Happy New YearTo all my readers
In spite of the couple of feet of snow that’s piled on the ground here in central Nebraska, accompanied by frigid temperatures that don’t seem to want to budge, January 1st always offers a shred of hope (and plenty of bowl games).
Good or bad, the old year is behind us. The curses that may have seemed to stalk us through last year dissipate on New Year’s Day and there’s a fresh breath in the air. And at nine degrees, that’s pretty fresh.
One of the hallmarks of celebrating New Year’s is to make one of those infernal resolutions. Well, this year my resolution is to not make a resolution. Crap, there goes my resolution.
Well, resolutions are like promises and they’re made to be broken. Actually, they’re made with the intention of being broken.
Resolutions are too demanding, of the cut-and-dried, black-and-white variety. There’s an instant rigidity and if they’re not achieved on the first day of the year, then they’re a lost cause:
“I’m going to stop smoking…I’m going to lose weight…I’m going to be nice to my neighbor…I’m going to stop swearing, goddamnit!”
You get the picture.
But I do set goals, which are far different. Goals are loftier, ambitious, more personal and you work toward them, setting the bar as you go. You begin on January 1st and follow through on the 2nd, 3rd, and so forth, not just until December 31st, but forever.
Nothing is set in stone. They’re not New Year resolutions, they’re lifetime goals that merely begin on New Year’s Day.
One of my goals that I can share with you concerns this Website. For those of you who check back occasionally, you’ve noticed that not a lot has changed over the past year or so. I’ve written very little here at Wendel’s World.
My Website was born five years ago this week. A couple of my friends developed it for me so I’d have a place to write after my newspaper column was axed.
For nearly 10 years I wrote a weekly humor column for the Grand Island Independent, a central Nebraska daily with a moderate readership. After winning a comedy writing award in 1995, Bill Brennan, then the editor of the Independent, hired me to write the column. To him I’ll always be grateful.
My humorous essays hit the printed page every Wednesday for a few years. Then I was moved to a prime spot in the Sunday edition.
A new publisher (or is that sheriff?) came to town late in 2003. He pulled the plug on my column in early January of 2005, telling me that my kind of humor “has no place in a conservative, family newspaper”.
The rest of that story would add up to three or four columns and there’s no point in going into that now. Suffice to say, I was out in the cold in spite of the support thrown my way by hundreds of loyal readers.
I’ve been a freelance comedy writer for over 30 years. When the weekly column went south, I attempted to return to my joke-writing roots.
There’s a huge difference between writing humorous essays for the printed page and writing jokes that are meant to be told on a stage. Hey, that last sentence rhymed. I guess I’m a poet, too.
So, I’ve spent a lot of time writing jokes for various comedians (not necessarily selling them, but writing them anyway). I’ve developed a blog that features daily monologue-style jokes. And I took the ultimate plunge--I joined Facebook!
Actually, Facebook has been fun. While I joined specifically as a marketing venture, I’ve re-established friendships.
But as I’ve worked harder on my jokes, I’ve lost touch with the kind of essays that have appeared on this site. It’s time now to return to the column format.
More than that, however, I plan to write here in a more serious vein.
My goal is to write more nostalgic pieces, opinion essays, and perhaps even a fictional short story. Who knows what will show up, but hopefully something new and original will arrive on this site each week.
So I invite you to return to Wendel’s World now and then to see if I’ve achieved my New Year’s goal.
This is a start. Thanks for stopping by and reading what I write.
Read my article on comedy writing:
http://aclnk.com/ar2369640
Please visit:
My Good Wife's World:
http://goodwife95.webs.com/
The Jokes are at:
http://wendelpotter.blogspot.com
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