Blogging can kill you.

Really, I mean that. Don’t let it happen to you.

Wednesday, I shared with you 3 rules in keeping a blog that gives you what you want. I was so excited to get feedback from all you bloggers, especially some brand new bloggers who are just starting out telling their stories. Today, I’m finishing up my week of celebrating my year of blogging with three even more important rules to keep when telling your story on a blog. In fact, these aren’t even rules, these are commandments, the thou shalts of blogging.

Telling Your Story: Three Commandments

If you want to write a coherant blog that others will probably read, it will take time. For me, it involves keeping a notebook of little ideas which may never be used. It’s writing posts three times a week, which takes about an hour, if I’m feeling creatively juicy. It’s responding to comments and visiting new commentor’s blogs as well as visiting my favorite blogs.

Don’t forget to spread the word about my big prize giveaway too! Looks like I’ll be giving out a few prizes, but I want to give out lots more, so tell your friends!
Thou shalt not let thy blog control thyself.

Hey everyone. First thing: you’ll notice I’ve revamped the commenting system here by installing Intense Debate. A lot of you like this system, and it’s an exciting way of tracking our top commentors on the left of the page. Some of you are new to it. You don’t have to sign up to use it, just fill in the form as usual. I’m hoping it’s all working right. Test, test!

Second, don’t forget to tell your blog friends about my giveaway! An easy way to do
this (and make sure I have to give out lots of stuff) would be to Twitter the following:

Visit @MattTCoNP ‘s blog for a big giveaway contest! T-shirts, food, books and other stuff!

I told you Monday that I’m celebrating a year of blogging. I didn’t think it would last this long. There were lots of days I didn’t feel like writing. But I pushed myself to keep with it, and I think it’s paid off in some way.

So I’m sharing with you some lessons I’ve learned about how to get the most out of your blogging pastime. Monday, I shared with you what I think is at the heart of blogging:

Telling Your Story.

Everything else I tell you this week will help you tell your story. Blogs are the easiest way to be a published author. Yet, there are lots of factors in blogging that actually hinder creativity, causing bloggers to quit in defeat, before their stories have been told. I don’t want that to happen to you.

Three Blog Rules to Help You Tell Your Story
Ignore the Numbers
I didn’t tell my wife I had started a blog until I had about five readers to show for it. Somehow, having five random strangers legitimized my new hobby. Guess what I wanted when I had five readers? I wanted five more readers. Then five more after that. From the time you get one person to read your blog, it will never be enough, even if you had the readership of a ‘mega-blog.’

Even worse, you may try to recapture the ‘magic’ that brought you a few readers with another great post. You’ll steer your content to gather more visitors. It becomes a game that you can’t win, as you start to judge yourself on how many visitors or comments your last post got. When you get several readers, you’ll start to think you’re hot stuff. I have a poster on my wall that says “You’re not hot stuff, Matt. You’re an idiot. Okay, maybe you’re a little hot…but you’re still an idiot.” I kept adding to when I wrote it. It keeps me grounded.

Why should you ignore the numbers? Because trying to capture the ‘magic,’ chasing visitors, validating yourself, and thinking you’re hot stuff will give you writer’s block!

Make Friends
Blogging a fun hobby because of the people you meet. I can’t count how many friends I keep in my mind that I’ve only met through blogging. Sure, we don’t even know what our voices sound like, but making friends transforms blogging from narcissitic into awesome. I can’t believe I’m still in contact with so many of my first followers, including Katdish, Jason, Tony C, Joanna, Peter, Richard, Sherri, and many more who have shown me amazing support. I do believe Katdish was the very first, and is a great cheerleader for me and lots of other bloggers.

Bloggers learn that a great way to make friends and get your blog noticed is to comment on other blogs. Go ahead and comment, but don’t make lame comments because someone might link to you. Do it because you’re interested in them. Making blog friends is so much easier than in real life, so at least put some effort into it.

My policy is that I’ll always visit and comment on the blog blog of a new commentor that shows up here. They’ve broken the virtual ice with me, and I’ve got a conversation going. These days, I can’t just go down the list of my followers and visit all their blogs, but you can bet I visit the blogs of the people who have recently commented on my blog. Some weeks I’m short of time, and it’s really hard to make comments to others, but I try.

Besides that, if you don’t make friends, see what other people are blogging about, and have interactions with others, you will discover you are not an endless oasis of inspiration, and you’ll get writer’s block! Are you seeing a pattern? There are tons of stuff I’ve written, directly inspired by what someone else had written.

Don’t Make Noise
This is a two-way street. First, I’m a big believer that blogging is a discipline that is often best done with a schedule of some kind. Decide when you will post, or how many posts a week you’ll write. For me, I decided a workable schedule would be every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you don’t have a schedule, you’ll probably log on and realize it’s been three months since you’ve written.

Now that you have a schedule, write your posts and then shut up.

People have a lot of information to absorb every day. So make sure what you’re saying is worth others’ time. For that matter, make sure it’s worth your time to actually type! I assume most of you have jobs, or at least families that also need attention. So don’t make blogging a waste of time for everyone.

I started out blogging, and didn’t quite grasp this. In fact, I realized that my blog looked rather bare, and I thought that perhaps visitors should think I was ‘serious’ about blogging. So I quickly squeezed a bunch of crappy posts out of my head to fill the page. There was little quality, and I was sometimes writing for the wrong reasons. Now that I’m a teacher and listen to students talk like clanging symbols all day, just to hear their own glorious little voices, I understand the true crime of this.

Finally, on this note: there will come a day when I have said all I should say on this blog. The temptation will be for me to wonder how my readers will make it without reading my exceptionally witty prose. I may think I must soldier on, for the poor readers’ sake. But in reality, I will one day quit blogging, you probably will be mildly affected for about 15 minutes, and then you will move on. So I hope I’ll have the humility to go out on a high note, not a slow decline.

Do you struggle with the numbers? Tell us about the great friends you’ve made blogging. Have you ever blogged to make noise? When was the last blog-break you took? Fess up!

A year ago, I sat at my computer and started what I considered at the time to be a lame hobby that I would probably quit within a month. I started a blog. I didn’t tell my wife I had started a blog until a month later, when I actually had 5 readers to show for it.

I’ve had a great time subjecting all of you to my opinions over the last year. I’m sure you are so much richer for the experience. I have also had a great time being subjected to your opinions of me in your many comments. You’ll notice among the changes around this site is a new ‘Top Commentors’ list to the left. All you have to do to get a prominent link to your blog on my site is try to topple one of my commenting champions!

To celebrate a year of blogging, I’m doing two things. First I’m having a Really Big Giveaway. I’ll be giving away T-shirts and other stuff from my store, as well as gift cards to your favorite restaurants and book stores!

How many prizes are there to win? Why, that all depends on you, dear reader! For every 5 new Subscribers, Facebook friends, Twitter-ers, or Blogger followers that join up in the next week, I’ll give out another prize to a random person! (Make sure I can contact you on Monday November 2, if you want to be eligible.) So you can help everyone win more prizes by telling more people about the contest all week long!

The second thing I want to do is share with you some things I’ve learned over the last year about how to be awesome at blogging (i.e. write a blog and have fun at it.) Lots of you are bloggers, some just starting out, some old hands at it. I’m trying to give back to you, my blog-friends, who have subjected yourselves to my opinions for a year with something that may actually be useful to you.

Lots of people try blogging. Literally, at least 1 new blog is born every second. Lots of people soon decide it’s not for them – maybe they actually make more money by working a job or something. In the last year, I’ve seen some great blogs, blogs that I looked up to, go dormant, much to my dismay.

So I’m trying to answer the question: how do you get what you want out of blogging? I don’t call it “successful” blogging, because that’s stupid. If you don’t know why that’s stupid, you don’t know what blogging is for, because you work for Sony or Pepsi or some other corporation that thinks it needs a blog because blogs are “cool.”

Here’s what I think is at the heart of blogging. I tried to have this mindset when I started blogging. Jon Acuff, Carlos Whittaker and Anne Jackson very eloquently stated the same idea at their Catalyst lab.

The heart of blogging is telling your story.

That’s so basic, but gets lost on many people. I started blogging because I read blogs I liked, and wanted to do that too. I’ve wanted to be like a lot of people. But I can’t be like someone I look up to. I can’t preach like a pastor I look up to. I can’t write someone else’s blog. I can’t be as funny as Jon Acuff or as nice as Carlos Whittaker or as sensitive as Anne Jackson. (My words, not theirs…that I know of.) I can only tell my own story.

A lot of us started blogging because we wanted to be heard. As our world gets bigger, people want to be heard more. We don’t want to die with no one knowing who we were. So don’t try to tell someone else’s story. Tell us who you are!

Bloggers are pretty keen at sniffing out phonies and ripoffs. That’s why I say tell your story. People will know if you’re telling someone else’s, and they won’t read your blog.

So the rest of the advice I can give you this week is all about how to tell your story. Because, blogging is great for telling stories. But believe it or not, it also does a lot of things to stifle your storytelling. That’s why I think blogs go dormant. And I want to hear those stories!

What do you think is the heart of blogging? What did you set out to do when you first sat down at your computer and published your first blog post? Don’t forget to tell some friends to sign up here! How many prizes will you win?

It seems I’ve gotten on a theme with families this week. Today, I want to talk directly about my family.

There’s lots of things I could discuss about families. For example, I wonder how common it is for a child to follow in a parent’s career choice. I wonder how even less common it is to emulate both parents, which is what I’m currently doing. My mother is a teacher. My dad is a pastor. Right now, I kind of wish at least one of my parents had been a handsome millionaire…

I could discuss how my being born first helped me to become a fearless leader early on, although I was a jerk who had to cultivate empathy for others, while my younger brother worked in the opposite direction.

I could talk about all the statistcs that link the sort of family you come from with the kind of life you’ll lead, and so forth. But I don’t know those statistics.

What I really want to talk about is family feuds.

I’m reading Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, a book about our instinct for snap decisions. He discusses a research firm that looks at 15 minute videos of couple’s discussion of a contentious subject. With just 15 minutes, they can predict with over 85% accuracy who will still be married 15 years later. Sounds like how we fight is pretty important.

Did your parents fight? Everyone says that every couple fights, so my guess is that, yes, your parents had some fights. My parents could fight sometimes, and my brother and I could fight, with each other and with them too. I’d say my childhood was pretty peaceful, but those fights could get pretty serious. Nothing physical, but they were stressful family affairs, nonetheless. Not worth writing a book about, but maybe a blog entry.

I’ll spare you the details, but let’s say this. Our family fights included plenty of the following:
1) Airing of grievances.
2) Feats of strength.

And we all took part in breaking several commandments, us kids included. I mouthed off pretty viciously as a teenager, even enough to make my mom cry once or twice; a fact I was proud of at the time. My mom was toughened by an outrageously obstinate father, so it was a minor victory to be able to get under her considerably thick skin. My parents even came close to divorce. They didn’t go through with it after an extended separation, and I’m not sure why to this day, but I’m glad for it. My parents would have definately fallen into the ’15%’ with the researchers.

Statistically, people who come from divorced parents are more likely to get divorced. I wonder if the same is true for good old-fashioned family feuds.

On the other hand, my wife never saw her parents fight. Never. That seems pretty impressive. But as an adult, she’s been able to detect in her memories the same tensions that exist in every relationship. But they did a good job keeping it quiet, so kudos to them.

Statistically, I should probably be a lot more prone to yelling and stuff than my wife is, but so far, we’ve had very few arguments. We’re just very good roommates, and we hate to raise our voices at one another. That may all change when there’s a little crumb-cruncher crawling around someday. It so hard to disagree peacefully with Elmo on the TV. I think the few serious fights we’ve had happened during Elmo TV commercials.

The thing is, I don’t respect my parents any less for their ‘shortcomings’ when it came to resolving their differences. Sure, a good Christian marriage and family handbook might tell them they were horrible people. Sure, they provided occasional examples to me of what not to do in an argument. But I’ve actually come to respect them a lot more. I say that because I know they haven’t had an easy time living together. They dated a short time, and had a lot to work out as a “blissfully” married couple. Yet, despite whatever happened between them, they decided they were better off together.

I’ll tell you what I learned from my parents, which is the same thing every marriage book will tell you. It’s all about communication. Failure to communicate creates a fight, and a fight escalates the failure to communicate. You never communicate more clearly when you’re fighting. That knowledge has made my relationship with my wife so much easier.

Not that I would recommend fighting in front of your kids, just so you can stay married and make your kids love and respect you, but it did work for my folks. But what do you think? Have you followed in your parent’s footsteps, in your career or in your home? How do you and your mate manage disagreements, or what have you learned from your parents’ or your own divorce? What advice can you share?

Animals are pretty awesome.

That was probably the most obvious, least controversial opening line I’ve ever started with. Don’t get used to it.

Whether you like dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, fish, turtles, birds, monkeys, tigers or just fur coats, most people love their pets. I don’t know what it is that makes animals so adorable to people. Something about a creature that constantly sheds hair, scratches up furniture and poops in a box so you can pick it up with a little plastic shovel just makes them irresistable.

As a pastor, I’ve had people ask me if I think their pets will meet them in heaven. I tell people that, sure, their pets just might be waiting for them in heaven. What biblical evidence do you have that they won’t be? Zero. Pets bring joy to people on Earth, and only a heartless pastor would burst the pets-in-heaven balloon. It’s like the last Santa Claus adults get to believe in. I think it does no harm.

No doubt, a lot of people are obsessed with their pets. Some of you go to expensive bakeries to buy cookies and other goodies for your dogs, or just to McDonald’s as a reward for a good day. Some of you dress yourselves and your pooch in matching running suits, and then you snuggle in bed like a married couple in love. Gross.

I think people treat animals like little people, because they desperately want animals to be little people.

I’ve got big news for you. Animals are not people, No matter how much you want them to be. They should not eat McDonald’s…Actually, people shouldn’t even eat McDonald’s.

Meet “Winona Ryder,” the guinea pig. Though this cuddly little rascal shares a name with a wealthy celebrity, it lives in a box full of rubbish. It eats barely edible pellets from a box and drinks exclusively from a bottle. It sits in its own garbage with no thought for cleaning up after itself. If left alone, it’s box and itself would become ever more filthy. Does that sound like any human you have ever heard of?

Okay, bad example. But seriously, a bunch of people are trying to lobby to elevate the status of ‘animals’ to ‘people,’ with all the rights and priveliges pertaining thereto (really.) That means they wouldn’t be ‘property.’ I don’t know how people feel about animals in other societies, but in India, cows are sacred, so I guess anything’s possible.

I’ve written before about the whole system of unintended consequences. People have a problem, think up a solution, and it invariably causes another problem. This is exactly that, only I’m a genius, so I can tell you what unintended consequences it would have. It’s a rather common and seemingly innocuous thing to think of your pets as ‘people.’ Trust me, you don’t want your pets to be ‘people.’

Problem: animal lovers think there should be tougher penalties for animal abusers. Seems like a good cause, right? Solution: elevate the sanctity of an animal life to higher than that of an unborn baby human. Result: Michael Vick has to go back to prison, and say he’s really really sorry.

Unintended result: you can no longer afford healthcare for you precious little LoLCat. What killed healthcare in America? Malpractice lawsuits, for one thing. Right now, vets can count on being sued only a handful of times in their career, far less than a medical doctor. Thus, their malpractice insurance is far less, and emasculating Toonces the cat is very cheap. But what if Toonces was a ‘person?’ Suddenly malpractice suits against vets becomes much more lucrative (though no less baseless) and costs skyrocket. Then you have cats crying in heat and spraying everything in sight and doing it right in your yard with no shame because a chop-job just quadrupled in price.

And yes, I found this topic important enough to bring in my very own Church of No People LoLCat, despite my complete distaste for them.

So the next time your little ball of fluff does something to make you say “Aww, he thinks he’s people!” I suggest you smack man’s best friend for making you think he’s a person, and remind him where his place is: at your feet.

So tell us about your non-human pets! Tell us if it’s a yard dog, or if you sleep with your pet. We have a chocolate lab and an Australian shepherd. It was part of our wedding agreement that there would never be a dog in the bed. In fact, the whole bedroom is kept dog free.

I was a Preacher’s Kid.

Now I’m a Preacher’s grown kid, and a preacher myself. I plan to have a couple Preacher’s Kids of my own someday. If I can’t have my own, I’ll adopt a couple of Preacher’s Kids. Preacher’s Kids are the cutest.

I wasn’t one of those whiny rebellious Preacher’s Kids as a teenager, but I wasn’t Reverend Jr. either. I just tried to be real with people and I was so darn handsome and charming that people expressed surprise that my Dad was a Pastor. I liked that. It’s like I was blindsiding them with Jesus. People didn’t expect such a totally awesome guy to be in league with Jesus. They expected me to be either completely socially inept, or a major screwup.

I probably didn’t rebel because my parents weren’t raving fundamentalists. They had smart rules in the home that were easy to respect and they respected their sons.

I was reminded about being a Preacher’s Kid when that balloon boy gave his confused response in his interview to his parents, “You told me we did it for the show.” It reminded me that being a Preacher’s Kid was a lot like reality TV.

But really, being a Preacher’s Kid was totally awesome, and I’ll never understand why any kids would want to rebel against that life.

Four Reasons That Being a Preacher’s Kid Ruled

Church People are Amazing…
Amazing…ly entertaining. Even an eight-year-old can be amused at the absurd combination of people God has assembled to do His bidding. It’s like Gilligan’s Island. And the church committee is the most entertaining of all, because they take care of the truly important things God needs done. Come hell or high water, or bickering like schoolgirls, those people will decide what color the foyer should be painted. And with God as my witness, it won’t be that awful yellow that Steve wants.

Accountability Partners
The whole church was my accountability partner. Little Matthew couldn’t take two steps without Mom and Dad knowing about it. As a college kid looking for a fun night, you better believe that the one lousy house party I went to* where some smoldering cigars left in the planters filled with Miracle Gro caused the deck to burn down, my parents heard about it…because it was one of the Elder’s kids who threw the party and then learned how to build a deck.

*This is not to say that I only went to one house party. It was just the only one where a deck burned down.

Family Ties
I’ve told you before my Dad pastored a [difficult] church. Well, the church itself wasn’t difficult. The building was quite lovely. The people inside seemed to be the main problem. He endured a lot of criticism on a regular (read: weekly) basis for a few years, until the sources of criticism left. I appreciated the fact that my Dad had such great accountability partners. If he started to believe he was ever worth anything, his head would’ve gotten way too big. It drove me to defend my Dad…until we got in a personal fight, and then I had extra ammunition.

You’re a Celebrity!
Come on, this was the best. Being the Preacher’s Kid, you felt like the center of attention all the time. Lots of Preacher’s Kids whine about living in a ‘glass house.’ I think living in a real glass house would be awesome! Being the Preacher’s Kid is like being a celebrity, just without the money. That’s win-win! Not only do you get to experience the glamorous lifestyle of a Paparazzi hunted star, but you get it without the corruption of lots of money, big houses, expensive clothes, new cars, restaurant trips, big Christmases, name brand cereal, allowances, and all the other stuff Satan doesn’t want you to have.

What else was awesome about being a Preacher’s Kid? Were your Preacher’s Kids screw ups or little junior pastors who erred on the side of ‘creepy?’