Saturday, November 27, 2010

Prefatory remarks

Welcome to my first blog. Rant / Rave / Reassure comes from the early days of the form, back when knowing about Andrew Sullivan was kind of cool and unusual, and the whole internet / blog / geek permaculture hadn't infiltrated every bit of working writers' lives.

A simpler time, you might say. George W. Bush was still president, things seemed to be going okay in our wars overseas and housing prices were heading straight up.

I had just started working in Florida, an rather improbable turn of events for a Kansas boy, but one made possible by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund. I interned at The St. Petersburg Times in the summer of '02, and that internship was extended through the end of the year. That's roughly when this blog began.

At the beginning of '03 I hopped across Tampa Bay to the Tampa Tribune, where I would work for the next two years. This blog wouldn't last that long -- it was too loose, too diverse and personal.

Y'see, I'd figured out something important about blogs. The more general they are, the more likely they are to be neglected and float off into a sea of bland haze. Meanwhile, I started another blog, focused on copy editing and journalism -- one that gained a small following. A link to it can be found off to the right.

Rant / Rave / Reassure occupies a special place, though. I experimented with the form, connected with other writers and friends, and assembled my first blogroll. Good times.

As reconstituted here, the blog is more or less what you would have found back in 2002-2004. A few bits have been edited out, a few bits have been edited in, and I wrote titles for early entries that were missing them. The site also features a far spiffier layout than available at the time, which pleases my sense of aesthetics, if nothing else.

So read, enjoy and wallow in the randomness.