blogging101

Blogging 101 Project: Hello

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I started “The Gad About Town” last fall to reintroduce myself to the writing world after a long break from writing and publishing. I quickly discovered two things: One, that I still enjoy writing/publishing/designing a website, and two, that while I may very well have a book or two in me, I do not have 750-1000 words worth of ideas per day, every day. So for the last couple of months I have been writing responses to the WordPress Daily Post/Prompt, which has brought me a lot of feedback, some new online friendships, and many positive responses. The “Blogging 101” project is a good next step.

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My name is Mark Aldrich. I am a one-time winner of the New York Press Association’s Best Humor Columnist award in its annual “Better Newspaper” contest. This blog, “The Gad About Town,” is about many topics, from social habits to baseball to art and movies. If I think something is worth commenting on, I do. I am a gad about town. When my column won its award in 1997, I contacted a syndicate and was told that there is no market for random thoughts from random people. I set out to prove that agent wrong and launched a blog in 1998 to the great acclaim of no one. He was right, for that era, but now we have the vast world of social media and self-publishing and partnership publishing.

I currently live in Goshen, NY. Up until May 2014, I mostly lived in New Paltz, NY, which I first moved to in 1990, left in 1996, returned to in 1997, left in 2000, and returned to in 2006 have always loved. Since 1990, I have lived in 17 places (I think) across three states, showing the same kind of stick-to-it-iveness that ought to include about a dozen jobs in the same time period. That would match my curious resume.

I have had many writing and copy editing jobs, including editing websites and creating instruction manuals. In the early 1990s, I became a writer and performer with a radio comedy group, the Magnificent Glass Pelican, which continues to produce and perform improvisational comedy.

I am no longer looking for a job, as I was diagnosed with a form of spinocerebellar ataxia in 2012, which was revised to spinal muscular atrophy in 2014. I am disabled and spend some of my time and column space talking and writing about rare disease awareness issues. It is not a great income, but I survive and I am planning on publishing for a living. Instead of a 9-to-5 job, I have a career, full-time, as a writer. This website/blog is a start towards that.

You can find me at these fine social media gathering places: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, About.me, Contently. I am even on Tumblr, and I do not know what that even is.

About the Name

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

From 1995 till 1997, I wrote a humor column, “The Gad About Town,” for The River Reporter, a great weekly newspaper in Sullivan County, New York. (I still read it online.) It held the distinction of being the only column in the newspaper that did not generate even one letter from readers. Another editorial columnist, a genial elderly man, wrote the most innocuous weekly pieces and received the most vituperative letters disagreeing with everything he wrote. I admired that this only amused him.

I did create one controversy: once, our music columnist used his own space one week to disagree with me and take me to task about something I had written. Since he could have written a letter to the editor complaining about me and also submitted his usual column, but chose to sacrifice his space to rebut me, I became skeptical about his music suggestions.

The “Gad About Town” column held one other distinction: It won an award, the only award for which I have ever even been nominated. To this day I toss out the phrase “award-winning writer” every chance I get. (Not true.)

On deciding to create the blog that you hold in your virtual hands–and thank you for visiting and reading it–I also decided to name it after that old column, as no one has taken up the name at either my former employer or anywhere else. Or so I thought. A little research revealed that someone now owns the domain name “gadabouttown . com,” and as per the name, its owner writes a fine journal about the many things that interest him today there. (That is of course what a gad about town is and does: a gadabout shares observations, sometimes talking, sometimes writing, sometimes even listening.) This is the reason my blog is entitled, “The Gad About Town,” emphasis on “The,” and poses no competition to that writer’s work.

One of the new “Gad’s” earliest entries concerns his selection of the name “Gad About Town.” My first column in 1995, I recall, was itself about choosing the name “Gad About Town,” which I selected from a long list of none because my first deadline was approaching and something was needed above my 800 words written about not having a name for the column that was about to be published. (I even offered a clip-out and mail-back-in name-this-column contest, which earned zero entries and thus solidified my not-first non-choice of “Gad.” I have just now decided to remember that in my second column I declared that everyone who didn’t enter was a winning non-winner.) (I had no prizes to offer, anyway.) (Is this microphone on?)

Thus, my “Gad” column provided me with a great opportunity to learn to write with little feedback. Up until then, everything I wrote was for a professor’s eyes or an audience’s ears. (Later, when given the task of writing the story of my life, a friend understood why I was having difficulty: “You only wrote when someone was handing you a twenty-dollar bill.”)

“To learn to write with little feedback.” That sounds like a witticism, but really it was valuable to learn to not assume an audience or to write everything as if it is a letter to a loved one. What will follow in the future here is more of that letter.