I’ve been surveying the landscape for years now, but I’ve
recently started looking more closely at the individual brush strokes. In the
past few months, I’ve even started taking my brush and very tepidly putting some
earthy tones to canvas. Abraham Lincoln once said if he had six hours to chop
down a tree, he’d spend four sharpening the axe. Well, I wonder what he would
have done if he had no deadline and no guarantee that the axe worked or if he
even liked cutting down trees anymore.
I’ve been writing a blog for years now and the one
conclusion I’ve drawn is that it isn’t working. I’ve spent the years since this
revelation analyzing why it isn’t working. I mostly believe it’s because the
subject matter has no focus. Movie reviews, football predictions and stories
about my childhood are written and published in consecutive posts. It also
probably doesn’t help that I have no real publishing schedule that I follow.
When I go to read something online, I generally bring up a
search engine and type in “stupid cat videos” or “Bill Cosby dead” or “Abraham
Lincoln quotes” and I’ll click on a link or two. If I’m really interested in a
topic, I will bookmark their website and check it frequently, aka ESPN and
Rotten Tomatoes. Very rarely will I stumble upon a site with no specific focus
that I will come back to again (with the exception of friends’ sites). The Onion
and McSweeny’s are two good examples of such sites. My blog only has two
regular readers and one of them isn’t even my wife.
I haven’t really ventured into the electronic publications,
mostly because my writing doesn’t fall into those categories. The things I
enjoy writing are more commentary on current events, be it social issues,
political issues, or most often, sports or movie-related commentary. I have on
occasion written something worthy of submitting to an electronic publication,
but part of me thinks I’m too busy sharpening my axe to start cutting just yet.
Part of that sharpening is figuring out how to operate this whole social media landscape,
including my blog – which just underwent a major transformation last month. Also,
trying to figure out what I want to do with my writing would help.
Adam Ruben, a fellow storyteller and non-fellow chemist,
writes a monthly a science-related humor column called “Experimental Error” for
sciencemag.org. Derek Hills, another storyteller friend, has written theater
reviews for Washington City Paper. Nevin Martell, a food writer from the same
storytelling crew, has a few regular gigs with magazines such as City Eats and
Washington Post. I also have a friend who fell ass backwards into being a
regular contributor for the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series. These people
all get paid for their craft and the common thread is that they all found a
niche in the writing world. Alex Petri, fellow storyteller and comedian, writes
the ComPost, a daily editorial for the Washington Post. She is the notable
exception. She is also brilliant and has an English degree from Harvard. I have
links to all these friends on my “blogroll.”
As far as how this will shape what I do for this class, I’m
not sure. Because I already have my own blog with an established and purchased web
address, I’m using this blog mostly as practice. I plan on incorporating the
things I’ve learned from this class into my future posts and projects. Right
now, I have plans to continue with my current website (dustinrecsports.com) as
a general “Here’s what Dustin is all about” site to promote myself. I also have
visions of writing a very specific “stay at home dad” blog with an obviously
more specific focus. Additionally, I have plans for a multi-author website that
I’d like to use for my final project. But since none of this fits into the material
I’m being asked to write about for this class, it will likely be a standalone
blog that I’ll only really share with people in this class. I think it would be
confusing to include posts like this on a stay-at-home-dad blog and as I made
mention several times already, it’s all about the niche.
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