That’s the sign of a repsonsible blog owner, going through the blog roll once and a while to cull out those dead links…

Mat Trevors: …write what you want to write…

Amen!

Mike:
Wait a minute. Other people read our blogs? I thought I was howling to the moon for the sake of the howling — which, by the way, feels pretty good. Digitally or otherwise.

Yup, it certainly does; there’s a certain satisfaction in putting experiences and ideas into understandable words. Though I’m not always successful…can’t count the number of rewrites…

What makes blogs interesting to me is the energy the writer puts into it, that could include the enthusiasm he or she has in the subject. Great article and blog you got here Patrick, I will have to stop by more.

I live in Illinois, the land of no trout. Bass is god here and the writing about the pursuit of bass is horrendously dull, something I’ve been complaining about for a couple of decades. Everybody and their brother thinks they can cut their teeth writing about the outdoors with still another article on fishing (fill in your choice of lure) for bass. But bass anglers absolutely love it.

What Alex says about fly fishing blogs can easily be expanded into all kinds of fishing. You need something to put you to sleep at night, read about the proper way to do figure eights when fishing for muskie.

The over abundance of blogs on fly fishing in the last few years, has made it inevitable that eventually they will start to be perceived as boring, been happening for years in the non fly fishing/non trout world for a long time. I’ve been leaving blog like posts on Chicago area fishing forums for 15 years. In that time I have seen countless people jump in wanting to be the next best writer around.

They are all gone. I see them come and go all the time. This will start happening with blogs and I’ve noticed by more and more dead links, that it already is. I was told in art school that if some day I wanted to have a name in the art world, keep painting past 50 years old, by then 95% of your peers will have gone by the wayside. The same can be said of this writing thing, I’m finding out.

The other day I put this on my Facebook page: Doing bookmark and blog roll spring cleaning. Why did I even find that remotely interesting the first time.

I like to read good writing of any kind and as I kept returning to my bookmarked blogs, they just weren’t cutting it. They had to go. I deleted a lot and it wound up that virtually all of them were about fly fishing. The other run of the mill writing about bass fishing didn’t have to get deleted because they never got bookmarked in the first place.

Basically, we all write for our own niches. I know for a fact that 99% of gear head bass guys think what I write is garbage. If that leaves me with 100 people that got something out of something that I wrote, I can live with that. And with that, I’m exhausted, need to go to bed, and have no further clue where I’m going with this……

The kicker is, there are a lot of fishing/fly fishing blogs out there.

Some are established, consistently well-written and informative (i.e., Mr. TC/Underground above, Cameron at TFM), some are relatively new & provide a classic journal/essay feel (Mr. Sanders & Miss Block of Mysteries Internal fall into this category for me). Of course, many are just fun & entertaining escapes (Owl, Mr. T!, Howard, etc.) that I look forward to.

That being said, my OPINION is I find quite a few blogs are started in a “I have a blog, I catch fish, I’m awesome, send me gear/sponsorship/ad revenue now” mentality (for an example of this, please click on my name & go to my archives of Aug-Oct 2010 :p ).

This is where Alex’s post comes into play: as an optimist, I’d like to think most people are semi-interesting/intelligent, and each person has some sort of a little corner of the world they are extremely knowledgeable about (or extremely interested in becoming knowledgeable about).

For Cameron, it’s glass (obviously), for Grant above, it’s cruising across the States in an RV & fly fishing; Mr. TC/Underground, small streams, industry, CalTrout. Myself, I travel a lot for work and try to fish wherever I go while trying to simplify my home life.

Everyone should have something to separate themselves a bit from the herd, either by technique, gear, geography, species or demeanour. This is where the ‘raw honesty’ comes into play. Raw honesty doesn’t mean whimsical, “I love the gurgling of the stream” stuff, or super edgy “I’m a fly fishing badass because I wear a skateboard hat backwards, and f**k the establishment.”

It means being yourself & write what you want to write, not what the fad/crisis of the day/week is (Tenkara!! haha) just to get page views & hoping to get sent some free gear to review because of unique visitors.

PS- My two favourite blogs:
–Pine Island Angler (lots of redfish pics & it motivates me to save $$ so I can winter in FL before I think white pants are a reasonable item in my wardrobe);
–Smallmouth Fly Box ( lots of smallie fly patterns)

I don’t think those guys are even on Twitter, G+ or Facebook to ‘promote’ their stuff, one of them doesn’t even allow comments. They just have great content…for me, that is…