Deep Thoughts with Joshua....

I love it when my email folders are full of hate mail. I love when people take the time to repost links to my work and then call me terrible names. I love it when people call me blogger, say I am not a true member of the assembled sports media. I love it when people have no freaking idea how many times they are helping me when. I am a member of the media cause my press pass says so and every month when I pay the bills, earned off the back of all that hate I win. Every time you read one my articles I win, when you repost to facebook I win, and when you talk about it I win twice.

I don't care what people call me cause labels are not of interest to me. This is isn't the dark ages where a title gives me lands and rights. I am good at what I do and proof of that is how long I have been doing it, and the way I can easily piss of sports fans from coast to coast.

Call me blogger cause I happen to write online but fail to know I am also a published poet, I have a book deal, and I pay my bills and care for my family with the money I make yes from blogging.

Bring it on doubters, haters, underestimate the level of access I have. Underestimate my abilities to produce content people want to read, hate me for saying bad things about your favorite sports teams. It all pays the bills.

Deep Thoughts with Joshua...

Since  I started I have always had the plan in my head. How I would go about building my career as a writer. and for the most part I have stuck to that. Granted there have been a few pitfalls along the way but that happens in every career.

I started writing as a hobby. I covered sports for a friend's website and then we started booking shows and we created a Local music thing. Writing show reviews and working with the bands was a lot of fun and I started thinking I would love to be a writer man do this for a living.

Of course at some point real life got in the way. I got married and had a kid so I had to have a real job ya know with a salary and benefits. Then fate intervened. After being a stay at home mom for almost two years my then wife decided she wanted to go back to work. So I became a stay at home dad, and with the proliferation of the internet I started writing again and then actually started getting jobs and people were paying me money to do the thing I loved and it was just awesome.

I wrote for a website for two years and never got a dime. I think the only compensation I ever got out of that gig was a few baseball hats. My now ex wife was so pissed at me for doing that, for covering NASCAR for that tie for free for that long, but in a very real sense every dime I have made writing since then is a direct result from first learning the craft of writing there and building my audience. I have fans and readers that still read my work that started on that started reading me on that site some six years ago now. they have followed me around the net and have made my writing gigs that much more enjoyable and profitable.

The point here is I knew what I was doing and I built up my audience and kept the long goal in mind. At every point since that that initial investment has more than paid off.

Deep Thoughts with Joshua...

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is write...Some days I wake up and my mind is totally blank and some days it is filled with so many competing thoughts getting something on the page is next to impossible. Writing for therapy and for a living is something of a double edged sword..I am more willing to share intimate things about my life with complete strangers than most people but at the end of the day I have to make money doing this. It is how I care for my family.

What that means is I am constantly looking for motivation to write. I write anywhere from 5-10 stories, blog posts, journal entries, or posting poems a day. I write about everything from sports to my love life to my family life to just about any other kind of non sense that happens to pop into my head. Some of it is great, some of it is good, but most of it is crap...nature of the beast.

To be a success at this all I have to do is sit at my computer and bleed each and every day. Most of what comes out is dribble but every once and again something great escapes my fingertips. As a writer I am constantly chasing those moments...like a addict chases the next high...Writing is an addiction for me.