Just about every week for the past 10 years I have sent fishing reports on the Fox River here in Illinois to Dale Bowman, outdoor writer for the Chicago Sun Times. He puts a one sentence report on the Fox in the paper every Wednesday. My dad gets a kick out of this when his friends call him and tell him “your kids in the paper again.”
I’m his 54 year old kid.
It’s been a couple of years now I think that Dale has had a blog running on the Sun Times website. He gets to put much more info up there than the paper allows. He’s always run my more extended reports on the blog since space wasn’t an issue.
Apparently, as a friend politely put it, my reports tend to be a bit verbose. But Dale runs them anyway. He’s kindly given my longer ones there own spot on his blog that he calls Ramble with Gortowski. I guess I do ramble a bit.
The interesting thing for me is how things change from what Dale puts up, to what I put up on my forum, to what I put up here on my blog. For Dale, it’s all words. By the time it makes it here, there’s some times too many pictures. And if I’m finding the time to do it, what I send Dale gets cut up into multiple posts. That most recent one will wind up as 3 posts, eventually, I hope.
What I find happening is that for Dale, the weekly reports become one long story over time. They keep referencing back to each other. While here, they become pretty much stand alone stories. No real past, nothing suggested for the future.
It gives me headaches keeping it all straight.
I linked to the Ramble to show how I hack those reports out. Those are the types of reports I’ve been leaving on the internet for 14 years (see About Ken G). I guess what I’m questioning is whether I should continue to make a definite distinction between the two or just keep hacking out reports.
I knew starting this blog would give me too much to think about. It interferes with my fishing and hunting thoughts.