A Day of Writing

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So my quest to become a writer has begun. A full week has not yet passed, and yet in that time I feel as though I have taken the first few baby steps towards the potential of a dream.

As I wrote earlier, I signed up for Associated Content. What happens when you first agree to be a "content publisher" for AC is that you write a few articles, submit them, and wait. Someone behind the screens reads your articles, presumably, and either accepts or rejects your work. After you have had three articles confirmed (as in, you are not a robot), you can then publish content instantly. It took a couple of days, but my first two articles were published.

Now, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I'm not terribly keen on linking to them. I often find that I dislike the majority of what I write, thinking that I could have written it better, communicated more clearly, or picked a better way of saying it. However, I've read a number of the articles on AC, and I have no shame in admitting that I think I am terribly better than them. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of decent writers out there as well, and they are getting all the traffic. So I am going to link to my articles, not because I want your page views (and those miniscule fractions of a cent), or because I want you to share them with your friends (though I suppose it would be nice). I am going to link to them because I have to get used to other people reading what I write, no matter how bad it is.

Like this article - a review of The Police's album Synchronicity. When I first signed up for AC it had a section called "Calls for Content", where it basically suggests articles that you could write. One of them was a review of an album from the 1980s. So I popped open my iTunes, found the only album in there from the 80s, and wrote that joke of a review. Its not that I have terrible grammar, or that what I'm saying is completely pointless, it's just that I know I could have done so much better. I have done better before. In college I had a class called Rock Faith and Pop Culture, and our three major papers were album reviews, essentially.

In fact, they were so much better that I decided it might be worthwhile going through one of those old papers and seeing if I could publish that on AC as well. There's no law against publishing a paper I wrote for a bible college, now is there? So I quickly edited and published my review of Pink Floyd's The Wall. They are essentially the same thing, these two articles. Two reviews on albums that were released three years apart. Yet they're written completely differently.

I've submitted two more articles that need to pass the publisher before I can link to them as well. I've got one article about watching mixed martial arts, and I wrote a how-to about getting engaged. I think the nice thing about this "work" is that I enjoy it, and that it has such variety. In what other profession can I spend a lazy Saturday listening to old rock albums, watching men hurt each other, and dream about my fiance? I'm going to continue to post links to my articles here, as a form of encouragement to myself. Five days ago I was just another guy sitting in his sweat pants on his couch, but as of today, I'm published.