Archives for October 2012

Your Blog Is Like A Village

October 15, 2012 by Jack Steiner 12 Comments

Late Sunday night blurs with early Monday morning and I am back at the computer. I am wrestling with the boundaries of blogging and am frustrated by semi anonymity.

It happens to me…sometimes.

A feeling of restlessness and frustration.Â A sense of not having accomplished enough and having fallen short of the mark. I look around at others and see what could be, but remind myself that sometimes looks are deceiving.

And I remember that my list of accomplishments is long. My ledger isn’t all red because there is plenty of black, but sometimes it doesn’t matter.

We are who we are. This is me. There is good, there is bad and there is ugly. Most of the time I am perfectly fine with it.

The Village

Our blogs really do remind me of villages or at least how I imagine them to be. I am a city guy and though I have spent time in villages I don’t know a ton about them. Or maybe I do. Maybe life at private schools and small businesses have taught me something about them.

Maybe it is part of why I am sometimes quite guarded and slow to trust others. I have seen the gossip mills at work and have never been impressed by them.

Won’t lie and say I never engage in that sort of chatter because I have. I don’t think I do it often, but maybe I do.

Still I like to think the tone we set helps to build the kind of village we want to create. I know I like the one that is forming here.

A year ago I wrote a post called I Hope You Will Be A Part of My Community and was very pleased to see how many people signed up for my Facebook page, not because I look at you as being numbers but because it is a different place to hang out with a different vibe. I have had fun getting to know people there.

But I have also had a lot of fun getting to know people here in the comments, by email and by newsletter.

If you didn’t comment or email I would still write. That is not going to change. Writing is a part of me and if I stopped I would be crippled but that doesn’t diminish the importance or value of those who spend time here.

The Seeker

I am still wrestling with that letter to the universe and still asking if things happen for a reason. I have my thoughts and ideas about this.

I suspect part of my frustration lies in feeling like I almost have the answers and the idea that I am not going to get the sort of answer I want.

It is kind of a funny thing to me.

I remember standing in the middle of Jerusalem talking to girls from Scotland, Australia and South Africa about my funny American accent and why I wore my baseball cap backwards.

It is a moment in time where I felt a thousand possibilities. I was single and I remember thinking if I left the pub with any one of these women life would be forever changed. I wasn’t concerned with whether it would be better or worse, I just knew it felt like Let’s Make a Deal.”

Monty Hall was just waiting for me to pick what lay behind door number 1, 2 or 3.

The Choices We Make

Flip through the pages of this blog and you will see I carry very few regrets, but those I do are major. I do my best not to focus upon them because the past is behind us, the present now and the future unwritten.

It is not always possible to say which was good or bad. As my grandfather used to tell me sometimes you don’t know until you play out the hand and that is what I am doing.

I am playing out the hand.

That is part of my strategy for building the blog. Sustain your effort is a big part of my motto because I have seen growth come over time.

People stop blogging and you fill the gaps where they were. It is not because you try to it is because you are there and good things come to those who work for them.

I am working.

Where Everyone Knows Your Name

“Where everybody knows your name,
And they’re always glad you came;
Where everybody knows your name,
And they’re always glad you came..”

Cheers

One of the big goals here is to build a community that is worth being a part of. It is the idea that being part of a village is a good thing because it is big enough to offer quite a bit but small enough to offer a cozy and warm feeling.

I hope those of you who are new will choose to stay and those that were already here will continue. I appreciate you.

And just for the heck of it here are some old posts that I decided to show a little love to again:

See you later.

Betrayed

October 14, 2012 by Jack Steiner 19 Comments

Sunday morning hits and I wake up to the lovely sounds of my children fighting. A silent groan slips between my lips and I put a pillow over my head.

It is the sign ofÂ SundayÂ morning parenting, this desire to see them magically negotiate a truce between them. Further dismay comes from the ache I feel in my legs. They aren’t working the way I want them do.

Too much basketball. Been playing too hard for too many years and my body is betraying my will and desire. It is a bitter pill to swallow, this feeling that I just can’t make it work like it used to.

I make adjustments and play differently but it doesn’t matter. I can’t draw blood from a stone and I am sort of sad about it. My desire to compete is stronger than ever and I suppose my ego is there too. It hurts to let inferior players beat me, well they aren’t inferior now but they used to be.

There comes a revolution and this is how it goes.

Been listening to The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Springsteen this morning. Emotional Rescue, Kashmir, One Slip and Happy.

These songs make my heart sing and I feel like maybe there is a way I haven’t tried yet. Maybe there is something more in the tank and a way to turn back the clock. Always a way to make things work, always a way to get it done.

I just need to find it.

**********************

This was my 5 minute Stream of Consciousness Sunday post. Itâ€™s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rulesâ€¦

Set a timer and write for 5 minutes.
Write an intro to the post if you want but donâ€™t edit the post. No proofreading or spellchecking. This is writing in the raw.

Come Sail With The Dread Pirate Roberts

October 12, 2012 by Jack Steiner 18 Comments

I sent out a dozen job applications this past week with cover letters in which I revealed my dream job as becoming the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Don’t know about you, but it seems like a pretty cool job to me and from a blogging standpoint it works in all sorts of ways. How many jobs provide more opportunities for adventures that lend themselves to being memorialized in story.

You might wonder if I am trying to be funny in this post or if I am going to shift gears. You might wonder about many things and that is ok. I spend more time wondering and wandering than I care to think about.

Maybe that is why I contacted Miracle Max and asked for some help. When I pressed him to move faster I received the standard response about not rushing a miracle man for fear of getting rotten miracles.

Princess Bride Quotes Are Social Media Gold

Princess Bride quotes are social media gold. I have never found a time when a quote didn’t generate a response of some sort and that is a positive thing. Social media is about people and people are about engagement.

Speaking of engagement I joined a few more tribes in Triberr and now I have an enormous…reach.

We’re going to see if it proves to be useful or not. If it doesn’t generate more engagement than the benefit is quite limited. The “ideal” situation is for it to generate a significant increase in the number of subscribers and a book deal.

That Princess Bride headline you read above is intentional. I am trying to pull more people in, but once I get them here I have to figure out how to retain them. So maybe I ought to provide some links to posts they should read:

My Social Media Experiment

Sometimes I stare at the ceiling and wonder how I can use social media to raise a million dollars. I close my eyes and think about writing a post where I tell people it is an experiment and I am curious to see how long it would take to raise a million dollars.

The money would go towards a bunch of things, basic living expenses, the books I want to write, a vacation, kick around cash and who knows what else.

I wouldn’t promise to do anything with it. Would I donate some to charity? Sure, I would but not because I had a million bucks but because I try to give back. But I am not going to try to convince anyone to give because I would give some to charity. I won’t guarantee a percentage or anything like that.

In this experiment all I am going to do is say that I will donate something. If I ever do it I will probably blog about it, assuming someone doesn’t steal my idea.

The Mutiny of My Legs

I played two hours of basketball last night and was disappointed to find learn my legs are on strike. Damn things mutinied again. Do you know how frustrating it is to drive to the basket and find the left you always had has left.

It pissed me off so I went to bathroom and threatened them with harm, but they just laughed at me. I blame my metabolism for this. I never should have let it run away because once it did chaos erupted.

These mystery aches and pains show up unannounced and stay for as long as they want. I keep threatening those damn squatters, but they just laugh at me.

Children and Star Wars

My almost 12 year-old son and his friends have this funny idea about their generation and Star Wars. Those little buggers seem to think they own the movies and have some sort of knowledge the older, wiser generation doesn’t.

I need to write George Lucas and thank him for raping my childhood by producing some prequels that weren’t as good as the originals and for turning Darth Vader into a character you feel sad for. That dude used to be bad. He was evil. He was mean.

Back in the day if you told someone you wanted to go Vader on them they knew you were serious and not a joke.

It is late and bed calls, but I think we are about due for another post about aggressive promotion and blogs. Before I go here is an invitation to join TheJackB facebook fan page.

Don’t miss out on all the cool things that happen there and don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter. Use the form at the top right of this page.

Good night from Los Angeles.

No more rhymes and I mean it!

Headlines Are Useless

October 11, 2012 by Jack Steiner 18 Comments

Two weeks ago several people reviewed my blog and said they didn’t like it because I used curse words inÂ it. Their response irked me because I felt like the work I do here was given short shrift.

My stats showed their review took less than three minutes, they didn’t read my About Me page either. Think about that, less than three minutes to sum up almost nine years worth of work.

Three minutes to decide that my words weren’t of the standard they are looking for. I shrugged my shoulders and thought about how life is and how you only get a brief opportunity to make a good impression.

Are You Still With Me?

I wrote a post called Words You Wont Read and said 2011 was a real motherfucker. It wasn’t an exaggeration. It was a very hard year filled with multiple ups and downs.

This time last year my BIL was on life support and I was trying to convince my little sister not to worry about becoming a widow and telling my 5 year-old nephew to hang on a bit longer so that daddy could come home.

My BIL didn’t die, but my grandfather did.

He didn’t die of old age. He died from a broken heart. Don’t misunderstand, I am not angry he died, the man was pushing a 100. Grandma was the love of his life and he spent the last 18 months of his life without her.

It wasn’t easy. He cried. He didn’t want to cry in front of me, but sometimes he couldn’t help it.

When I look back it is so surreal. Six weeks before grandpa died I wrote about how I drove him to the tux shop to get fitted for my sister’s wedding. I called the post Four Generations & A Wedding because it was.

You should have seen the smile on his face when he saw my son put on a tux. Grandpa grabbed my hand and told me how proud he was of us and how sorry he was that grandma wasn’t there.

The Stories We Tell And The Stories We Share

The stories we tell and the stories we share aren’t always the same thing. There are boundaries in blogging and things we just won’t write about. I hear the echoes of the people we miss and I am sorry they aren’t here to share some things.

I am a father and a writer. I made promises to others and promised myself I would stop trying so hard. When I look back on where things were and look at where they are now I see tremendous progress.

It is gratifying to see growth and to be able to confirm hard work will make a difference.

Headlines Are Useless

I teach my children to deal with what is and not focus on what the world should be like. The instant gratification societies inability to focus irks me. Three minutes worth of skimming my work irks me.

The question I ask is what am I going to do about it. I can write better headlines and see if that helps. Or I can keep writing the crazy headlines and see how that goes.

I kind of like the second option. It is fun.

Concurrently I’ll work on building my community around me and every now and then I’ll ask you to like my Facebook page and or sign up for my newsletter.

P.S. There is an entire paragraph written in invisible ink here. If you have sensitive eyes/ears you probably don’t want to read it because it is chock full of four letter words. 😉

Good night from Los Angeles.

Bad Editors- It Is Too Important Not To Write

October 10, 2012 by Jack Steiner 8 Comments

Five hours ago I wrote a piece of fiction that didn’t work the way I wanted it to. I didn’t feel like the rhythm and flow I wanted it to have and I was disappointed.

Maybe it was because the internal editor was yelling and screaming at me about my failure to hit the mark I set for myself. But sometimes the internal editor is wrong.

Sometimes that guy fails to distinguish between editing for mistakes and destroys the style and content. Sometimes I tell him to STFU and get out of my way.

My natural hair color is black and my natural habitat is wherever it is that writers live.

There is a reason why Twenty-Five Links That Will Make You A Better Writer/Blogger is driving so much traffic to the blog and it is not based solely upon the headline.

If headlines were the only thing that worked How To Make More Money and Have Better Sex Through Blogging would be doing a hell of a lot better than it is and it is doing well.

BTW folks, I owe responses to your comments and I will get to them, but sometimes you have to write.

Write out Of The Rut

Many times when I feel unsatisfied with my writing I make a point to write more. Writing is about practice and discipline. You don’t become better by walking away and moaning about how bad it was.

Every day I talk to my children about the need to keep going even when things are tough and I can do no less. Some days in school are going to be hard. Some days at the office suck.

Some of my best writing is never acknowledged and some of my worst receives all sorts of acclaim. Don’t try to understand they rhyme and rhythm because sometimes there are no explanations.

What About Bad Editors?

Fifteen years ago one my editors butchered a piece I wrote about the Superbowl. The man took an hour to rewrite it and then handed it back to me with his name and mine on the byline.

I was livid.

It was as if he had decided to move into my home and made himself comfortable by throwing out all of my furniture and replacing it with his.

When I asked him why he had taken a machete to it he told me he really liked the idea and thought he could make it stronger. He didn’t. He took an opinion piece and turned it into his opinion.

I told him to take my name off of it and when he refused I went the publisher. I don’t know if I would handle it the same way today, but I would be just as irritated.

There is an art to editing. Editors are supposed to make your work stronger. They are supposed to provide constructive feedback on why they make changes. Sometimes you run into bad editors who for whatever reasons drop the ball.

When this guy told me The Princess Bride wasn’t funny I knew I was in trouble. Some people just suck.

Triberr

I joined a supertribe in Triberr. I am not real sure it was a good idea. I am not convinced that people are really going to read my posts and or promote them.

But even if they do promote them I wonder what kind of response we are seeing from Twitter. It really is being used as a broadcast channel by more and more people.

It is a problem. I need to blog about it again.

The bigger picture is I am focusing on building community. I am focused on building my community around me. I need to balance my disdain for headlines with looking for ways to bring people in.

But first I need to sleep. It is after 1 and I have a 5:30 am conference call. Morning comes too soon and I am not a true vampire. Don’t take that admission as permission to mess with me.

I may not drink your blood, but I am not above biting your neck, kicking your shins or stabbing you. That goes double for the people that keep sending me Farmville invitations. I don’t play and don’t want to play.

I hope your farm burns down and is destroyed by a tornado. Not in real life, just on Facebook. In real life I hope your farm does well, see sometimes I am nice like that.

How To Make More Money & Have Better Sex Through Blogging

October 8, 2012 by Jack Steiner 15 Comments

He asked me if my goal was to be a rapist and I almost spit out my drink. If you want to talk about an awkward beginning to a job interview that has to rank somewhere close to number one.

It was a classic misunderstanding that was prompted from my trying to use pop culture to build a rapport. When he asked me what my dream job was I said I wanted to become the Dread Pirate Roberts.

His face was as expressive as the picture of Half Dome three ‘graphs above this sentence. When he didn’t respond I had a sense things were off and refrained from making any cracks about being Inigo Montoya, let alone references to drunk Spaniards.

All I needed was for him to accuse me of being a racist and rapist. In my mind it was easy to imagine some screwy scene from a bad sitcom or comedy. I would look at the camera and protest my innocence and then make some sort of crack about how being a racist wasn’t nearly as bad as being a rapist and then the laugh track would run and we’d fade to black.

“Ooh La La Tu Hai Meri Fantasy Full Video Song” | “The Dirty Picture” | Vidya Balan

I haven’t any idea what most of this song is about but I have watched the video a bunch of times. My daughter watched part of it and then explained to me that she has learned to shake her hips.

Since I am a good father I glared at her and said she is not to shake her hips in front of boys. She glared back at me and said, “I can’t hula hoop if I don’t shake my hips.”

Score another point or ten for the eight-year-old and none for Jack, the dad blogger. Didja like how I just tried to insert some more keywords into this post. I said dad blogger and I included, sex, money and blogging.

Damn, it won’t be long before this sucker is overwhelmed by tons of organic traffic. Hell, might as well go for broke and include sex tape, naked Brad Pitt and Kardashian.

The Evolution of a Blog and Blogger

There is a reason why I maintain more than one blog. They serve different purposes for me. Some are for fiction, some are for whatever I feel like writing about and some are for professional reasons.

We won’t talk about whether I am over extended because I am. Nor will I spend more than a moment telling you that some of the blogging advice out there is questionable.

There are professionals who are promoting themselves as experts but I’ll lay dollars to donuts they are supporting their pro blogger habits through money earned via other means. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t know what they are talking about, but it might.

Buyer beware and remember that some of these people will be gone in a year or so.

What is nice about having multiple blogs is that it keeps things interesting. I like being a dad blogger but the parent blogosphere is a crowded space.

There are a million mommy bloggers and 50,000 dad bloggers to compete with. Many of them have more time than I do to spend on their parent blog. I don’t go to blog conferences and network the way they do nor do I write 283 pitches to brands and agencies each day.

What that means is that I have a lower profile than some of them do and I don’t get invited to play the same reindeer games.

What Is Your Goal?

Have you spent any time thinking about why you blog and what your goals are? My headline isn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. Blogging can help you make more money and have more sex.

It is not hard to develop a plan to monetize your blog. What is difficult is sustaining your effort long enough to move from execution to success.

I won’t be surprised if this post receives 5 comments or 500. Some of it is because I know I am competing with a lot of noise and clutter in the blogosphere not to mention that people have busy lives.

It is part of why I try not to take things too seriously. Remember I am the insouciant dad blogger who likes the word defenestrate and loves to write.

I am here because I am having fun. Are you?