Welcome to me!

Hail and welcome to me.  After years of resistance, I am finally writing my first blog.  I have several friends who do it, and a couple who do it very well, like my best friend Sam Reeves, a humor writer who is responsible for With Both Hands and a Flashlight, or a particularly blunt dear Irish friend who writes Have Minivan, will Travel.  My disclaimers:  Sam is weird.  The Irish girl hates stereotypes, so if you comment on her posts in such a way, she will probably jump up and punch you once she finishes her beer.

There have always seemed to me many reasons that blogging was to be avoided, and they generally stem from others that I have read.  It has always seemed to me that most blogs lacked anything really meaningful.  People will write of the latest exploits of their children, and those without children will talk about kitties and doggies, and no one really cares.  Others post more serious topics, stuffed with opinion on political or economic topics, and no one really cares.

I have written as a serious hobby for several years, and I didn’t want my writing to become something that lacked a direction, a focus. 

Then I noticed that I have neither.

This was a result of returning to some of my earlier works, to ponder my evolution as a writer.  I have some fantastic pieces in my notebook, sitting right beside some papers that are only good for starting fires.

A quick review of my Yahoo! Voices works makes no sense at all.  I’ve tried to write on all sorts of things, from finance, to places I have visited, fiction stories, and non-fiction based on my exploits or those of others.  There is no central theme, which was the point for a while.  I was experimenting with my style of writing to find out what worked, and what people liked to read.  It certainly isn’t the money – I’ve earned a little more than $75 in the last four years, a number that is inflated by a freelance piece that I sold in 2008 for $15 – an informational brochure in which I was not credited.  The rest is one or two dollars a month in advertising revenue.

Writing to make money isn’t a motivator, because there are faster, easier ways to wealth.  My motivation is fame.  Not for myself, but for what I write.  If I was known by a few million people as “What’s his name, that guy who wrote Insert Title Here, I would be ecstatic. 

Since the only way to measure distribution is with page counters, I tried to make sense of that, and I just can’t.  People won’t share a short story that took weeks to get right, with paragraphs carefully crafted to inspire.  The video of a cat chasing a laser pointer gets 2 million views.   To illustrate this insanity, I’ll pull some historical data.

Since it is election season, I thought, “Why not write on a popular topic that other people might find interesting?”  Thus was crafted, Top Ten Dumb Quotes from 2012 Presidential Candidates, released December 8^th. 

35 pageviews.  I guess people aren’t typing that into Google.

The Top Ten Things I Hate About the Twilight Movies got 157.  This should at least illustrate an important ratio – there are four times as many people interested in Twilight than those who care about the presidency.

Angel, a true story I crafted two months ago, has 1,376.  It wasn’t written to be searchable at all - I created it to inspire, and to tell a powerful story of a day experienced in the emergency room in western Iraq in 2008.  Take a break from reading this drivel, and enjoy words that were forged to reach right down your throat and grab you in a place you don’t find comfortable. 

My all time best seller is a submission that was rejected by the publisher.  Basking in my $15 success from my first sale, I tried again to write an informational pamphlet on a medical topic.  After I recovered from the “Doesn’t suit our needs at this time” speech, I posted it in the open out of spite.

Women's Health Issues: Fibroid Tumors has 6,838 readers to date, and still gets hit almost every day.  It’s not exactly a page-turner. 

In spite of all this, my Facebook page, The Pen and The Sword, only has 53 likes.

So, there doesn’t seem to be a magic formula, and I won’t contaminate my writing by trying to cram keywords into it…

Get Rich Quick with Free Videos of Brittney Spears Naked with Barack Obama

…Okay, but just that one time.

I have decided that I am going to write what I want.  Today I might want to make you happy, and tomorrow angry.  I want to make you cry, and with the next post make you laugh.  Some of my stories are true, and some are complete fantasy – I will be upfront about which is which.

What does Stephen King do if he gets the urge to write something entertaining for a small child of a friend?  I’m sure he can do this, and do it well, but does he feel the need to hide it, because that isn’t his usual style?  Or does Little Scruffy get her heart ripped out at the end by radioactive junk-yard dogs?

In the end, I am going to write what I want to write, so here it comes - all the randomness that is me.