So, for around the last eight years I’ve been a Sunday and then a weekend columnist for The Charleston Gazette-Mail with “One Month at a Time.”

The premise was pretty simple: each month, I’d pick a topic and then spend several weeks learning about it in a decidedly haphazard and disorganized way.

The goal was always to learn something, challenge myself a little, but also have a few laughs along the way.

To say the column changed my life would be an understatement. Not only do I look vastly different than the man who began the column, I’m probably a better, wiser, more well-rounded human being.

I know lots of stuff. Some of it is useful.

Though, not all.

And people followed along with me. The read my column whether I was dancing with the ballet, trying to learn how to ski or take care of bees.

I never pretended to master anything or suggest that anything was either easier or harder than it actually was.

I failed a lot, but I succeeded enough. After a while, people began stopping me in grocery stores and on the street. They wanted to talk about what I was doing or tell me they liked that I was getting out there.

They were amused.

I became kind of “smalltown famous,” not a big deal, not significant enough to merit even a sandwich named after me, let alone a building, a street or a school, but known

…in a nice way.

I’m still doing the column. You can read “One Month at a Time” in the pages of The Charleston Gazette-Mail every weekend.

I hope you do.

Of course, if you’re just joining us, there’s a lot that you missed –like the month I did standup comedy or tried fasting (I did not fast for the entire month). When I refer back to things like a Spartan race or trying all 31 flavors at Baskin-Robbins, that’s a total mystery to anyone who wasn’t reading a few years ago.

And nobody is going to dig through the newspaper’s website to go looking. They just don’t.

That always seemed like a shame to me. All those stories were sort of buried.

So, over the years I’ve broached the subject of trotting out my old columns on my own in some shape or form. Management waved it off. They didn’t care.

I pitched collecting the columns with new material to regional publishers. I thought, “maybe a book?”

Publishers told me that it seemed to them that the people interested in my columns had probably already read them. Why would they buy a book?

Whatever.

So, a couple of times I’ve thought about a blog –just a little website to bring the old stuff out. To sweeten the pot, I could maybe add some extra color for people who care and also talk up whatever I was working on for the paper at the moment.

It never really came together, but a couple months back, I went ahead and bought some space with the idea of doing that –this time for sure!

I would migrate files and start doling out old columns by Christmas.

And then it looked like I might be out of a job covering the arts, something I’ve done in Charleston for right at 20 years.

Times are tough.

I could’ve let it go, but I still wanted to do the work. While it’s not watching the government or letting readers know about the latest disaster, I thought writing about the local arts community was important, too.

So, going forward on my own probably means that I’ll be talking to fewer semi-famous bass players, but maybe that suits the times.

So, “Smalltown Famous” began to sound like something that might lend itself to a website about a local arts scene (as well as be a shrine to my ego. I haven’t given up on my columns).

So, I’m going to try that.

The plan is to deliver some form of local arts reporting. Mostly, that’s going to be telling people about stuff they can go see and talking to artists about what they do.

As is usually the case with my projects, there’s no expectation that I’ll make any money at this. I haven’t even really dug into the Dummy’s Guide for Word Press book, though I did manage to check it out from Kanawha County Public Library –so, goal one achieved.

If there’s a section that tells me how to install a donate button, it will probably take me a few weeks to get to it, let alone figure out how to make it work.

Maybe I’ll do a bake sale…

However this plays out, there won’t be a paywall here and you should be able to share content on social media –or print it out and give it to friends in parking lots if you’re worried about being tracked by foreign governments or national restaurant chains.

I hope this is fun. I hope it’s useful. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

Thanks for stopping by.