Archives for December 2011

“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Twenty-eight years ago I sat inside my junior high school English and silently cursed Emerson and what I called his stupid essay on self reliance. I looked at it with all of the contempt and disdain a 14 year-old boy could muster. This man who had died long before my time had nothing of value to offer to me. Had it not been required by my teacher I would have thumbed my nose at him and gone about my way.

Fortunately maturity and life experience has helped to teach me that I was an idiot and that the words of the departed can reach out and touch us. And now some of my favorite moments come from the quiet times in which I can read their words and think about what they mean to me now.

I like sharing those moments with you, the members of my community. I like hearing what you have to say and learning more about what you think. I value your help, your input and your insight.

So I am reaching out to you to ask for your assistance. I am trying to build my community. I want more subscribers to my blog. I want more Twitter followers and more fans for my Facebook fan page.

My purpose in asking is simple. I am trying to build a bigger platform. As many of you know I am working on writing a book. It is fiction but I hope that many other books will follow it.

The point of building the platform is simple. It provides more opportunity to be exposed to people who might be interested in working with me. That might mean writing jobs, literary agents who are interested in finding new talent to represent, social media positions and anything else that comes along that helps me generate revenue.

That is it. There is no secret here. I am transparent about my goals and my wishes. When I leave comments about the need for bloggers to sometimes be more aggressive in their requests from readers I make a point to also do as I say.

So dear reader here is what I am asking for:

• Subscribe to the blog. You can do it via Feedburner or through Jetpack. You’ll find widgets on the sidebar that you can use for this. You don’t have to sign up for both, just pick one.
• Please follow me on Twitter.
• Please become a fan of my Facebook page.
• And then recommend me to your friends, family and neighbors.

But What About The Readers

My promise to you is to keep writing. If you have requests for content you are always welcome to email me or leave your request in the comments. I’ll try to come through. I say try because my premise in blogging is that bloggers need to write with passion. That means that I am going to pick things that generate that passion and set off the fire in my belly.

I know, it sounds contradictory to ask for your help and then say that I might not do as you ask. But I also believe in building my community around me. After 7.5 years of blogging the one thing I know for certain is that the readers who hang out here consistently are diehards.I appreciate you and am grateful for that.

You stick around because you are getting something out of this joint. You stick around because we have built some sort of relationship. I don’t always comment on it or thank you for it but I am grateful. You have been part of something that has changed my life.

Before I began blogging I had forgotten how much I love writing. Before I began blogging I had lost sight of the wisdom of words and my need for them. I was a writer who had forgotten who he was. Well, now I remember and now I strive to make it into something that is a career and not just a hobby.

It is a journey and we are on it together.

Thank you again, I appreciate your time, your help and you.

Don’t know about you but I am guilty of trying to dance like Mick Jagger. I can’t do it when people are around because I become entirely too self conscious but when I am alone…that is an entirely different story.

I strut, prance and stick out my jaw in ways that probably make stupid people look smart. But I can assure you that these moments are filled with unadulterated joy and pleasure. That is the sort of feeling that I always try to create in my blog posts. It is something I strive for because if you want to write the perfect blog post you most take your reader to place where they submit to your authority and release their inhibitions.

Did you dance or sing along with Mick? C’mon, raise your hand admit it.   I did. Stood up in the middle of my office and let go of all restraint. And then when I finished laughing I sat back down and started typing again.

I don’t know about you but even though I strive for perfection I don’t know that I am ready to write the perfect blog post. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to or that I don’t think about it because I do.

Truth is that I look at blogging as one big journey and that the end product isn’t a single post but a body of work. When I take time to read and revisit the words of the past I find nuggets of wisdom intermixed with radioactive waste that is simply awful. Really some of the posts that have made it past the editors are simply horrible works of wonkery.

But I don’t delete very often, if ever. Deletion of old posts dilutes the power and permanence of the better posts. Deletion denies the opportunity to see and experience growth. I am a better writer today because of the posts that came before.

Those experiences in the trenches have made it easier to make things happen now and I am grateful for them.

When I look at my work now and ask the hard questions I find that one of my biggest challenges is tied into mood and time management. What that means is that I have had an ongoing issue with having very small chunks of time to use for writing.  Those minutes seem to be consistently peppered with interruptions that prevent me from establishing the sort of rhythm and flow that I prefer to use when I write.

If you want to use a cruder description you could say that you are almost at the point of orgasm when something happens and you lose that feeling. It irritates the hell out of me but it is part of being a writer and I need to find a solution.

One would be to find a patron or sponsor who in the name of art would provide a substantial stipend so that I could have a place where I don’t worry about “writus interruptus.”  That would make one hell of a Chanukah gift but I don’t have much faith that money is going to be showered upon me any time soon so I am trying to focus on other things.

Other things being the euphemism I use for a locked door and ear plugs.

It is getting quieter around the blogosphere. The holiday season is in full effect and the children are on their winter break. Many people are taking some time to spend with family at home or elsewhere. To me that sounds like opportunity. There are fewer posts being written which provides some of us with a better opportunity to break through the chaos and clutter of the normal cacophony.

And that too is part of why I am doing more writing now. I still write first for me and then for you but if I am to find my own sponsor well then now might be a good time to make some more noise of my own.

So I’ll write about this and write about that and in between I’ll still think about how to write that perfect blog post. The question isn’t so much about whether it is possible to get there but about the good things that come from trying.

“Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.” 
― Vince Lombardi