What mushrooms was I eating yesterday when I wrote that the weather would look good today for my planned 50-mile bike ride?  It’s raining and cold.  Brr.  I’ll see if tomorrow looks any better, but today is definitely a gym day.

So for the morning, I’m camped out at Zoka with the laptop and the White Stripes and wishing that they had a fireplace.  I have a feeling today might be very productive, despite last night’s fun at the Seattle Startup Drinks event at the Two Bells Tavern.  I may blog a TON.  Feeling the old itchy fingers that I haven’t felt in a long while.  I just hope I keep the #wahbulance emo to a minimum, while still letting the authentic me shine through.  Because I know you haven’t gotten enough of me yet.

By the way, my blog traffic numbers are seeing record highs lately – what that’s about, I really have no idea, but thanks for reading!

Dave Winer, with whom I’ve had an on-again, off-again reading relationship over the last few years, has really struck home with his most recent post on Natural Born Bloggers.

Not everyone was born to blog, but some people were. […] NBBs annoy the hell out of you. And if they’re good, they get you to think. There’s the big value in having us around. We foster thinking.

When I say someone is a Natural Born Blogger, it’s the highest praise I know. I am not annoyed by them, but I know that often people are annoyed by me. I don’t plan to change.

I love it.  I would like to think that I’m a NBB. I have a lot to say, I’m opinionated, well-read, not afraid to call bullshit on something, and probably annoy the hell out of some people.  But I love writing, I love the craft, the art, the audience, the readers, and the ability I have to express myself through the written word.

Go read his piece.  That’s my one recommendation for the day.

From my latest Seattle 2.0 blog post, “Startup Decision-Making Done Right”:

If you’re a startup founder, you should be good at making decisions.  If you aren’t, you’re going to have a rough time of it – because the better part of your first year or three will be spent making them.  You’re the boss, you’re on your own, and you have nobody to fall back on.

Check it out.  Leave a comment!

Sometimes when I sit at a coffee shop, writing pages for The Next Great American Novel, I stop.  I think.  It’s not writer’s block – I have logorrhea and could write all day, if prompted, or if promised an audience – I’m just musing about my prose.  Prose quality, to be exact.  Am I good writer,I ask myself.  The page is mute in response to my question.  I don’t know.  I’d like to *think* I write well, but sometimes I find that blogging habits – such as my tendency to hyphenate every side thought (cough) – pass through into my “real” writing.  Also: my tendency to overuse air-quotes.  My tendency to avoid pronouns.  My tendency to jump from one thought to another, cat-like, without giving any one thought its full share of attention.

Journaling is tough too, because when I write in my journal it’s all just stream-of-consciousness writing, fast, loose, no rules, no editing.  I wonder if between the two (blogging and journaling) that I’m not spending enough time honing my capability to create amazing prose passages.  There’s a certain set of effects that I’m searching for when I write, a certain sibilance, one that is original – truly me – and one that is allusive, witty, informed, active, and which reads as if casually unrehearsed. 

Sound is important too – when I read passages in my head, I want them to sound right.  This is difficult, because you have to take into account the need for BOTH consistency and variety.  Too consistent, and your prose sounds boring.  Too much variety, and your prose sounds jarring.  You have to weave together Faye Dunaway’s breathy innocence with Marlene Dietrich’s insistent demands with Mae West’s purring invitations, and get them all to work seamlessly together.  It’s hard, harder than I would think, but of course EVERYTHING is harder than I would think, what with me being the eternal optimist.  I think if I was a pessimist, I wouldn’t write at all.  But I think you, the Generic Reader, care to read what I write.  What hubris!  *cough*

The secret to great writing?  There is no secret.  Hard work, patience, learning the ability to critically analyze one’s own work, being willing to seek out and accept feedback gracefully, having the ability to Ctrl+X passages that are not working.

I’ll stop doing this soon, I promise, but I’m still a little giddy when I see my name and photo on the front page of the Seattle 2.0 website:

You can read the whole blog post here.  Leave a comment!

Here it is:

Posted this morning at 6:31 AM PT.  I’m very excited, nervous, and thrilled to be part of the Seattle 2.0 blog staff, and I really hope that my first post is well received.

Head on over to Seattle 2.0 to read the full post, and if you’re so inclined, leave a comment to tell me either (a) you love it, (b) you hate it, or (c) meh.

Look for me every week from here on out!

Believe it or not, I’m now a member of the Seattle 2.0 blog staff.  I’m flattered and honored and hope to be able to contribute timely, engaging, and thought-provoking content on a weekly basis.  At the very least I’ll shoot for “timely” and hope that I’ll luck out on the other two criteria.

On The Pursuit of a Life, I’ve been writing a lot of personal posts in the last few months.  On Seattle 2.0 I’ll shift back to an industry focus, writing about startups, tech, entrepreneurship, and ponies.  Well, maybe not ponies, but I’ll be searching for ways to throw in pony references from time to time.  I want to continue writing in the same “voice” – analytical and witty, allusive and blunt.  In other words, I don’t want to go all soft and corporate on you.

One thing that will be very important for me is to inspire/provoke readers to follow on to my posts with their own comments .  I’ll be active in monitoring and responding to follow-on comments.  There are a lot of smart people out there who will have something to add, and I want to encourage your participation.

I believe my first post is scheduled for Monday, so I had better get writing!  See you there (and here), and please let me know how I’m doing from time to time.

In no particular order…

This morning I did eight reps on the Blaine Street staircase, or 8×293=2344 stairs.  It’s (again) a personal record for me by one rep.  I was nervous in the last 24 hours wondering if I could do it – both physical and mental stress have been fluctuating according to some random differential equation lately.  However, when push came to shove, I shoved, and, if you held a gun to my head, I could have gotten one more rep.  Maybe two.  Always leave them guessing and wanting more, right?

Today was Day 68 of my streak.  Tomorrow is Day 69 so I’ll have to think very creatively about what type of exercise I engage in tomorrow   Ha ha!  That’s more funny to me than it probably is to you, knowing what I know about my life.

Yesterday I had a wonderful time catching up with a good college friend who I had not seen, or talked to, in literally about 15 years.  He’s a great guy and I’m really glad he looked me up (on Biznik, of all places).  I’m looking forward to re-establishing a friendship with him.  He’s working on some really interesting alternative-energy projects.

Lately the side-project work has been a steady, if small, trickle: I got asked just yesterday for some information on what it would take to do some features for a web-based system that I had previously worked on.  I like the continual votes of confidence that getting asked to do additional work implies.  I take great pride in my work, my work ethic, and my sense of professionalism.  I think customers, managers, and coworkers all appreciate that about me.

We had a sort of oddball iteration at my day job this week – in addition to having to absorb a pretty significant hotfix, we also found out (on the last day!) that the work we’d done on a fairly thorny application wasn’t what the customer actually wanted after all.  I got my panties in a bunch for a few minutes, being the hotheaded Scorpio that I am, but just as quickly cooled down.  This stuff happens; live and learn and try to get everybody on the same page a bit more thoroughly next time.  The net result is that we’re going to release only a part of our work, and defer a decision on the rest of it for later.  More complicated?  Sure.  No biggie.  Work is not what’s complicated for me right now.

I’m going to try to do less personal-exposé blogging in the near future.  Now, I make no claim to consistency, only of good intentions, so if you’re reading this page next week and I’m going off about some private matter, forgive me in advance.  But I think it’s for the best, all things considered.  If there are any significant changes in my personal life (and there may well be), I may write about them, but I’m not going to do a Jim Lampley, NBC Sports-style focus piece every time I get my knee scraped, and I’m DEFINITELY going to try to keep personal issues in long-term perspective.  So – if you’re a friend, and you want details, e-mail me.

Closing with this thought: Sometimes you can only cross an ocean with a single leap.  Call this the quantum theory of personal lives.

If there’s one common piece of advice that I run across in the blogosphere regarding how to manage one’s blog for maximum impact and SEO benefit, it’s this: keep your blog focused on one topic or topic area.

Darren Rowse, the “Problogger”, describes it like so:

Suite 101: What are two things that boosted you in the transition from "recreational blogger" to the position you have today within the industry?

Darren Rowse: Focusing upon a Niche – my first blog was very general, I talked about everything from spirituality, to culture, to politics, to hobbies etc. I found that the more topics I covered the more pushback I got from readers who didn’t share my eclectic mix of interests.

That’s just great – if you care about such things.  I don’t.  I want you, dear reader, to be able to take a peek into my brain each time you pull up The Pursuit Of A Life.  Each post is a little bit of me, repackaged, grammar checked, spit out on the page for you to read.  It’s context-sensitive (what am I thinking about right now?), time-dependent, inconsistent, contradictory, unfocused, vague, self-referential, perhaps eccentric at times, filled with insider jokes and references, but it’s all truth as it exists at that moment inside my head.

I used to blog quite a bit about technical/programming subjects, and I still get most of my organic SEO traffic from those posts: how do I fix this problem?  How do I write this piece of code?  But lately – say, the last four to five months or so – my blog has switched gears quite a bit and I’ve been posting items of a much more personal nature.  It fits with my mood, my life, and my circumstances.  I want to tell you about myself.  I want to share with my readers those personal stories that are important to me right now.  I want you to understand how I feel and why I feel the way I do, to the extent that I’m capable of transparency.  I can’t share everything – but I want to share what I can.

It may be that I get back to a more “pure” focus on tech/software/entrepreneurship, but for now, I’m happy with my recent output – it feels right to me to post a subjective running commentary.  And, to the extent that I get feedback at all, there are enough of you out there that are OK with the format and focus I’ve had lately to keep me feeling like I’m writing for more than an audience of one.

Having said that, I always like MORE feedback, so send me an e-mail or leave a comment below if you have anything to share on the topic!

I haven’t been writing a lot lately. Part of it has to do with the fact that I haven’t felt that stimulated and don’t want to turn you off by drenching you with insipid musings. Add to that the fact that the topic(s) that I really would want to write about are more or less off-limits for a public-facing blog, and you have a recipe for few posts.

To that second point, I suppose that authors everywhere, when confronted with a touchy subject, would sharpen pencils and come up with a roman-a-clef in which your hero Anthony Stevens is transparently recast as Andrew Strosser, Darcy Devereaux becomes Denise Derbyshire, Charles Cross becomes Chase Clover, and so on. It would be a lurid, storm-tossed tale of high drama and low dudgeon, win me a spot on the bestseller lists, and fuel recrimination and counter-recrimination among the literati for the next ten years. Actually, that sounds sort of fun. Should I attempt it? I remember reading recently something to the effect that fiction has to be truer than real life, because it has to be believable. Sometimes real life is so unbelievable, it nears insanity. Or at least inanity.

So here’s the plan: I’ll browse around for a compelling short-story contest. Your hero, as well as you, dear reader, will provide grist for the mill, and I’ll come out a couple weeks later with a winner, a piece about life, death, love, hate, hope, and despair, so deftly written that it merits notice by editors at the New Yorker.

Stay tuned!