Another kick at the can

"Blog."

What a funny word.

"Blog."

Say it enough times, over and over again, and it starts to sound an awful like "blah, blah, blah."
Oddly, that's the main objective of someone who blogs - we want to communicate. In the case of blogging, we want to do it with our writing.

I'm no stranger to blogging. I have been doing it off and on (mostly off) for the last 16 years and I once had a site that had thousands of regular readers per week that I just decided to stop one day. One of the reasons - and the main one, really - for stopping was that I was a brand new father and I really didn't feel like sharing all the minutiae of my life as a new Dad with an audience comprised largely of folks I didn't know.

The second reason was that upon closer inspection, I realized I wasn't very good at it. Who wants to do something that you think you're terrible at? Not this guy.

I had a lot of friends keep asking why I didn't start writing on a website again, and I would always come up with some excuse that I thought would sound good enough to get them to leave me alone. the fact of the matter was that I wanted desperately to be a good writer and I wasn't, so I shut the factory down and sent all the writing muses home.

Then a funny thing happened.

A friend of mine who works for the local newspaper - the Time & Transcript - approached me about doing a weekly movie review column. Loving movies like fish love water, I gladly accepted and I realized the more I wrote every week, the more comfortable I felt. I gained confidence as I was beginning to find a more mature writing voice and I got another break when I was asked to do a weekly opinion piece in the same paper.

This year marks my fifth year doing the newspaper gig and I can't express how much it gave me the confidence I needed to start writing for an audience again. A big reason for blogging again is to share my work with people who may not have access to the newspaper, and I will eventually have an archive of most of my T&T work available for readers here. (If you look to your right, an archive has already been started, and the T&T pieces are all tagged at the bottom - click the tag and you'll be brough to the entire collection!)

The biggest reason for beginning to blog again, though?

I really miss it.

I just turned 40 years old and I'm a much different person than I was the last time I hopped on the blog bus and hoped for the best. I have two children now, have been happily married for almost 10 years, lost my mother and brother unexpectedly over the span of one year, had a near-death experience, stood at the precipice of depression, fulfilled some old dreams, made some new ones, and generally have amassed a whole collection of stories, memories and life experiences that I finally feel like sharing with someone.

Here's hoping that if you've made it this far, you find something that will keep you coming back.

I'm following my whimsy. You're free to tag along!