Today, after reading a post on Duck Sports Authority, it occurred to me that I have entirely neglected my personal blog for quite some time. In fact, my last post here coincided with a trip to Hawaii last October.Upon my return from tropical paradise, the season took hold in full and I found myself quite busy writing four and five articles every week. When those articles extended in December with the creation of the "Flock Talk" series which gave me the opportunity to express more opinion in my writing, I felt the need for the individual blog begin to dissipate.
Today, poster BigMattyO on DSA posted a link to Dale Newton's article about strength coach Jim Radcliffe... and that reminded me of an article I had written two years ago. After reviewing my previous article it struck me that my voice had changed. Not the physical voice, but the voice I had expressed myself with over the past two years.
Anything I do, I take seriously and try to maintain some level of pride. Whether that be in the weight room, in my own personal betterment through reading challenging material like The Character of Consciousness (Chalmers, 2011) or writing for Duck Sports Authority, I strive for excellence. Do I always achieve a level of excellence I am satisfied with? No. That's what drives me, always looking to improve.
Nonetheless, I take the process by which I write very seriously. I am not always the most flexible person when it comes to my writing and that has caused some consternation.
About a year ago, I was asked to write a couple of pieces for another site, which, as long as it was not a conflict with my writing for DSA, I was completely comfortable with conceptually. In practice, however, there were some things about the process which were not appealing. For the most part, even for DSA, I have nearly full editorial control of my content. To me that is an important part of my process. If the voice I speak with, the views I share or the manner in which I choose to convey a message do not appeal to the editors or publisher, I don't like to be hacked up; I prefer that the piece just not be published.
I would actually be more okay with that than having someone take a hatchet to the piece in a way that changes what I was attempting to convey. In the long run, it led to an exchange that severed a positive relationship which is too bad, because I respect the person tremendously for his passion and commitment to what he does.
There are a lot of great Duck bloggers out there and I do not pretend to be better than any of them. My hope is not to replace the bloggers, but add my own unique style back to the mix.
One of the things that has happened as a result of my work with DSA is that my "fan" voice has begun to disappear. Make no mistake, I started writing as a fan and still consider myself a Duck fan. Nonetheless, the work I do for DSA requires a voice and point of view that has made me lose that alternate voice.
I want to gain that back.
From this point forward, I will use my personal blog as a means with which to express more opinions and other topics of interest. I will, of course, have my unique voice and much of what I talk about will be related to the topics at hand on DSA as well as different pieces which I cannot produce for DSA. Duck Sports Authority is, at its core, a recruiting website. As such, much of the content centers around recruiting and some football analysis.
One of the topics we thought was good was crossing over into "traditional" media territory with human interest stories. That did not really fit the meat, though, of what Rivals wanted from us, so we agreed to move in a different direction.
Here at The Other Side of Duck, however, all is fair. There is no corporate "guy" telling me what to write. This is my site with my thoughts. There will be a benefit, though, from my work on DSA and there will be a crossover.
So, I am back to The Other Side of Duck.
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