First tentative steps...
I should feel like a dragon gradually awakened from his slumber ready to spread the news of his brand new website to the world with its firey breath. But I feel more like an awkward duck being suddenly scared into consciousness, clumsily staggering and quacking through the first tentative steps of an online presence.
I've got the website, which I've paid the annual fee for. I've got the Twitter account (@jondoolan1), I've got a new professional Facebook account (to distance it slightly from my personal account) and I've got Instagram (also jondoolan1 - I don't know who the other jondoolan is who keeps nicking my name!). I've climbed aboard this social media rollercoaster and hopefully I'll find a way of hanging on.
There are no seat belts. There are no instruction manuals. No one is going to tell me how to do this properly. In fact, there is no real proper way to live this online presence. All I know is that I'm ecstatic that I get to share all of the adventures and thoughts. I hope you enjoy them too.
Exposing myself
Not in that way, cheeky!
It's an interesting conversation on how much to expose oneself. My wife recently searched for me on Google and 2 pictures of my daughter that I had posted on Twitter many months before popped up. I instantly went back through all my old posts and deleted all the pictures of the sprog. Including the one that I had entered into a photography competition.
It's important that the little one doesn't grow up with this massive online presence hanging over her. She needs the chance to grow up on her own terms with her own wins and losses. She needs to make her own mistakes and have her own successes without 'Daddy's Stupid Adventures' holding her back.
I can see her now, defending me in the playground, stamping her little foot and screaming at the bullies, 'My Daddy is not a nutcase!'
Even calling her 'The Sprog' gives her an anonymity that she deserves.
And it's not like my adventures will be holding her back. I'm hoping, with permission from the missus, to take the sprog on as many adventures as possible. I want to show her what an amazing planet we live on and how amazing the vast majority of the people are. I want to show her how easy it is to fill your life with adventure. I want to be a role model of someone who is able to live an adventurous, fulfilled and above all happy life.
So I will be sharing my life and snippets of the lives of my wife and daughter when it crosses with my adventures and challenges. But this site is about me, not them. Why are you so interested? Stop asking about them!
Living the dream
I truly appreciate how great life is at the moment and I completely appreciate how brilliant my wife is for enabling me to live the life I want to. She goes out each day to work to earn the money while I stay home, do a bit of tidying, take the Sprog to ballet or swimming and get on with writing my books.
The dream is that, with the sale of my books and with some other side line ideas that I've got lined up, I might be able to financially justify my role at home. But like a small bird it's difficult to just grab hold of. I know that if I catch it too quickly and too aggressively I'll crush it. So I know I need to build a fragile cage of creativity around it first. So whether it's bloggingin brief paragraphs (which I tried before and failed miserably), attempting to write 80,000 words for a book or 140 characters for Twitter I'll be creating content as often as I can.
Join me on the journey, why don't you?