Pick up a pen, start writing

My heroes are writers. I’ve come to realize this in recent years, probably in some small part because of my experiences with this blog. It will be five years next month that I took the plunge and started collecting my thoughts and stories in one place. And I wish I had started it earlier than

You can be the greatest, you can be the best

As June comes to a close, I think back on what’s been an interesting month. I haven’t put very much new content in this space, but I make it a point to refresh things here every few days or so. The days of posting five or six different things here in the same 24-hour period

Another creative outlet

I’ve recently begun creating galleries that appear on the website wowthatscool.com. It’s fun because it consists of inventing a series of images or thoughts, held together by a common thread. And–unlike the writing I do here–I make some money in the process, too. Can’t argue with creating something and getting paid for it, too. The

What I do for fun

Now that baseball season is finally here, I find myself directing much of my attention to writing about the Cubs. I don’t get all the sleep I want, but that’s all right because this is fun for me. Sportswriters get paid to tell me–and everyone else–what they think about the game and my team, and

Still another writing outlet

Over the past few years, I’ve sent some of my writing into other websites. It’s always a hoot to see something that I wrote turn up somewhere, whether it’s in print or online. For reasons that may never make sense to me, I enjoy helping to create content for places that share my interests. So

That old musty cheese

Over the past few months, I’ve found great insights in the writings of Thoreau. I pick up an old copy of Walden when I can, and after a few paragraphs I’ve usually found something worth reflecting upon. And so it was today, when I found this pearl buried in Chapter 5: Society is commonly too

Some writings from this month

Yesterday was the first time that I’ve had a piece published on ChicagoSideSports this year, but I’ve also been active on ThroughTheFenceBaseball and on FiveWideSports. I haven’t promoted them the  way that I would like to here, but I’m grateful to have a chance to share some of my thoughts with those in the online

Mad-dog and A-Rod

The title of this post sounds like a bad after school special, but it’s actually two subjects that I wrote about over the weekend. The Greg Maddux piece appears on ThroughTheFenceBaseball, while the A-Rod piece is on FiveWideSports. As the NFL has its playoffs going on, and the other professional team sports are doing their

I get around

Over the past few days, following a 36-hour nostalgia bender in my hometown, I’ve written pieces that appeared on FiveWideSports, ThroughTheFenceBaseball, and ChicagoSideSports. And in this space, of course. Translating the thoughts inside my head into words is something that I’ve always enjoyed. That’s a good thing, because anything stronger than caffeine has now been

A new outlet

I’m happy that FiveWideSports will be carrying some of my thoughts and writings, beginning with this piece that appeared on their site today. I’m still writing for ThroughTheFenceBaseball, and I have a piece appearing there today, as well. The writing is all Cubs and baseball-related, and a week from now their season will be done.

In two places at once

Today is one of those days where I have a bunch of thoughts in my head, and neither the time nor the ability to drain them all out before they get turned into something else inside my brain. But I was able to see things that I wrote in two different places online today, and

Links to some baseball writings

It’s been a frustrating season to be a Cubs fan. Isn’t it always? The way that I cope with these frustrations is to write about them, and send them in to ThroughTheFenceBaseball. I greatly enjoy having an outlet for these frustrations, and I fully understand that the snarky, cynical tone of my writings may not

Gotta fight for to write

Whenever I look along the right hand column of this space, at pictures that represent the most recent posts, it always makes me smile. What is represented there are the topics that I care about more than anything else: family, Chicago, music, baseball, Lincoln, and perhaps one or two subjects from time to time. These

Write on

From the very beginning, the word counts of these posts have interested me, to the point that I keep a spreadsheet with the name, date, and word count for every post that I write. Whether it’s a post of  under 100 words–such as the one I wrote yesterday— or more than 1,200 words like the

Listening to the golf pencils

WRITE That message, engraved on the side of the golf pencils that were stationed next to the public payphones at the hotel I was staying at until yesterday, couldn’t have been any simpler or more direct. WRITE And yet there were many factors aligned against me: Kids who wanted to go out and do things

A word count milestone

Early in the process of creating and maintaining this blog, I made a decision to keep tabs on how much writing I actually did. I started keeping an Excel file, and every time a new post is added here I record four things: The number of the post, the date it was first published, the

A cross post at Through the Fence Baseball

Over the last few months, some of my writing has appeared at Through The Fence Baseball. A piece that I wrote today is here, for example. As with writing this blog, it’s all about putting down my thoughts and letting them loose into the wider world. I’m sometimes torn between what to put on my

Quarterly report #3

When I wrote my last quarterly report back in December of 2011, I pointed out that the end of this quarter comes right before the start of the baseball season. I’m a baseball guy at heart, and have been since I was a little kid, so the thought of baseball season starting up again helped

This is different from books

In the time that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve put thousands and thousands of words together into hundreds of little word morsels. And they haven’t been–and won’t ever be–published into traditional book form, which is something I take as a good thing. As I see it, the moment that ink meets paper is when

Working on my serve

I love to make analogies. The first time I remember doing it was in college, where I likened some philosophical debate to a game of tennis. The professor wrote a note in the margin of my paper, saying how my analogy made the issue seem more concrete. After that, I was off and running with

The first thing I ever wrote

All my life, I’ve loved to write. I once read that Benjamin Franklin, for all of the things he did in his lifetime, described himself as being a printer in his will. And I’m nowhere near Franklin’s standing, in anything, but I know how he felt. Whatever I’m doing, and whatever my job title might be,