Often It's the Little Things in Life that Make Me Smile

Me mugging with the Chrysler 200 at its media intro in Louisville, Ky.

I'm not the kind of guy who takes much for granted. When you eek out an existence as a freelance journalist, you gain a real respect for whatever opportunities arise. Over the years there have been a few unexpected lucrative clients that have reached out to me from left field based on referrals – maybe half a dozen over the course of more than 25 years – but the majority of my work comes from ideas and proposals I submit to active clients. It's a day-in-day-out, week-in-week-out grind of thinking up story ideas and proposing them. It is a stressful, and often unrewarding, process that saps my energy, dampens my attitude and deflates my self esteem. But hey, I get weekends off.

Clanging Bell and my Greenville-centric GreenvilleInsider.com Website are two writing efforts that are more hobby than anything else. That's the reason I've gone from 25 posts per month to 3 or 4 on Clanging Bell. I began this blog three or four years ago during a particularly slow and scary time in my freelance career. Paying work had all but dried up. Writing is like any developed skill: You must use it every day to maintain it. Clanging Bell was my primary writing outlet for several months.

To a lesser extent, GreenvilleInsider provides the same sort of tool to try to keep me fresh in my craft. Love of my new “hometown” is another reason I post as much as I do on it. GI does give me media access to some local events, as well as being a platform for (I hope) some future monetization, but I maintain the site primarily as an outlet for travel writing, which I don't have much opportunity for lately.

As something I do primarily for myself, I am always thrilled when I discover more readers for a particular Clanging Bell post than I can account for by totaling up the number of my family and friends. I am also amazed when a blog post from years ago suddenly produces a comment. Sometimes years after I've written a CB post, I'll receive an alert via e-mail that someone commented on it. First of all, I am stunned someone who doesn't know me actually took the time to read the silly thing. Secondly, how in the heck did this person stumble across a two- or three-year-old CB blog post?

Checking my e-mails this morning, I discovered an alert that someone commented on a post I wrote almost two years ago to the day. Granted, it was a story about the Chrysler 200 media event in Louisville, and the person commenting apparently works for a Chrysler dealership somewhere; but I was still astonished.

It's such small victories, as well as positive feedback I receive from relatively regular followers, that keeps me cranking out three or four CB posts each month, even when I have paying assignments and other pressing issues vying for my time.

Responding to this comment made me smile this morning. And, who doesn't welcome a smile on a Thursday morning?