So, Where Have I Been?

A valid question.

Well, since I last blogged, I…


Won a fishing tournament…


Built a jig and learned to make my own furled leaders…


Bought a nice fishing flasher and became as obsessed with ice fishing as I am with fly fishing…


And broke a fly rod…

That will get its own post later on.

I spent all this time doing things that I enjoy doing, but not sharing them. And I discovered that I really missed that aspect of my blog. I am starting to think that a lot of people read my blog not for the fishing, but to hear my words. That is the message that I took away from my grandmother. Writing a blog to a single purpose, can be mind numbingly restrictive; and I think that helped to burn me out on blogging too.

Flies Over will still be fishing heavy. I spend way to much time fishing and thinking about fishing for it not to be. But I think I will start to expand the topics out a bit more. I envision this next era of Flies Over Nebraska to be a blog written by a fly fishing writer stuck in the body of a higher education professional. Topics from any part of my life will be fair game.

You’ve been warned.

And I am going to India for work in a few weeks. So there’s that…

I am sure I am going to need an outlet for my creativity while I am there.

So welcome to the, what I think is the fourth, dedication of Flies Over.

Slightly less fish, more glimpses of a fisherman’s mind.

(You ought to love that, dd@dog.com)

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Oh, WordPress! How I Love To Loth Thee…

In my last post, I declared that my blog was going to rise out the slumber of neglect. I even drew upon the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes to obtain new life…

And then I pressed publish.

Thank you for reminding me, WordPress, why my motivation faltered in the first place. I have already disable comments from non-registered users, since they were only spammers or (what they believed) anonymous goats. I had already abandoned looking at the stats page having realized that it is artificially drummed up. I had even come to an uneasy accepted of the random ads that I have no control over appearing at the bottom of my posts.

But as soon as I pushed publish, the spam followers started again…

I finally had to turn off all email communication from WordPress because every spam follower made me feel like my words, my posts, did not matter. As if I had created a platform on which I felt I had finally found a small audience to communicate too, even if it was mostly family and friends, only to discover that I had created yet another vehicle for society to commercialize, advertise, spam, and otherwise crush my soul. All of the parts of WordPress that I used to adore now stabbed at me and drove me away…

Within seconds of hitting publish, all of those spammey stabs came back.

That is, until my Grandma asked if there was something wrong with my blog…

She was afraid she was missing posts, that she was doing something wrong and could not access what I had to say. It was then that I realized through all the noise, clutter, and crap that WordPress makes me go through that there really are a few real people at the other side of the screen. And that I should ignore all that clutter and just write.

So, perhaps I should thank you WordPress, for reminding me of a very important lesson learned way back in creative writing courses in college. That a writer writes because that’s what they do. They write for the joy of it, because they have something to say. And it doesn’t matter if anyone listens… so I might as well turn all this crap off.

So off go the notifications, the emails, the followers, and the checking the stats page that was never quite accurate anyways. To hell with tagging and categorizing posts. Maybe I can find the will to write again if I stop caring about whether people read my writing. At least I know someone is…

Thank you, Granny!

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