It is hard to say which is more frightening to a writer, the blank page, or the empty wallet. There are times that both have been particularly frightening to me. Yet there are other concerns that the writer always struggles with. Is the writing any good? Is anyone reading it? Doesn’t make a difference?

From time to time, I worry about this and my own writing. I try to put up at least one blog post every day, and by my calculations, I’m putting down the equivalent of six or seven novels a year worth of words. Web analytics tells me that between seven and eight thousand readers visit my site every month, but I don’t how many really read what I write, and it is only rarely that I get glimmers of when it is making a difference.

Each year, I also attempt a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month. I only completed it one year, and only a few close friends have read these works which are still in early draft mode. One of the things that I’ve tried to focus on is character development. A sign of a good novel, I’m told, is when you see a change in the main character as the events of the novel unfolds. Unfortunately, I don’t see that in the characters in my novels.

Looking at my own blog as the equivalent of six novels a year, I wonder how the main character, myself, has evolved over time. To a certain extent, it is hard to tell. I know that the circumstances of my life have changed greatly, and I feel like my wordsmithing has gotten better, but has my writing improved? Has my living improved? Certainly, my earning potential has not. I doubt I will ever make as much money as I did ten years ago as a technology executive on Wall Street, but life is much more than what we are earning.

Next month will be my thirtieth college reunion which provides further opportunity for introspection. I studied philosophy in college, and I remember a story one of my professors used to tell. He had led a group of students on a pilgrimage from Paris to Santiago and upon the return visited various alumni association meetings where the students spoke of their experiences.

At one meeting, an elderly alumnus got up and shook his finger at a student who had just waxed eloquent about his life changing experience on the pilgrimage. “You know what’s wrong with you?” the old alumnus asked. “It’s that you don’t have any goals.”

The young student responded, “But I do. I seek to live each minute more fully and more lovingly than the previous.”

I’ve always carried that story around with me, and while I suspect I’ve often failed to achieve that goal, it remains one that is close to my heart.

Five years ago, I took a job as Blogmaster for a Gubernatorial campaign here in Connecticut. It struck me that five years earlier, that sort of job did not exist, and I started thinking that another good goal is to in five years be doing something that does not currently exist. Well, it’s five years since then, and I’m not sure how well that is going. I’m sure doing a lot of things that couldn’t be done five years ago, but is it what I should be doing?

All of this feeds into my love of the road movies and travel books, where the adventurer sets out on a journey, not knowing where it will take him, yet in the end, is transformed by the journey. It may be difficult for the traveler to see the transformation, so it is always useful to have external observers.

Yesterday, I received an interesting email that helped me gain a little perspective on it. Last week, Audubon Dougherty submitted her master’s thesis, New Medium, New Practice: Civic Production in Live-Streaming Mobile Video in her effort to obtain a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. I was one of the subjects she interviewed and she quoted me in various places to illustrate her thoughts. It is always interesting to see how someone else views your own words.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been used as a subject for a paper. In 1999, Professor David Jacobson wrote a paper entitled Impression Formation in Cyberspace: Online Expectations and Offline Experiences in Text-based Virtual Communities. In that paper, some of his students interacted with me and several others online. They wrote about their impressions and then compared them to photographs of the participants. It provided another interesting chance to see how other people saw me.

Perhaps by looking at these two papers I can get a better sense of my own character development online.

As I consider all of this, I try to find ways to help people understand what I do online. A couple years ago, I attended my daughter’s kindergarten class to explain to her classmates what I do. I found a good description being, “I help people tell their stories on computers.” Storytelling, the art of the narrative, is nothing new. We told stories around the flicker of the campfire ages before we told stories by the flicker of the computer monitor.

I’ve tried to avoid monikers like “Social Media Consultant”. Too often, that phrase and similar variations is best translated as “Snake Oil Salesman”. For a little while, I used the phrase, “Internet Novelist”. It captures the aspect of storytelling and the volume of words relatively well. Yet novelist connotes fiction, something that isn’t true. I prefer to work with stories that are true, and simply need to be repeated in a way that people will hear it.

Recently, I was listening to a radio show which talked about Peter Ustinov as a raconteur. ‘Raconteur’ is a lovely old world that captures the aspect of storytelling nicely without the same connotations of fiction, so today, I call myself an “Internet Raconteur”.

I still struggle with the blank page, the empty wallet and worries about my writing. I’m still unsure what I’ll be doing in five years, let alone next week, and wonder what other transformation might become apparent. Yet in all of this, I am pleased to have a phrase that somewhat captures they online storytelling for good that I seek, “Internet Raconteur”.