Banging My Gong - The End: Why I Blog
So, in response to Darren Rowse’s Group Video Project, I’ve decided to try something new.
To finish off my Banging My Gong series, I offer you a short (4:13) video about why it is that I blog:
This was my first video podcast, so forgive the quality; I’ll get better as time goes on (and I get some software other than Windows Movie Maker!)
Banging My Gong - The Brand, Part 4
If you haven’t yet read the earlier posts in the Bang The Gong series, I’d encourage you to start here and work your way back up to this post.
So, I told you yesterday that my Internet writing career began while I was in grad school. I didn’t really go looking for a writing gig; in fact, I was bound and determined to teach history. I was back in grad school for the express purpose of becoming qualified to teach college history courses.
As I mentioned, though, student loans weren’t quite enough to cut it. After all, we’re a family of 5, and we have a mortgage and two cars. So, when Angie became ill, went in for surgery and lost her job, it was time for me to find a new way to make a living.
Instead, it found me.
One of Angie’s good friends ran (and still runs) a pregnancy web site. A huge pregnancy web site. Three of them, actually. She needed to have some articles written, and was frustrated with the poor quality of work she received from the low bidders at places like Scriptlance. So, knowing that we needed the income, she asked if I’d like to write some articles for her. I agreed, and chose a female pseudonym with which to write the articles. The rest is, as they say, history.
Over the next two years, I was able to finish my Master’s degree and provide for my family with student loans and the income I was making writing pregnancy articles. By the time I finished my degree, I realized that it would be at least another decade before the history field would be open enough for me to be able to get a good tenure-track position. Rather than flounder around from one adjunct position to the next, I kept writing. After all, I was really enjoying it. And, for once, I felt like my work really benefited people. I could see how women (and men) were directly benefiting from the research I’d done and the articles I’d written. That, my friends, was cool. Very cool.
As time went on, I managed to find more pen-for-hire work. I wrote web content for a number of different sites, and did article work for several clients. There is a chance you’ve read my work somewhere other than here, especially if you’ve read anything at the major article directories on parenting, pregnancy, conception, writing, or, believe it or not, satellite TV. I wrote articles for traditional web sites, blogs and newsletters. The vast majority of this work I did in anonymity, of course; because that’s how most Internet writing works. Unless you’re writing for your own blog or web site, your work is never your own.
That brings me to today. Today, I’m making the transition from writing for others to writing for myself. This blog is, in many ways, the ultimate expression of that transition. For the first time in five years of making a living writing on the Internet, I’m making it as me.
Why is that important? Why do I want to make a living writing on the Internet as me?
Well, I answered that, indirectly, in the second post of this series. There, I said:
I want to provoke conversation. I want to participate in conversation. I want to interact with my readers and with the whole blogosphere. Like I said yesterday, I want to share my failures as well as my triumphs. I want you to know me.
Why?
That’s a silly question, isn’t it? Who doesn’t want to know and be known? Who doesn’t, deep down, want to learn from other human beings, to help them when they need it, to share their experiences, to help shape their lives and be shaped by them. That’s what being human is all about. Apart from how we relate one to another, there isn’t much separating us from the rest of existence.
It really is no more complex than that. I love my job, writing for the Internet. I love that people benefit. It gives me meaning, when I crawl into bed at night, knowing that my writing touched lives that day.
But I want more; I want to see my readers benefit up close. I want to dialogue with them, not just have them learn from my writing from a distance. I want to answer questions, and ask some of my own. Most of all, I want to help other Internet writers to achieve their dreams.
So, there you have it. That’s my brand: Helping Internet Writers to Achieve Their Dreams. It’s on my new header up at the top of this blog, it’s on my business cards, and its in my email signature. Most of all, though, it is in my heart. It is what I am passionate about, and what I most want to spend my time doing. And, as time goes on and this blog actually generates revenue, I’ll be able to do that more and more. At some point, I’ll be able to refuse pen-for-hire work, knowing that my life’s calling - to teach other writers and help them on their writing journey - is enough to support me.
Tomorrow, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, I’ll have a surprise for you. Make sure to come back then!
Banging My Gong - The Brand, Part 3
If you haven’t yet read the earlier posts in the Bang The Gong series, I’d encourage you to start here and work your way back up to this post.
After yesterday’s shameless self-promotion, it’s time I took it down a notch.
I’d love to tell you all about how I spent nearly a decade in the computer industry and how great it was to me. Technically, those things are true. For a time, the industry was amazing. I started out working a help desk job for Concentric Network for $7 an hour. Eight years later I was making four times that as a slightly-underpaid network engineer. The computer industry put food on my family’s table for a long time, and it provided me with all sorts of opportunities for career advancement.
Unfortunately, that was only a small part of the equation. You see, by the time I was fired from my last IT job, I was clinically depressed. I was so constantly anxious that my eldest daughter didn’t even like to talk to me. She was afraid I’d start yelling at any moment. My wife was thoroughly disgusted, and nearly left me. She’s told me since then that there were several days that she started packing things for her and the children with the intention of moving out. The combination of long hours, the pressure of keeping on top of new technology and a jackass of a boss had driven me to the brink of my own sanity. There were times when I even thought about driving my truck into a telephone pole so that I wouldn’t have to go in to work.
I had hit rock bottom. When they fired me, it was almost a relief.
I say “almost,” because being jobless and looking at three months of unemployment checks before my family could no longer eat didn’t exactly bring a hell of a lot of comfort.
I shut down, almost completely. I spent many days in bed that summer, at the end of my rope. I shut out all of my friends and family. I even stopped playing D&D.
My amazing wife, who had been a stay-at-home mom since we were first married, went out, got a job and kept our family afloat. She figured out how to get the kids to school, managed all of the doctor appointments, and made dinner most nights. She did all of that while endometriosis was rotting out her insides, too. (That was a problem that would take several years and 4 surgeries to correct). I can’t tell you all how much she still impresses me, every day, with how strong a woman she really is.
I realized one cold February morning that one of the reasons I had been so unhappy was because my work was not fulfilling. With the exception of the six months or so when I’d run my own computer business in 2001, the computer industry had never provided me with any self-satisfaction. I loved the pay and liked my co-workers, but there was no feeling of accomplishment when I would fix a router in the dormitory at 3 AM so that some freshman could get to his Internet porn.
When I was a child, someone told me that I should “do what you love, no matter how much it pays.” The fact that I’d not followed that advice had finally caught up with me, and was about to destroy me.
At any rate, I figured that I needed to do something fulfilling: I decided that I needed to go back to school. I wanted to help people, to teach them. Hadn’t that been my dream so many years ago at IWU? To do that, I would need a Master’s degree. I enrolled in the Humanities program at Central Michigan University and took out as much as I could in student loans. Still, when Angie got very sick with endometriosis and couldn’t work, we needed some more income.
That’s when my Internet writing career began, and that’s where I’ll pick up next time.
Banging My Gong - The Brand, Part 2
It seems I’m going to have to continue spending some time talking about myself. Honestly, its one of my least favorite subjects. I’d rather talk about all of you, and what you are all up to. Twitter has been helping me with that in the last few days, so I suppose I can continue banging my gong for a little while.
So, where did I leave off?
Ah, yes. I’d just arrived in Marion, Indiana, with the intention of studying for the ministry. But, what does that have to do with branding, and with my journey as a writer?
photo credit: Rainer Ebert
Well, like a lot of kids, I went through several different branding attempts over the first couple of years I was in college. I was the super-devout mystic, the carefree surfer dude, the professionally-groomed and dressed megachurch minister type, the cool youth pastor, the music devotee, and others. I finally settled in on being the “academic.” I spent most of my college career debating and discussing the big picture ideas with folks. I decided that I’d rather help folks by educating them than pastoring them, so I switched from Christian Ministries to History and Philosophy.
In college, I worked a bunch of different jobs. I did work study in the library’s media center, where I was first exposed to PCs. I worked as a Youth Pastor in a small church where the Pastor sold snake oil on the side. I worked for a small manufacturing company called American Mobile Power driving their truck to Ohio to pick up inventory.
American Mobile Power was a neat experience. The owner had invented a particular type of plastic polymer to use for hydraulic oil tanks on Semis. Apparently this polymer was much better than steel and much cheaper than other plastics. He was making a killing. It was there I first got a taste for entrepreneurship.
In terms of college and my eventual writing career, there’s not a whole lot more to say except for this: if I hadn’t been a decent writer, I never would have met my wife. We met via Prodigy in 1995. This was back when the online services were still big, and few folks had a direct Internet connection. I placed an ad on the Prodigy Personals area entitled, “Philosopher/Poet.”
Somehow, she fell for it.
Prodigy Personals would eventually evolve into Yahoo! Personals. There’s a brand I’d support today, even though the product looks nothing like the one that meant so much to me all of those years ago. The quality outcome of that experience has created a customer for life.
After college, I tried a semester of grad school. I wasn’t really ready to be there; I was more interested in other things. I wandered around from one customer-service type job to another for a while. I worked for a bank (NBD), the Avon-equivalent of women’s fashion (The Worth Collection), and Hellyer Communications.
Hellyer was a voicemail company. We don’t have too many of those today, but back then they were quite common. At any rate, Hellyer Communications was the one job I ever quit based purely on principle. To make a long story short, the terms of my employment required that I do my best to mislead (not lie to, but distract and misdirect) an 80 year-old woman named Pulaski into agreeing to keep voicemail service she had been subscribing to for five years but never used and would never use. I refused, and quit that moment. I didn’t even bother to put in a letter of resignation. Hell, I didn’t even tell my boss. I didn’t feel like these morally bankrupt people deserved that common courtesy. I got up, walked out, and never went back.
My branding, in my early 20s, was very unsettled. I suppose it is that way for a lot of folks. It wasn’t until 1996 when I would settle into a brand. By 1996, I was a family man working for Charles Schwab doing Windows NT Administration. Thus began my career in the IT field that spanned the better part of the next 8 years.
I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow.
Banging My Gong - The Brand
Over the past few days I’ve spent a lot of time writing about myself and about my blog. I’m not entirely comfortable with this sort of introspection, to be honest with you. I feel that I am much to young to genuflect. Still, I think this has been a necessary exercise for me. I stated that this sort of thing was imperative for the blogosphere right now, and I believe that the best way to lead is by example. To that end, I’ve tried to articulate my vision and I’ve explored my voice. But where do I go now? How do I translate that into a brand?
I think branding flows, naturally, from vision and voice. My vision is to help other Internet writers get where they want to be. My voice works to accomplish my vision by sharing my own experiences with you, and interacting with you. The natural outcome of this is my brand. So, where do I start? I guess I should start by telling you my story.
My Early Writing Career
I grew up in a middle-class family in Linwood, Michigan. You probably haven’t heard of Linwood; we have one stoplight, two churches, six bars, and a post office. Oh, and a bait shop.
Linwood is just outside of Bay City. If you’re old enough, you might remember the Bay City Rollers, an English band in the early 1970s. The legend goes that the Bay City Rollers got their name by tossing a dart at a map of the U.S. The dart landed on Bay City, and the name stuck:
(How’s that for branding?)
If you haven’t heard of Bay City, you might have heard of Saginaw, which is another twenty miles or so to the South. You may remember the Simon and Garfunkel song, America, in which the duo sing the line, “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw.” If you’re into old-time classic country music fan, its possible you know Lefty Frizell’s last #1 hit, “Saginaw, Michigan”:
(I can personally tell you, the Saginaw that Lefty sang about is vastly different from today’s Saginaw. Not better, not worse, just different. So much for that branding exercise.)
If you haven’t heard of Saginaw, I guess I can tell you that I was born an hour South of Saginaw in Flint, Michigan. You might remember Flint as the setting for Michael Moore’s Roger & Me. I’ll spare you my thoughts on Moore, other than to say he didn’t grow up on the rough streets of Flint, like he claims; he grew up in the white, upper-middle class suburb of Davison. Davison is where I lived until I was seven, when we moved to Linwood.
(Moore, regardless of whether you like him or not, knows how to brand himself.)
From an early age, I enjoyed writing. In the fifth grade, I won the school-wide creative writing contest with a poem I wrote. The poem is long gone, but as I recall it was something about writing music with words. I’ve often wondered if there is a copy of it somewhere in my folks’ basement, but I’ve never taken the time to check. When they are gone, I’m sure I’ll have the opportunity; I think it will be fitting in some ways. I can still see how proud Mom and Dad were of me on that day. I can see myself holding my poem up, surrounded by my folks.
In High School, my experiences weren’t as grand. I took a single creative writing course with a large fellow by the name of Larry who collected Coca-Cola paraphernalia. In retrospect, I think Larry was probably a great teacher. I just didn’t like him. Frankly, I didn’t pick up a pen with any serious ideas of being a writer for another decade. Besides, I developed other interests in High School. I decided that I would, after High School, go to Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, and enter the ministerial training program.
I intended to be a Wesleyan preacher.
Come back tomorrow (or maybe Monday, what with the holiday and all) to find out what happens next to our intrepid hero.
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