My Ambitions as a Writer and That Time I went sorta Viral-ish (Part 2 of 2)
This is the sequel you’ve all been waiting for. Maybe. If you haven’t read Part 1, please check it out here.
Previously on… 40 Days to 40, I was busy getting my dreams crushed by an advisor in college. But I hinted that there was some hope coming my way in the form of something called… BLOGGING!
While it felt like I spent all of my time in college in front of a computer on the internet, I must say, I wasn’t really an early adopter on anything except for maybe, Napster. And that’s not really even fair because it was invented by a guy I went to school with. Granted, I didn’t know Shawn Fanning but I knew of him and I knew of this thing he created that everyone around campus was using to trade their MP3’s.
So if something new came out on the internet that wasn’t invented on my campus or didn’t have anything to do with the things I was doing on the internet, which was mostly reading about wrestling, hip-hop or fantasy baseball, I probably didn’t know about it. And as a result, blogging, was absolutely foreign to me until 2003, despite it having been around for a few years prior.
People I worked with at my first job out of college put me on to their favorite blogs, which were mostly about the media industry. I remember the morning routine of going through the five or so blogs that we all read and then reacting to them over email or at each other’s cubicles. One of those blogs was Fishbowl NY, which covered the New York and national media scene.
One day in 2003–4, during the height of popularity of a reality show that featured some guy I rather not name or mention, but let’s just say he’s on your TV for more than just one hour every week these days, Fishbowl NY linked to a story written by someone who went to the tryout for season two of that show. No, I didn’t try out for it (but if you want to read about me trying out for ESPN’s “Dream Job,” click here), but this person did and she wrote an incredibly entertaining recap of her experience. It was written on a personal blog built with one of the many free blogging networks at the time, I don’t recall which one. I soon found myself coming back each day after that, reading this blog written by a person I had absolutely no connection to whatsoever.
After a few weeks of reading her blog, I started discovering other blogs like hers written by people I’d never meet. But I loved it. I loved it so much that now I wanted to do it.
I started looking into it, and thinking about what my blog would be like. I was super excited to get it up and running, and just see what happens from there.
Just before I got my blog going, I thought I should mention it to my girlfriend at that time. I explained blogs to her and told her this was something I was interested in doing. Without giving it much thought, she said “No. Absolutely no. You’re going to get fans and they’re going to be girls and you’re going to break up with me for one of them.” That was not a joke. This is what she felt about me becoming a blogger.
For the third time, dreams crushed.
But I really wanted to have a blog. What if I just keep it a secret from her? I thought about that for a couple weeks and figured if I could just avoid ever bringing it up and never mentioning her or anything that could identify me at all, I’d be good.
And so I did. I started my secret blog. I wrote on my lunch break at work every day, so she never actually saw me writing. We’ve long broken up, but to this day, I am almost positive she had no idea. And she was half-right, I did have actual fans, real fans who read every day and would send me emails and comments. The blog as far as I know is all gone from the internet, and that’s probably a good thing because I was way too snarky back then. It was a product of that era, blogs were mostly mean.
As I moved to Los Angeles, I kept the blog going. Now a single man, I didn’t really have to keep the blog a secret anymore. I was sending it around to other writers for feedback and to see if there might be any potential opportunities to actually make some money blogging. In the midst of blogging, I was also working a lot in my day job in public relations and also picking up paid freelance writing gigs, thanks to an amazing former boss at one of my college internships who went on to become an editor at an alternative weekly newspaper in Florida. And, somehow I was still writing for that music magazine I was writing for in college.
All of the pieces of those crushed dreams were starting to come together. I was getting paid to write, I had a little bit of an audience for my blog, and I also was working a full-time job that gave me the chance to write press releases as well.
By this point, in the mid-ought’s, blogs had become much more sophisticated and popular. Blogs were also communities. You became friends with the people who read the same blogs as you.
There was a growing list of blogs I read, but a short list of the ones I was way too passionate about. There were two blogs that I kept tab in my browser open for all day during this time, Deadspin and LAist. Both blogs offered top notch writing covering topics I cared about, sports and Los Angeles. And unlike reading ESPN.com or the Los Angeles Times, I felt like I knew the people writing and even more so, thanks to the comments sections, I knew there were other people reading and reacting just like me.
LAist was always looking for new writers, they had a permanent ad on the top corner of the homepage that said as much. And one day, I got the courage to respond to that ad. I included some links from my blog along with some other writing I had done and not long after, the editor Tony Pierce got back to me. He asked me to email him my first post when I was ready, and he’d get it up on the site if he liked it.
A few days go by and I’m not really sure what I’m going to write about for this first post. I’m getting anxious that I’m going to miss my chance to join this blog that I loved reading, and that had a large audience of engaged readers. And then, it happens. A friend invited me to join them at a Dodgers/Giants game, one of the biggest rivalries in baseball at the all-time height of Barry Bonds hatred. But on this night, he did not get the biggest boo’s from the Dodger Stadium crowd. No, you see it was Paris Hilton who was shown on the jumbotron who felt that wrath. Suddenly, I had some material for my first blog post for LAist. Tony loved it and got me all the login information and everything I needed to be a part of the LAist team a couple days after that post went up.
It didn’t pay but writing for LAist felt like I had gone professional. There were some amazing, legit writers there they got to meet once a month a cookouts at Tony’s house.
People, way more people than I had ever imagined were reading my writing. I became obsessed with finding the next big story, the one that would get all the upvotes on Digg (remember Digg?). Getting onto the front page of Digg and Reddit were like the ultimate goal back then. If I could get on there and then attract tons of readers to my writing, maybe there’d be bigger writing opportunities in my future.
And then it happened…
Much like the blogger years earlier who inspired this all, Anna who wrote about her experience trying out for that TV show, my big viral-ish moment happened from writing about seeing a TV show we all knew and loved up close and in-person — American Gladiators. Well, the reboot of American Gladiators, that is.
I attended a taping of the show, weeks before the first episode would air on NBC. When you live in Los Angeles, you get to go to things like the taping of a new TV show and you’re never really quite sure how you ended up there. I think I went to this American Gladiators taping because I was genuinely excited to see the show I loved as a kid come back on the air, not because someone who knew someone who knew me had an extra ticket. I think I actually signed up on a website for tickets or something like that.
Well, the taping was disappointing to say the least. It was unfortunate, because the original American Gladiators was my jam. I remember staying up late at night after “Saturday Night Live” and “Showtime at the Apollo” went off to watch dudes in red, white and blue spandex joust. What I saw on this day nearly two decades later was not as good. And so I decided to write about it for LAist. I had no pictures to go with my post because photos weren’t allowed. So it was just over a 1,000 words or so with one image of the show’s logo up top, definitely not what you think of when you think of viral content. LAist also covered UCLA’s “Undie Run” at the end of each semester featuring a photo gallery of dozens of photos of co-eds running in their underwear, needless to say that was always going to go viral for us. Yet somehow, my description of what I had seen at the taping of American Gladiators found its way on the front page of Digg, and even more importantly to me, it was featured on Deadspin, thanks to Will Leitch.
For the next week or so, my post was getting mentioned on news sites I could only dream of writing for like Sports Illustrated and Time magazine. What? How was this happening? Then after it seemed like the craze had died down a bit, I get an email requesting me for a radio interview on NPR!! Technically, it was the SiriusXM version of NPR, called NPR Now. But still it was NPR. They wanted to talk to me on the eve of American Gladiators’ premiere.
The guy who worked in public relations, who had prepared several executives on how to get ready for a media interview was now the one being interviewed, and it was about a show that made names like Nitro, Zap, and Gemini totally not weird at all.
I did the interview and honestly don’t think I was all that great. And I’ll do my best to never listen to it again. But it was the culmination of an amazing ride that lasted about two weeks or so. I definitely felt some sort of high from it. And it was only like viral-adjacent. I can’t fathom what people who go legit-viral experience in the moment.
But I can fathom what it’s like to be told over and over again to not go after the thing you really want. I’m glad that I didn’t let the adults entirely stop me from continuing to pursue… my ambitions as a writer.
Tim Hammill is a communications professional in the nonprofit sector. He’s turning 40 on October 20, 2020. He’s writing about the final stretch to this milestone age in 40 Days to 40, a collection of stories, thoughts, reflections and whatever else comes to mind each day. In addition to writing a blog, Tim has also decided to donate his birthday to This Is My Brave, an organization he very recently learned about that brings stories of mental illness and addiction out of the shadows and into the spotlight. If you’d like to support Tim’s birthday fundraiser, go here.
Additionally, there are three other organizations that are close to Tim’s heart: Save the Children, Stand Up To Cancer and the Bridgeport YMCA. Click on each to learn more and to support their work.
