blog, he’s purchased each wee-book, every week.  I wish his new blog, Teach My Children Well, much success, and I’m glad there’s a place I can reciprocate.

I met Steph only two weeks ago, but already she’s had an impact on my writing.  She’s quick to evolve.  In half a moon, I’ve seen her blog, In Other Words, get a facelift.  And on Saturday, so did the blueprint for her life.  She’ll soon launch “EditQuest,” where, I’m certain, she’ll emerge as an immediate and natural success.

I know I’ve exceeded my word count, and I’d like to exit before I do the same to your patience.  

Quickly, here are a few I can’t omit.  

Ryan, Stacey (thank you for Friday), Ellen (some of your single sentences have touched me deeply, and thank you for the purchase), Andy, Emily, Chris, Friar, Hayden, Ian, Evelyn, Luis (Andy, Ian and Luis, thank you for buying wee-books, even though none of you have children), Dot, Urban Panther, Scott McIntyre, T Edwards, Dereck, Kool Aid, Linda, Robin, Kyddryn, and of course,

Blogger Dad.

If I neglected you, sorry.  Email me and we’ll talk about a guest post.

Writer Dad

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Writer Dad Through the Looking Glass

September 1, 2008 By 62 Comments

“The artist’s world is limitless.  It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away.  It is always on his doorstep.” 

~Paul Strand

Writer Dad went live six weeks ago.

Though the site has met an audience quickly, there was a long month of prologue that I don’t like to discuss.

Those were the forgotten days of my stumbling stabs at a blog on blogspot, where early posts sounded much like an idiot rambling inside the corridors of an empty cave.  Each post carried the shame of a dirty magazine, and I was too mortified to show them even to Daisy.  

I had nothing to say; at least nothing that anybody would want to hear.

I didn’t have a cat to talk about, I didn’t feel like bragging, or complaining, about my children to a network of strangers, and I certainly wasn’t an expert on anything; at least not enough to pop out how-to lists several times a week.

Eventually, I swallowed, and decided to just start writing.  I could figure it out as I went along… as long as I had the right name.  

I searched for an afternoon that felt like a week.  Everything was taken, including a few ghastly choices, I’m thankful were spoken for.  Almost ready to retire, I typed writer dad dot com into the search field.  

Domain name available.  

I’m a writer and a dad; guess that’s green lights all the way.  

I registered the name and drafted my first post.  

On the other side of the looking glass, and a couple dozen of the states, was a gentleman by the name of David Wright.  He too, was a writer and a dad.  He had just been let go from his job as a reporter, and was trying to decide on his next move.  

He wanted to be Writer Dad.

He checked and the domain was available, but he hedged.  

An hour later it was gone.  

I can imagine the seething hatred David felt for the thief who had crept into his head and embezzled his idea.  Fortunately, animosity died a quick death, and David started reading Writer Dad.

He liked it.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email.  Dave told me his story, and about his new blog, Blogger Dad.  He’s a seemingly terrific guy.

This is where a fun anecdote turns relevant.  

I believe in the new renaissance, and putting ourselves together.  I believe that barriers are breaking.  

My relationship with Dave is the first seed to crack shell and see a sapling stretch for light.  

He’s a cartoonist, with a long running strip called Todd and Penguin.  We’ve collaborated on our first wee-book, which we will unveil this Friday.  

This is the magic of the internet.  Dave and I weren’t assembled by a team of marketers.  We came together because I put my voice out there and he answered with his.  Collaboration has been superb; swift with no middlemen between us.  

If this is what the future offers, we should all be wise and listen.  

When it comes to things like Twitter and Facebook, I’m still a bit ignorant.  But the exchanges I’ve had with Dave, and a few others like him, could only be described as some of the brightest spots on tomorrow’s dawn.

Writer Dad

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Thank you to everyone who nominated Writer Dad for favorite writing blog. If you haven’t done it yet and would like to, you may do it here. Thanks.

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Big Sloppy Thanks

August 18, 2008 By 60 Comments

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. 

~G.K. Chesterton, influential twentieth century English Writer

Happy Monday, everyone. 

First off, I’d like to say thanks.  The site traffic on Friday was our best ever, and by a wide margin.  I did not know this Saturday morning, when I was looking at the analytics from the day before, but apparently StumbleUpon users have the ability to travel back in time so that their time spent on a given website is exactly one negative second.  

Give or take.

Despite these Stumbles through the Space/Time continuum, the average Writer Dad weekend reader still spent four minutes, on an average of three and a half page views.  

Thank you for spending time with my words.  

Thanks to everyone who passed forward the link, or said the words Writer Dad out loud.  And further gratitude to those who attached monetary value to my words.  

I appreciate this more than I can say here.  

I woke up on Friday, checked my email, and felt possibility blossom.  A distant dream now dotted the horizon.  

That’s a gift you gave to me.  

Thank you.  

You will have this Friday’s release in your inbox before I fall to sleep on Thursday.  

I’ve never in my life been as fortunate as I am right now.  To have a voice and the encouragement to use it, is like a musician being told to get on stage and play.  

I believe that when we’re willing to work hard, with discipline and diligence, there are few things we cannot do.  

I expected to find an audience.  

What I didn’t expect, was so much immediate assistance.  

I pictured the first six months of blogging as being a somewhat solitary ritual.  I’d write my words, listen to the crickets chirp, then do it again the next day; each sunrise crawling further from the most desolate gangways of the internet.  

It was nothing like that at all.  

Our time has been spent in fluid conversation.  Other than the fact that I’m here, and you’re all out there, each post has generated the amount of volleying I might expect from a well played game of tennis, not a few hundred tossed off words.

This is Writer Dad’s fifth full week.  

I played around with a few posts, starting in the beginning.  But it was five weeks ago, today, when I was finally ready.  The first month was amazing; I’m sure the next will be even more exciting.  

Please, always feel free to comment.  

This past weekend, Ari Herzog pointed out that I was not handling my Flickr links in the best way possible.  Thank you.  This is important to me.  I can only address that which is brought to my attention.  If there is something you’d like to say, and you don’t want to say it below in the comments, please feel free to drop me an email.  

Writer Dad is special.  All of us know it.  Let’s work together to make it better.  

If one month from now, Writer Dad isn’t the first site you want to see in the morning, or the last you want to savor at night, then I’m not working hard enough.  

The following dozen people fall in no particular order, but in my first few weeks, they have gone above and beyond in keeping the conversation flowing, either in my house or theirs:  

Vered, Marelisa, Bamboo Forest, Rita, 

Dereck, Emily, Alex, Ian, 

Barbara, Sal, Urban Panther, and Linda.

Writer Dad

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In The Beginning

June 5, 2008 By 6 Comments

My wife and I’ve been together for ten years now, married for six. We have two children: a daughter who is six, and a son just shy of adding a fourth candle to the cake.  

A few years ago, we took a leap. I left my job and she left hers.  She’d been teaching children for seventeen years and I grew up working in a family business.  Together, we opened a small pre-school.  The best way, we reasoned, to spend time as much time with our children as we could during those years that matter most, and seem to be the easiest to miss.  

We bought property that we could use as both our home and business; an old victorian in our city’s downtown historic district. Shortly after opening, we discovered that our city’s parking requirements prohibited expansion and the addition of any more children.

Our business had a ceiling.  

That meant we’d have to start thinking different (the charm of us both teaching children for less than the cost of living was bound to thin once our own were no longer part of the blend).  

Daisy (my wife’s name for the purpose of this blog) has always dreamt of writing, and often urged me to enlist in her fantasy.  She’s always thought I had too much to say, and often believed my thoughts might be best expressed with my fingers rather than my tongue.

But as I had for every one of the ten years we’d been together, I ignored her suggestion.

Writing, for me, has always been a spectator sport.  I love to read, and have ever since I could stare at the pages and string the sounds together. I spent a good part of childhood with my nose between the pages, but I’ve loved movies with an unhealthy appetite for just as long, and yet I’m fairly far from imagining myself running through the streets with a camera slung over my shoulder, shouting “ACTION!”

Our lives changed forever last September, when from nowhere, Daisy shot me a look I’ll never forget and said, “Really, Honey, when are gonna just start writing?”

So I did.  

It was just after Labor Day, our daughter had started Kindergarten, and the winds of change had effectively swept into our lives, leaving plenty of emotional dust to settle like silt over our slightly more silent afternoons.  Across the next four months, I gathered whatever scraps of time I could find (mostly dredged up by Daisy), and drained my brain onto the glossy screen in front of me.

On the last day of last year, our printer groused and grumbled as it spit out my first manuscript; a five-hundred page sloppy copy that sent shivers down my spine and actually made my knees knobby.

I was under no illusions.  The book was beyond terrible and I knew it.  It needed more work than our hundred and ten year old Victorian (which I swear has had at least a hundred and eleven owners). The entire thing was a messy, jumbled, vomit of awkward similes and too many adverbs; a verbal explosion with little direction to guide the riot of ideas, suffocating inside too scant a space.

But I was writing.

I was pretty high on the revelation.  Even if the novel’s only scheduled stop was some forgotten folder, buried in the depths of my hard drive, I’d written something longer than a love note, and in the process, found something that felt innate, that I could do a little of everyday, continuously developing my skill as it drifted from from hobby to trade.

As usual, when I finally relented to one of Daisy’s suggestions, I ended up wondering what had taken me so long.  

By January, I needed a break from the novel, but I didn’t want to stop writing, so I started drafting simple stories for our children, as well as the wee students at our school.  These stories were a fast and fun diversion.  Totally different from what I’d done with the novel, but every bit as satisfying.   

In February, I returned to the novel while continuing to diddle with the children’s material. Now it’s June and I’m starting the third draft of the novel.  It’s already grown into something far from its cradle, but I’m also starting to see the potential of where it can go. Daisy and I have also gathered a portfolio of children’s material; a magical brew of her twenty years with children, my love of words, and the endless inspiration of our own offspring.

If I’m a writer, then I need to write. This blog will be an excercise for my craft, as well as steady documentation of the process as we seek representation and live through the process of getting our work into the proper hands. We have a lot on our plate right now, so posting will be infrequent for the first two months.  By the first of August, posts will increase to five times a week. I promise.

Writer Dad

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