Ah, Life...

Recently, life was transformed. My dear wife was prescribed full bed rest by her OB/GYN for some complications in the pregnancy. WITH bed rest, everything should be fine. WITHOUT it... we don't want to think about the result.

The problem is that right now my time is taken up by work during the day and housework in the evening, the stuff that normally Janet would take care of (as a stay at home Mom), and it's not leaving me with much energy to write. And worse, on those moments when I do feel like I have both time and energy to write, sometimes it's hard to feel funny.

I'm going to try to keep it up, because the writing (and the humor) is therapeutic for me. On the other hand, I've already given up several activities I enjoy (such as singing with the Barbershop Chorus) because I can't justify the time or energy away from my family at this point. I think this blog will be less affected than the rant blog, because the frequency of posts is so much lower. On the other hand, that one doesn't require me to be funny, so who knows. We'll see what happens.

Oh, and if you're a praying person, please add Janet and baby Liam to your prayers.

Thanks,

Liam.

Delay...

Anyone who's used to my posting the Friday essay on Friday morning, remember that the plan was "sometime Friday". It needs to be polished, and real life has intruded upon my free time.

It'll be up later today or perhaps late tonight.

Liam.

Still worth it?

[UPDATE: Apparently I have a lot more regular readers than I was aware of. As a result, rather than scrapping the Humor Blog, I've decided to try to up the ante, by joining several humor blog webrings (if they'll have me). So at this point, my plan is to keep at this until they haul me away, babbling like some sort of deranged freak, to the New Hampshire State Home for Bewildered Humorists. Thanks, everyone! -- Liam]

I'm considering giving up on writing the humor blog.

I can't figure out how to increase my traffic or become popular. I've been at this for 6 months now, and I have maybe five regular readers, and then a whole lot of people who stop by once because they see me listed on BlogExplosion or BlogClicker, drop a quick comment, and leave.

I had really hoped for this blog to become popular. I never had illusions that I could *BE* Dave Barry, but in his hiatus, I thought perhaps I could be a poor man's version. Perhaps an insufficient filling for a huge cavity left by his absence, but a filling that was better than the aching hole. But in truth, I'm getting a lot more response on the political blog, and I never really meant to become a political pundit.

So, I guess my question is this: Can anyone think something I'm not doing that could drive a lot more traffic here, maybe build up my regular, week-on-week readership?

It's not that I don't enjoy WRITING the humor columns, it's just a matter that sometimes it's starting to feel like pressure to write something funny every week, when there is a lot of other pressure in my life right now. (Not looking for sympathy, in the world as it is today, we can all say that). When something strikes me as funny, I'd probably still write an essay about it, even if I no longer had the weekly essay, but somehow it's feeling like a lot of effort for not a whole lot of readers.

This is starting to sound whiny and self centered, and I don't mean it as such, I'm really just looking for someone to either give me some advice on how to get my columns more widely read, or else for someone to honestly tell me that I'm just not that funny, and perhaps a humor column isn't the outlet for me.

Thanks for any input,

Liam.

As fellow blogger Tony so eloquently posted:



Nothing more needs to be said.