The underlying substance of this author website/blog is the book that prompted it—Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. The title is its essence, the subtitle a hint at the details. You know where they say the devil is, don’t you? I would add the truth is there, too.
I’ll leave the details for the book, but I want to explain an adjustment I plan to make to the blog. For a number of reasons, it’s killing me. The blog must become less dependent on the timeliness football demands in season and broader in nature, not only to accommodate my interests—and perhaps yours—but also because to write in the manner I am accustomed requires research and thought. Blog posts are generally shorter than mine. But I wrote newspaper columns. This length fits my rhythm.
The change I am considering would require a new blog page title. That could be a challenge. A professional built my website in a convoluted relationship that ran through 1106 Design, a Phoenix firm that works with writers who want to or must publish independently. (That’s a euphemism for self-publishing, which has been considered the illegitimate stepchild of real publishing. A real publisher decides an author’s work is worth paying to publish or at least worth taking a chance on its appeal to readers and offers a royalty deal. If the book sells, the author receives a small amount of the proceeds. The smirch on self-publishing is that the author had to pay someone to publish it. I won’t bog you down in the details, but that is not the way 1106 Design works. Authors work with 1106 editors, designers, copy editors/proofreaders, and, yes, website designers, under the direction of a project manager, to produce a professional book. My new book is as professionally done as my previous five, four published by a university press and the first by a publisher of sports books.)
That parenthetical explanation is the long way of saying: I am able to put up these posts, with some stumbles, but other intricacies behind the website pages remain a mystery. I am continuing to try to solve them but until I do, I cannot change the title.
What I have in mind would not exclude football but would focus on reading and writing, the underpinning of my football and other sports writing. The problem is: How does one create a title that suits the material but is not as long as my book? There are other issues. My one known reader—a longtime friend whom I browbeat into taking a look at the website and blog—complained the type face of the post was too small. He says it should be larger and bolder (though not so bold that its readability is diminished). I tried different fonts and increased the type size from 12 to 14 points. When I copied and pasted from a Word document to the blog post form, it ignored the change and printed the font and size that, apparently, it is programmed to use. It is smarter than me.
These details might interest other writers and those wrestling with their own blogs and attempting to make needed adjustments. Other readers, if there are any are unlikely to care or be charmed by these bedazzling considerations. There is an alternative: Let the blog go dormant. I don’t enjoy this as I thought I might.
So that no one will feel shortchanged as I work through the decision, let me preview a post I hope to put up later this week. It would be inspired by the book title above and that obnoxiously and repetitively appears on several of the pages of this website.
I was born in a small town in Northeast Oklahoma, referred to as Green Country. That distinguishes it from red-dirt Oklahoma, which predominates. I lived there until the middle of my sophomore year in high school when I was 16. Leaving was traumatic. I went from a town of 4,000, give or take a chicken or two in the coop next door, to a suburb of a California metropolis that was the state capital. My Oklahoma high school (sophomores through seniors) had fewer than 300 students. My new high school, which had a Spanish name, had eight times that many. Talk about shock.
I loved my hometown, Nowata. The book addresses reasons why. It is difficult to separate whether it was because of the “fast friends” I had made or the “small-town” atmosphere in which we all felt secure—a nosy community of people who knew one another and felt a responsibility to care for one another. It was an amalgam of qualities I have never found again, perhaps because I got old and the memories seem shrouded in a rosy hue that does not always allow me to see critically this one place I call mine.
There are, I believe, similar places in the Akron area, but I do not live there. When I pass through, especially during football falls, they seem idyllic and leave me to wonder why we didn’t settle into a small town when we came to Northeast Ohio 40 years ago. I’ll share a simple answer but perhaps its complexity will be as obvious as life itself.
