Author: Matt

This post is either 14 or eight years in the making, depending on how you want to look at it.

I’ve been a writer for most of my life, but I was a blogger for only about two years. In those days, from 2007 to 2009, I had a football (read: soccer) blog at westendfoodball.blogspot.com. It’s still there, and I’ve gone back to look at some of the takes I had at the time, which look either much better or much worse than I remember, depending on which way the light strikes them. I was in journalism school at the time and despite the advice I was given in the program I thought blogging was a good idea. (A place to write! My own place! Oh the freedom!) Then I graduated, got a full-time job as a copy editor on the night desk at the local daily, my first child was born, life go generally hectic and all the blogging fell by the wayside.

Yet I was still writing, sometimes at whichever newspaper I was working for, and always for myself on my own time. There’s always been a place to park my thoughts on this or that, or just a way to work things out of my head and into some sort of record. Then after working at newspapers for nearly eight years and adding two more children to the family, my wife and I decided to move across the country and I dabbled in the idea of trying a new career. That new path has been a big chunk of my life for the past seven years, and I’ve really missed not working with words.

It’s not that I haven’t written, I simply haven’t put anything out into the world since 2015. I’ve made a lot of positive changes to my life so far in 2023, and something I want to add to that list is to publish regular blog. Yet it’s not going to be about football (although I can’t promise it won’t be mentioned), it will be about things I’m interested in and care about in the wider world. It will be about how technology is changing our world and how human beings are adapting. It will be about powerful political and economic forces are shaping our futures. It will be about the craft of writing. It might include my thoughts on keyboard shortcuts (or it might not, TBF).

At some point, all of this may coalesce around some specific things, but for now the scope will be wide. There are a few guidelines I’ll be trying to follow, as they have always seemed to me like pretty good advice all these years later.

Time to get started.