I wish I could say that I haven't been writing here because my life is boring and there's nothing worth saying. But when has boring ever stopped a blogger from writing about themselves?

I haven't been writing because I learned some things about myself in Panama that I'm not real happy about. In past adventures I was always the shit talking, tough as nails, world-weary guy who could travel forever. Fixed addresses, owning more than could fit in a pack, speaking the local language -- that was all for other people. I was going to circumnavigate the globe and never stop. I was going to crawl into every strange and exotic hole only to emerge when I had a story worth telling.

Traveling is a lot of things but it isn't easy. No one ever talks about it being lonely or boring or scary. No one talks about having days with nothing to do or how after a week of sleeping in a hostel dormitory you kill yourself if it meant five minutes of peace away from the awkward blowjob the guy on the top bunk is getting from his girlfriend while you're trying to sleep on the bottom bunk.

If we do talk about this stuff, it usually ends up sounding hopelessly romantic. Or at least, it does to me because there's some lose wire in my head that tells me that it's better to be miserable than bored. I'd rather the experience be scary than dull. I'd rather have the story than the money. If I had to list my insecurities they wouldn't be about my clothes or my appearance or the car I drive. I'm afraid of being one of those dull, boring people you meet around the water cooler who has nothing to talk about except what was on TV last night. I'm afraid of missing out on an experience, of being left behind.

And even though I'm pretty fucking far from that person, insecurities are rarely rational. Which makes them worse because no matter how many times I tell myself this isn't true, or show myself how far I've come from the office life, part of me still thinks I'll end up in some Monday morning ego session where people in badly fitting business casual khakis talk about things they don't fully understand and we're all nice to each other because of the almighty label of 'professionalism' and not because we actually like or respect each other.

But at some point in Panama, the stories stopped sounding romantic and I found myself craving routine over adventure. I found myself thinking about how nice it would be to indulge in all those things I had sort of held my nose up at before. Suddenly, I wasn't fucking hardcore. I wasn't handling it or maintaining. I was just another kid who wanted to run home the minute things got too hard.

It really sucks when the reality of a situation smashes through all the carefully maintained assumptions we hold about the person we think we are.

And so I haven't been writing here because who wants to engage in excessive naval gazing and endless introspection when they've looked under the hood to find something that they didn't like?

But I'm learning to deal with it. And I'm starting to get more comfortable with the idea of publishing here again instead of obsessively writing things down in my little black moleskine. I'm realizing that the path to being that person, the one I want to be, lies in getting out there and confronting all the shit I don't like. Not hiding from it, alone in my apartment behind the dull glaze that a bottle of bourbon and cable TV can provide.

And the longer we spend online the less we respond to static content. Some of us, those who use RSS, never even see the static content because we simply get the articles as they're published and all that fancy web design is lost in our reader. Same if you subscribe to a site through email. Or, if you're reading this on facebook (I have facebook suck my content into it's notes feature) you're never going to see the static content on bencorman.com.

By static content I mean my masthead, my blog roll, the list of other Rudius sites and yes, my advertising.

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you that you're stealing my content or call you a bad person. I'm happy you're reading what I have to say. Keep reading no matter how or where you choose to read. Share with your friends.

For a moment, lets take a look at those who do come to my website or really any of the Rudius websites. Since we're all fancy here with google analytics, I see how people interact with our sites. Let me share a dirty little secret with you. That "Friends or Rudius Media" blog roll. Almost worthless when it comes to driving traffic. Sure it might feel good to appear there, but it's basically an exercise in vanity.

And that "More Rudius" blog roll of all the Rudius Sites? A little better. Not much but, because of placement, it drives a little more traffic.

The only thing that really works for driving traffic is when someone writes a post about you. That drives many orders of magnitude more traffic than blog rolls or sidebar links. I'm not saying anything new here, just that people don't interact with static content. If you run any sort of website you know this to be true.

But it does raise an interesting question. Why do we spend so much time on website design?

If people aren't interacting with the non-dynamic parts of the page, if they're not hitting the sidebar links, if they've all got ad blindness, then why include those elements at all?

And my original assertion stands. The web is getting more dynamic. The point isn't whether RSS becomes mainstream or not. It's that between RSS and personalized homepages like igoogle and my yahoo and web enabled smart phones and devices like the kindle (and now the kindle is on the iphone), we're creating more and more ways to interact with content. People don't care about the underlying technologies, they care that they get the content they want in the way they want to consume it.

The website isn't going away. But it's place as king of content distribution isn't writ in stone. If your strategy is "drive as much traffic to my website" instead of "make sure my content is as widely distributed as possible" then you're missing the point. And you might want to go get a job at a newspaper.

I've been thinking a lot about this post and this podcast (transcript). Obsessing over it. Going back and re-reading and re-listening to it. And it made me realize that I'm Doing It Wrong(c).

I'm obsessed with fiction. Reading it, writing it. I make people up and I let them live in my head. I put them in weird situations and I'm delighted when they react in ways that I didn't expect.

I grew up reading. My parents are not big TV people. There were some years where we were too poor to afford cable and some years where we didn't have it because of a lack of interest. Their interest, not mine. I was much more interested in TV than they were. And my mom, if she caught me wasting away in front of the TV would yell, "Go read a book." Go. Read. A. Book. I heard that refrain daily. It was the sound track to my childhood.

And the result was that I fell in love with books. I read all the time. I was the only one of my friends growing up who read fiction. They had video games and MTV. I had an endless stream novels. I'd spend hours and hours and hours in my room, lost in worlds that others had created for me.

I haven't been doing so well since Jeff and I left Panama. I've spent a lot of time, more time than I like to admit, wondering what the fuck I'm doing with myself. Part of my life is easy. I love what I do. And I'm not saying that for boss points. I find what's probably an unhealthy amount of validation and happiness in working with my authors. Helping someone find their obsession times voice and giving them the tools to express that is incredibly rewarding. Rewarding enough that I happily let it overrun other parts of my life without complaint.

But another part of my life is hard. And I make it harder than it has to be. It's the bencorman.com part. It's the part where I think that I have something to say and I want to put it out there to see if it connects with the world. Since Panama I've been struggling to find something to say and let's face it, my life is fucking boring. I wake up at noon. Some days I work until two in the morning and some days I work for two hours and then call it quits. Believe me when I say it's not worth writing about.

bencorman.com was supposed to be a way for me to get my fiction out to the world. Because that's what I'm obsessed with. But I let the medium overrun what I had to say. I thought 'blog' instead of 'writing' and when I looked around at those who were 'blogging' I simply tried to copy their success. Which is stupid because I'm not obsessed with the same things that they're obsessed with. I was trying to push a writing peg into a blogging hole.

I know I'm not alone in this. I see the submissions we get from people who want to work with. Every. Single. One. And I've got to tell you, a lot of you out there are Doing It Wrong(c). You're writing what you think we want to read or you're writing about a topic that you don't understand because you think that's what you're supposed to do.

I understand the urge. I did it. When I first discovered TuckerMax.com and Philalawyer.net (long before Philalawyer was with Rudius) I thought that I had to be writing crazy stories about my life. And I did that for about six months. And it sucked. The writing sucked and the stories sucked and writing the stories sucked. It's not that I don't have my own slightly irresponsible nights, I do but I'm not a comedy writer. Consequently, while I can occasionally write something funny, it's not what I obsess over.

What people seem to miss is not that Tucker is obsessed with his own life, it's that he's obsessed with comedy. He's obsessed with being an entertainer, with being the center of attention. To the point where it can get annoying and I've wanted to tell him to just shut up about it already. But that's exactly the type of obsession that you have to have in order to create something amazing. You have to live and breath it, whatever your "it" happens to be. If you're not annoying the people around you with it, you might not love it enough.

I think we as people have a deep need to create. That's what so exciting about the internet. It gives everyone a printing press and an art gallery and a music label and a TV station. It allows the creator to connect directly with the consumer. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with something other than celebrity gossip or what car we're driving. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with what we're accomplishing. But all that promise and excitement is perverted and ruined if we're just running around copying each other's art, and doing it poorly because we assume that we're supposed to follow in the footsteps of those who came before us.

I know that's what a lot of you are doing. Your submissions tell me even if you don't know if yourself. Because I'm not seeing a lot of original work. I'm seeing copies of copies of copies. And none are as good as the original.

It's all right though. In a lot of way we're all in this together. We're all figuring it out together. I know the internet feels old and mature and boring and that blogging is passé and that twitter is even a little 'OMG NPR is totally on twitter' and so we're all onto the next thing but the act of creation is timeless. And so no matter what new technology is almost here, it shouldn't affect what you're doing. Technology only ever changes the distribution.

As I've been to figure all this out for myself, I reached out to a few people I admire and look up to. One of them sent me this

What you're feeling is a pretty normal thing that any artist who sacrifices in order to work feels from time to time. Sacrifice is fucking hard. Being broke is fucking hard. Frustration is a wicked bitch who'll whisper in your ear every chance she gets.

So take a break. Stop writing for a minute, and don't worry about it. Read. Read a lot, all your favorite shit, remember why you fell in love with writing in the first place. Relax and allow a little time to give you something you really want to say.

I took his advice and the first thing I picked up was my copy of Lonesome Dove. And that's when it hit me. I'm a fucking idiot. When I went to back to what I love, I didn't go to some fucking blog post or website. I went for my favorite book. Novel. Fictional account of people who don't exist and who delight me when they react in ways that I'm surprised at.

I think we can all do better. I think if we all stop and we're a little more honest with ourselves we'll see that sometimes we just write bullshit for the sake of writing bullshit. That sometimes our motivations suck and we want the ad revenue or X number of readers or respect when really, we should be doing it out of love. We stir up conflict where there really isn't any. We stand on our soapbox because we want the attention that yelling brings even if we're not yelling about something we care deeply about. I think if we try, we can get back to doing this for the right reasons.

And if you're new, or just want to relive past glories, here's 2006 and 2007.

Enjoy.