If you have been reading for a while, you may know this blog started on MySpace — which I’m told at least one person still uses — before moving to its current location.
This set of posts dates back to mid-2005, but really the groundwork goes back a bit further to some things many of you don’t know about.
Most writers have a distinct style you can pick out if you read enough of their stuff, and what you might call my “voice” really started during my junior year of college when I took over writing the weekly sports column in our school newspaper. It was a space where I could write about pretty much whatever I wanted, and experiment with different ways of breaking rules English teachers had drilled into my head.
Two years of that column produced some of what you might expect, and some slightly different stuff.
But I guess we can actually take one more step back, to my freshman year of college. That’s when I started my first website on GeoCities (which I’m sure nobody still uses). It was called The Ert Movement, and basically sprang from the idea that if something can be inert, why can’t the opposite be ert? The overall content is, admittedly, a bit ridiculous, but it was another place where I could experiment with a different writing style and see what this whole Internet thing was about.
The Ert site eventually became a “real” website when my brother and I bought a domain and started using a web hosting service.
Later, I used the same host to store most of the pictures you see here on the blog. Sorry to anyone who was looking through the archives in the past few weeks — we changed hosts and the pictures were down for a little while. But we’re back, so no more blank boxes.
The Ert site, which is still up for those who want some interesting reading, has a section called “Journals.” The posts are short, sometimes crazy, and a few of the later ones are actually represented here as well. Towards the end of actually updating the site, I got really lazy and just had my brother post some of the latest blog entries so we had something “fresh.”
But if you read some of the journals, I think you can see the very beginnings of what has evolved here. Here are a few quick favorites:
Soda cans + college kids + hot glue = masterpiece
Non-power windows confuse a nice young woman
In graduate school, I had to make a personal website for an online journalism class. The main part of the exercise was posting a personal story, which in my case was about my grandmother who had died a few months earlier. I later added a longer story — one of my better ones — about a family at our church who lost their mother to brain cancer, which I had written for a college feature writing class. The site also has a section of quick stories I wrote during a trip into Washington, D.C., one day that involved picking out a person I saw and making up their story.
So add up all those things, plus newspaper and magazine articles, and the countless TV/radio/web news scripts I have written professionally, and here we are.
Hopefully a few people have enjoyed reading.