Ten years ago today, I was in the middle of trying to get a content syndication startup off the ground.
I’d just left InfoWorld, where I had a cushy gig as a columnist and content development editor. In six months, the startup would be dead and I’d be back to journalism, this time as a columnist for eCompany Now, which later became Business 2.0.
In the past 10 years, I spent four and a half years working as a freelance writer and sometimes as a content consultant.
I contemplated going to library school. For awhile, I worked at RLG (now part of OCLC) and moonlighted by shelving books at the local public library.
I spent two years launching and helping to run a tech magazine, Mobile PC (later known as just Mobile).
I spent a year running online events and webcasts for PC Magazine, with Ziff.
And I’ve spent the past three years at Wired, first as a business and gadgets editor, then gadgets and science, and for the past two years as simply the gadgets editor.
I got laid off only once. I’ve been lucky.
My wife and I adopted two children. We are now the parents of an 8 year old and a 3 year old.
For the second adoption we started as foster parents.
We went through at least three almost-adoptions that didn’t work out.
We rebuilt our house, tearing off the roof and replacing it with a second storey, nearly doubling our square footage (and our mortgage payments) while keeping monthly utility bills just about even. Yay insulation!
Most of our closest friends moved out of the Bay Area and away.
I started tinywords, a daily haiku magazine, and ran it for eight and a half years. I let it lie fallow for almost a year and a half, and restarted it last month.
We didn’t travel nearly as much as I’d have liked. I didn’t discover running until late in the decade, missing many good years. I had to abandon my dreams of cooking my way through Julia Child’s cookbooks.
