Writers Ought to Write, Right?
Beg your forgiveness, I'm going to try this again.
Oh, hey.
The year is 2024, and it’s been 12 years since I was a columnist for the Bismarck Tribune. (I don’t know if that link will work since tech ain’t my forte, but if it doesn’t, just go to the Trib’s website and search for “Kelly Hagen,” cuz that’s me.)
A lot’s changed in the anyone-but-a-baker’s dozen years since then, to say the least.
I’ve written columns for other publications since then, most paid, some not, most enjoyable experiences, a few not so much. At some point in time, I should put my columns together on a website, something like, oh, let’s just say, www.ndchatter.com. But gimme a break. I’ve got a wife and a couple of kids, a full-time job, a dog and a cat, and I’ve also been trying to learn to play the guitar the last four decades of my life, so free time ain’t exactly a thing I know anything about.
But until that “some day …” becomes a today, I’m going to take another run at this SubStack thing.
I wish to start this restart by reminiscing quickly-ish on a couple of memories from my days as a columnist for my “hometown newspaper.” (Technically, that would be The Leader News, but for whatever reason, I’ve never been asked to write a column for them. Totally open to doing so, if anybody’s got a connection.)
If you remember reading my column back in the Before Times (2006-2011), it was kind of an odd thing. Truthfully, there really wasn’t a theme to it, which is kind of an important thing for a newspaper column. The Trip had long featured columnists of repute who wrote on serious subjects, like politics, local happenings, business, faith, cowboy stuff and Thomas Jefferson cosplayers. But I was just this random copy editor who asked his editor one day if he could write a column for the Entertainment section cover on Fridays to fill in a random hole that was being created by a four-column horizontal ad that ran at the bottom of a five-column template. (I forgive you if that doesn’t make any sense to you what I just wrote. It barely makes sense to me, and I lived it.)
I wrote about “entertainment,” which sometimes meant I was writing about music, movies, TV, arts and culture. And other times, I just wrote about my own life in a way that was meant to be entertaining. This was never made clear. I didn’t ever write out a mission statement or anything. I just started writing the thing, and it occasionally caused confusion.
In those days long ago, social media was still kinda weird (Facebook wasn’t yet ruining society, X was the Twitter bird, LiveJournal and MySpace were still things) and not a lot of people were just writing random essays about what they had for dinner on Tuesday or what their favorite DVD sets of television shows they’d been watching over the last week with their basset hound they’d accidentally named a slang term for injecting drugs through the anus. (I’m so sorry; in my defense, he was a rescue and I asked him what his name was, and Boof is exactly what he told me it was.)
So, yeah. It was a column about nothing. And one time, a commenter took me and my employer to task for printing some rando’s diary in their newspaper.
Ouch, by the way.
Since seeing that comment, I felt a lot of shame when I wasn’t writing newsworthy content for a newspaper. I was journaling, which is kind of what I thought journalists did, but yeah, I felt bad about it. And maybe that played a part in not fighting too hard when the Trib caught up to the fact I was an imposter and asked me to stop writing my column for them.
Joke’s on everybody but me now, though! Suddenly there’s this deal called SubStack where I can potentially write a bunch of these columns (journals, blogs, diaries, letters to myself, NDistinct Chatterings, whatever you want to call this thing I’m doing) and potentially make a tiny profit off it if put down the guitar and ignore my family more than I should, and write regularly and goodly enough to create a subscription model that people are willing to pay small amounts to watch me go crazy in real time!
So, that’s what is happening. I’m going to resist the urge to go back and edit this thing into coherence, and just send it out to my list of 50-some subscribers. If you like it, please share. The more subscribers I get, the more dopamine my brain receives and the more likely I’ll try doing this again in a day or two. I could talk about real things like my current favorite professional wrestlers’ entrance themes or how my hip always hurts lately, should I see a doctor or just obsess about it inside my head every night when I should be going to sleep.