The 198,873nd Coolest Dad Blogger

If I asked do you miss old fashioned blogging you might wonder if I am trying to be the grumpy old man of the blogosphere and I wouldn’t blame you.

Flip through the 10,000 posts here and you’ll find more than a few thoughts and comments about blogging. You’ll see the posts about why blogs fail, my complaints about how sometimes poor writers gain fame because they are good marketers and all sorts of other snarky comments about bloggers.

Hell if you like that kind of thing I invite you to check out the posts that are listed under the blogging category, such as:

• Do You Read The Blogs You Follow?
• Your Social Media Blog Is Still My Favorite Cure For Insomnia
• The Greatest Dad Blogger You Never Heard Of
• Bad Things Happen When You Get Bored With Blogging

Some of those are pretty alright and they help prove that in spite of what you hear commenting isn’t dead yet. You just have to work a bit harder to get them.

Hard work, or working harder seems to be a general theme of my life and many of my friends. I’d like to say it refers to our work ethic and talk about how our willingness to put in extra effort has yielded significant dividends but that is not what I was thinking about.

Don’t get me wrong, we work hard and we often outwork other people but what I was really thinking about is how lately it feels like we have to work twice as hard to get half as much as we used to.

What Kind Of Blogger Do you Want To Be?

When I started blogging in 2004 it wasn’t because I had dreams of becoming the first dad blogger to publish a book or get a movie deal.

I stumbled into it.

Started blogging on a whim and then when my dad had a major heart attack and ended up on life support I used the blog as a place to clear my head.

I didn’t have any real plan so I wrote about politics and religion and started sharing stories about the things my barely out of diapers son did.

Some nights I typed with one hand and tried to rock my infant daughter in my other arm.

And like everything else in life I learned as I went along and figured out what I liked to write about and what I didn’t.

As time passed and my children grew my writing evolved and how I approached blogging changed.

The writing about politics and religion gradually disappeared, the fiction increased and there were more posts about writing.

For a long while the anchor posts here seemed to be my thoughts about parenting and stories about things my kids did but as they got older that changed somewhat too.

That is because as the children grew the boundaries surrounding the topics I could write about changed. I focused on trying to protect their privacy and started thinking about kind of blogger I wanted to be and what kinds of stories I wanted to tell.

Some of those are things you’ll find on my About Me page but not all.  If you asked me for examples I could give you a bunch but I would be worried about not providing a complete list.

• The Rhythm Of Life
• Plenty of Time
• How To Wrestle With Faith Or Sex Doesn’t Always Sell
• The Song of My Heart Has Gone Silent
• Death- My Son Asked Me Not to Die
• The tears that do not fall

That is a random sample of pieces recent and older including some of the ones that I consider turned me into a blogger.

Stream Of Consciousness

If this feels disjointed and awkward it is because it is a pseudo-stream-of-consciousness piece.

That means I am not working with an outline and but I am taking a few moments here and there to search for links to posts that I think will add value to the story I am trying to tell here.

It means I am sorting out my thoughts as I go along and when you do that sometimes the finished product is less polished than you would generate if you worked off of an outline.

Truth is I almost never work off of an outline so this should be a bit tighter but it is well after midnight and the back of my mind is filled with the murmuring that comes with being concerned about other things.

A few days ago my son was presented with some awards for making the honor roll at school. Later on we sat down and talked a bit about the future and I couldn’t help but think about how much he has grown.

The boy who asked me not to die is long gone and now there is a kid who is capable of much more sophisticated thought.

During our conversation I shared the Mark Twain quote above and extolled the virtues of being willing to swim upstream and of knowing when to go with the group.

We talk all the time about how our children grow but we don’t often talk about how we have grown or our blogs.

But it is almost 1:30 AM so we’ll save that conversation for a different day. See you in the morning.