This post brought to you by Dad-Blogs' FatherHood Friday. Be sure to swing by for all the other great Dads and Moms who love to share their lives online!

I’ve spent all morning working on today’s post, well, the bits of the morning where I wasn’t taking The Teenager to school. Then there were the times I was holding the baby, which is a chore, let me tell you. Every time I hold that warm little snuggly body against me I can’t help thinking that I’d much rather be in front of my glaring blank white computer screen instead of throwing the baby in to the air and hearing his sweet, genuine giggle as I tickle under his ribs with my nose. Who wants that?

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah! I’ve spent all morning on a post that I can be proud of. This is not that post. I’ve decided to postpone that post until next Fatherhood Friday in order to do more research and obtain further photographic evidence.

So for today, please enjoy this peek in to my random fatherly brain, and I promise, next week will be a post more worthy of your precious time.

• My wife is the best editor/reviewer that I could ask for. She is the one person that I would allow to give me advice on my writing. She nails it every time, and is the reason the real post for today is postponed. I felt like something was missing, and she filled in the blanks. Man, I love her.
• Pandora just played Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zoroaster), Tone Poem For Orchestra, Op. 30‘, which was the theme for ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘, and I had to stop what I was doing and turn it up. I lowered myself to the level of my desk and imagined my laptop was a monolith. It did not, however, make me more cosmically aware. It just wanted to tell me not to use teeth whiteners or drink acai berry juice. The search for cosmic enlightenment continues…
• Last night, my considerate Calli gave my wife an astute warning about the window sill: ‘Don’t touch that,’ she said, ‘I put a booger there.’ She’s so thoughtful!
• Tristin’s asleep in his bouncy while still holding tightly to his knobby bouncy ball. He’s so cute!
• My wife hasn’t missed a day on the Wii Fit since we started, while it just yelled at me for missing four. My Mii is now sentenced to wear a hoody to sweat it out. Come on, Wii! I’ve been busy!
• We’re still wrestling with exactly the right punishment for Kat after she dented the wall with the Wii remote, and then didn’t tell us… Any ideas out there?
• I am pleased and honored to announce that I have 42 fans on Facebook after starting my fan page four days ago! Thank you all for the support! If you haven’t fanned me yet, there’s a convenient badge on the right for you to do so! My hope is that the page will add another level of interactivity to this blog, and sometimes I’ll be using it as a testing ground for upcoming posts, so be sure to check the discussion board! (Hint, there are a couple of discussions up now…)

Aaaand… my brain just stopped working. Hope all is well with you, and have a great time reading all the other Fatherly posts on this Fatherhood Friday!

This post brought to you by Dad-Blogs' FatherHood Friday. Be sure to swing by for all the other great Dads and Moms who love to share their lives online!

I’m not going to lie. I started this blog to try to make money.

A year ago, I discovered guys like John Chow and Shoemoney. I saw sites like Problogger and thought, ‘Man, I could do that! Let me at it!’

A year ago this month I started the Howefitz blog, and I have not made one cent. In fact, I’ve lost a few. (I’m lookin at you, aweber!)

But the fact remains that my blogging intensity has increased during the course of the year, and I have no intentions of stopping, because this is fun!

If you go back to the beginnings of this blog (and I highly recommend that you do NOT) you will see that I had no direction. I was looking for ways to build readers and make CASH! I was reading all the pros tell me to build networks and find other bloggers and SEO and blahblahblah.

Who wouldn't want to blog moments like these?

My wife kept saying, ‘Well, it looks like the guys that are making money on the internet are blogging about how to make money on the internet.’

Right. And you should always write what you know. And I (obviously) do not know how to make money on the internet.

Then, as these things go, I discovered dad-o-matic, and then dad-blogs.

(Sound of needle being yanked off a record) Wait. Wait one minute. There are dads. Dads on the internet. Dads on the internet blogging about their families.

…

And…

…they were interesting!

These weren’t boring home movies of someone else’s vacation or their kids taking their first step, this was all about the emotions of having a family. This was about supporting each other and giving each other advice.

All kinds of dads: stay at home dads, gay dads, married dads, single dads, divorced dads…

All these dads were rising to the challenge of trying to put into words their thoughts and feelings about being a dad and all the challenges that come with it!

I sat back in my chair and exhaled. This was something I could talk about! You never run out of material from your family! There’s always somebody saying or doing something funny or heart warming! I love being a dad! I can do that!

So I haven’t made a dime. As you can see, the google ads are gone, there’s very little in the way of advertising here. I occasionally review a book or movie and try to hock it through my amazon associate account, but nobody ever buys.

What I’ve earned through this blog is more important than any monetary gain. It’s become a writing exercise. It’s become a way for me to put words and thoughts together, sometimes coherently, in a way to elicit an emotional response from others. But mostly, it’s made me a lot of friends.

Ron Mattocks, author of the blog Clark Kent’s Lunchbox and the upcoming book Sugar Milk said it best recently:

The thing about blogging that makes it so different from just writing is that it’s about community, and community requires interaction. … The blogging community has become very real to me, almost as real as calling up people that are physically in my area, and meeting them for lunch; in some cases I interact with blogging buddies more than my own extended family.

That community is what has made me not only blog my heart out whenever possible, (Mainly when everyone else is asleep, like right now…) but what has also inspired me to write the sporadic column ‘Kids Play On The Net‘ at Dad-Blogs, among other unpaid projects I have in mind.

Plus, I absolutely love having a venue where I can show that I have the Greatest Family On The Planet™.

So, I would like to thank you all for the continued support, and hope that you like hearing about my life as much as I enjoy living and sharing it!

Here (in no particular order) are some friends I’ve made through blogging and their blogs:

Eric Bolton of Juggling Eric and Marvel Off the Clock

PJ Mullen of Real Men Drive Minivans

Apok of Knee Deep In Kids

Mocha Dad

Ron Mattocks of Clark Kent’s Lunchbox

Ciara of Ciara’s Ramblings and Whatnot

Weasel Momma of World of Weasels

Dad Unmasked

Melisa with one S of Suburban Scrawl

Jason of The Devoted Dad

Kevin W. Grossman of Get Off The Ground

Surprised Mom

Bella Daddy

Mr. Man of Dear Mr. Man

Thanks a lot guys, I’m just reeling this list off the top of my head, if I missed you, hopefully you’re on my blogroll on the sidebar. If not, let me know!

***Sidenote***

Today is the last chance to enter my Paying Forward A Random Act Of Kindness Giveaway! For details, simply click the link!

Kat, age 1 1/2

As I begin to write this, it’s just after 4 am in the Rocky Mountains. My beautiful wife and two children are still asleep. I’m awake on purpose. I set my alarm for this time. This is my favorite blogging hour. Some days, I miss this hour. I hit the snooze alarm a few too many times, or I do get up and get sidetracked by checking email, my twitter followers, Facebook, and MySpace. But today is special. According to Dad Blogs, today is fatherhood Friday.

This is the first fatherhood Friday I’ve had the pleasure to be a part of. I know it will be the first of many. Since this is my first, I really gave some thought to what I would say today. I have not yet read any other blogger’s previous posts for fatherhood Fridays because I wanted to strike out there and make this my own. I’m sure when I’m done with my post today, I’ll explore and see what others have written to see if I even come close to the mark of what others feel and want to see in these blog entries. 

I thought about trying to take one aspect of fatherhood and exploring that, but I think instead I’ll give you an overall picture of what my life as a father has meant to me.

I crowded my way in to Kat’s life when she was only four. I had met her mother, Bobbette, in an art class and within a week we were finishing each other’s sentences. As a single mother, naturally, Bobbette was cautious about who she let into her home. She didn’t want Kat feeling as though men came and went through their lives. Eventually though, I was allowed to come over. At night. After Kat was asleep. 

Bobbette and I were snuggling on the couch, watching a movie neither one of us truly cared about. Without any advance signal, a little toy car rolled across the floor from the direction of Kat’s room. I remember little Kat stumbling out of her room, big green eyes wide with curiosity. Bobbette picked her up and carried her back in to her room. I remember that little cherub face watching me as it was carried back to bed. I already loved her mother at first sight. Could that truly happen twice? I was terrified.

Bobbette’s almost five years older than me. She had Kat when she was twenty, which means that I was fifteen when Kat was born. The same age she is today. At twenty, what did I know about being a parent? I was too in love with Bobbette to run away, and now I had seen the daughter that people had ‘warned’ me about when I first starting looking at Bobbette with longing. I had no clue what I was doing, but now  I realize that no parent does!

Calli, born perfect!

I was so full of fear. I was afraid that I couldn’t support a family. I was afraid I wasn’t the right father for Kat, thinking that I probably acted more like a brother than a father (Something she’s admitted since), because I still felt like a kid myself. A friend of mine who grew up in a home with a step-father who acted more like a brother once told me, “Those are the best kind. Trust me.” I hope so.

We ‘settled down’ together by actually gaining the certificate that says the law officially recognizes what I already knew: that I would spend the rest of my life with these two young ladies. And eventually, along came Calli. 

Calli was the apple of my eye before she was even born. While she was still inside the womb, when her mother and I would cuddle in bed, we could feel her gently caressing us. We knew she would be a loving soul, and she is. She gives the biggest and best hugs. She can also wrestle harder and longer than any little boy I’ve ever met. Her laugh will bring a smile to any broken heart or solemn face she comes in contact with. She’s the light of my life.

They all are, mother and daughters, the whole of my universe. And I’m not stopping there! As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I have a third child on the way. I’m just as terrified today as I was when I first saw those big green eyes staring at me over her mother’s shoulder. But I’m also fascinated, and amazed, and excited beyond words. The things we will all share with eachother, the places we’ll go…

I would not miss this ride for anything…

Kat and Calli sort through their Halloween haul!

Today, I watched this video on johnchow.com:

Wow, this video makes a compelling case that “I’m drinking a cup of coffee.” Is something people might actually want to know!

Hmmm….

There’s only one conclusion.

If you want to tweet about your online business, do it.

If you want to share information you think is valuable, by all means.

If you want to tweet that you just let loose the juiciest fart of your life, absolutely, why not?

But…

I don’t have to read it.

Here’s the thing: I’ve seen a lot of people that don’t like Twitter because they think it’s a fat wad of wasted time. That’s cool. But, it is possible to use Twitter effectively. 

Tim Ferriss uses Twitter to post information, alert readers of his latest blog entries, etc. At the time of this writing, he has 13,605 followers. How many people does he follow? Zero. I’ve seen blogs that say this means he must be a spammer. This is absolutely not true. He’s using Twitter very effectively to spread information that he feels is important. But, he has different avenues of research, etc. so he doesn’t even want to wade through the endless tweets to find information.

Myself, not being a respected, published author who is perfectly at ease hanging out with CEO-types all day, I use Twitter and Tweetdeck to ask for/ferret out information. I find this useful, so I have cut down on my “I just blew my nose” tweets, and instead, post my latest blog entries, link to favorite sites, news stories, etc. Usually, if I can’t attach a link, I don’t tweet.

I suppose the point of all this is that social media is what we make of it. I don’t tweet unless I can provide a link because that is the aspect that I enjoy. There’s not much you can say in 140 characters or less. You can, however, say just enough to entice readers to click on that link.

AND

If you find yourself following someone who incessantly tweets that they love pie, you can simply unfollow them.

Welcome to 21st century friendship!  ;p

You can find more useful videos like this one at commoncraft.com

As we look to a bright new year, many of us are looking back at the year we just had. Then we look forward to the year ahead. I am doing the latter with a vengeance. This does not come without the required retrospective, however.

The past year has been very busy for me. I moved twice, continued to try to sell my home in Missouri, worked overnight and days, considered a second job, started several blogs, discovered Facebook and Twitter while growing increasingly impatient with MySpace, and somewhere in there tried to figure out how to get family and ‘me’ time.

So, looking forward to a year of building my online presence and finding ways to escape ‘the old grind’, I decided to  call in a few experts. What follows are excerpts from emails I sent to several authors and bloggers to find out how they balance family, life, and technology. How do they make the pieces fit?

My first questions went to author and blogger Dayton Ward:

You maintain another job along with family and writing. How do you make
the pieces fit? Do you not sleep, sir?

I sleep more than you might think, but less than I’d like, or which some
folks might consider healthy. Between the dayjob, family, and writing, I
average between 4-5 hours of sleep a night during the week. On weekends, I sometimes am able to squeeze in another hour or, on very rare occasions,
sneak in a nap. It all depends on the schedules my wife and I are keeping
on a given weekend.

You also maintain a website and blog as well as MySpace and Facebook. How
many hours a week do you think you spend on those things?

I don’t really keep track of that sort of thing. I spend far less time on
MySpace and Facebook than I do my LiveJournal blog, which I try to update at least once a day. I have no real agenda when it comes to the LJ; I post about things I observe, things that piss me off, updates about my kids or the writing, or jokes and assorted detritus I find amusing. As for Facebook and MySpace, in all honesty, I only really maintain a presence there as a gateway to my LJ and website, but I’m also looking for ways to keep those pages up to date and relevant. I’ve set up Facebook to get feeds from LJ automatically, and I’m looking into doing the same thing with MySpace. I don’t really go in for all the little applications and little cutesy things you can do with MySpace or Facebook, but I do participate in some of it as time permits. The trick is to just not allow them to become bottomless pits of wasted time.

Now, if I may, I’d like to add a second voice to the discussion, Dayton’s partner on many works of fiction and commentary, author Kevin Dilmore.

You also use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. How many hours a week do you think you spend on those things?

I spend time on FB and Twitter because it helps me a lot with my work. As a
writer and marketer for Hallmark, I absolutely NEED to know how people will
connect socially in the 21st Century. The future of my business depends on
it. So, I use them to learn about them.

Back to Dayton:

George Lucas said that there’s an old saying about how films are never
finished, they’re simply abandoned. Do you feel that way about your books
and stories?

I think every writer feels that way to some degree about at least some of
their past work. Aside from fixing obvious errors or things of that nature,
would I go back and correct, revise, or update everything I’ve ever
written, given the opportunity? No, but there are a couple of select pieces
I’d either refine or expand if I had the chance. In those instances, I’ve
reread the story and thought “Gee, I could have gone this way, rather than
what I did,” or “I should’ve fleshed this out more.” For the most part,
however, I’m okay with leaving my past work as is. In the case of one
particular short story, I became so enamored with what I considered to be
untapped potential behind it that I plotted out a novel-length prequel to
the thing. How crazy is that?

Kevin?

Hmm … actually, with the writing and rewriting and editing and re-reading
and everything, I’m pretty finished with them by the time they hit
print! >

Author/editor Kevin J. Anderson had this to offer:

The blog, the website presence, the e-mail accounts, they’re all like a hungry monster, always demanding to be fed. Authors are expected to have a web presence these days, but maintaining everything is a constant chore, taking away time that I really should be using to write. For the time and word count of the blog posts and e-mail I did last year, I could have written at least another novel!

I am extremely grateful to everyone who contributed to this blog. It’s nice to see that it’s not just we amateurs that struggle with this! I hope you have gleaned some insight as I have from these responses. I leave you with one final thought from prominent blogger John Chow:

“Family is the foundation of growth. No matter how hectic things may get, you must always take time out to enjoy what it most important.”

How many moments like this do we get in our lives, really?

—Who are these guys?—

Dayton Ward is the author of many media tie-in novels and short stories as well as original works. You can find his complete bibliography and other great tiddly-bits at daytonward.com

Be sure to read his LiveJournal blog!

Kevin Dilmore is also a media tie-in author and conjurer of worlds. Check out his stuff at amazon.com!

Kevin J. Anderson is an author/editor whose name has been associated with little known universes such as Star Wars and the Dune series of novels. Check him out at wordfire.com and dunenovels.com.

John Chow makes money online by telling people how much money he makes online. See how at johnchow.com.

Interested in monetizing wesites and blogs, I decided to give Magpie a try. I decided to have them post an ad in my tweet stream after every five tweets. I then tweeted things like what I had for breakfast, the weather outside, whatever was on my mind. I literally started to think in 140 characters or less. (‘This just happened, how would I tweet that?’) I was trying to earn some cash from Magpie!

My addiction truly hit home when I followed @SarahJL, and her automatic ‘thank you’ message had a link to ‘You Know You are too Popular on Twitter When…’. It might as well have been entitled ‘You Have A Problem and May Consider Finding Help’ because I could actually identify with much of what was being said.

I then came across ‘Using Twitter… ‘The Smart Way‘ by Darren Rowse. It was finally sinking in: I’ve got to back off. Around this same time, I get this message from @dungeekin: ‘@howefitz: Thanks for the Follow. I would follow back, but you appear to have Magpie tweets in your stream.’ Insult to injury, I also received from @magpiers: ‘rt: @howefitz: Thanks for the Follow. I would follow back, but you appear to have Magpie tweets in your stream. http://is.gd/aPGz’. The link takes you to the Magpie site. As near as I can tell, @magpiers is a bot that follows all tweets about magpie and retweets them. What possible good could this serve anyone? So I immediately discontinued Magpie with the total sum revenue of something like fifty cents. Fifty cents that I will never see, since they don’t send a check until you hit fifty bucks. Meh. It’s not worth losing followers to make a couple dollars. I would much rather monetize my own blog and earn money on the quality and merit of what I say than on spam.

So I will not tweet that it’s snowing in Avon, CO. If you haven’t heard of Avon, CO then you don’t care. If you have heard of it, then you know it’s snowing, because it’s Avon, CO! No one cares what I’m eating for lunch. My Twitter is set to update my Facebook, so I’m polluting that network with my crap too. I tweet out my new blog posts, but they get buried with all my other natterings before anyone has time to click the links. I say thee NAY! From now on, it’s more conservative twittering for me.

I would urge all fellow tweople to do the same!

What my plea for assistance looks like on tweetdeck

I was trying to insert Google adsense into my blog and was having a hard time of it. Luckily, @Frumph saw my tweet and answered the call! If you scroll to the bottom of my blog, you will see:

Ta-Dah!

So thank you, Frumph, and thank you Twitter! Obviously, I need to work on my design and integrating the ad a little bit, but I’m sure there’s a Twitterer out there who can help me when the time comes!

Cheers,

-Justin

-Justin

After my wife got off the phone, I opened my laptop, knowing full well that my little ol’ blog would not have any comments, and that I would just be blogging some sappy entry about my horrible, no good, very bad day and no one would get past the first line.

My WordPress dashboard loaded.

I blinked.

I had 1 comment.

I clicked it.

It was from Kevin Dilmore!

I was shocked. I was amazed! I was stupefied.

For anyone not ‘in the know’, Kevin Dilmore has written many Star Trek novels and e-books alone and with Dayton Ward. You can find a list of their works here.

I friended Kevin and Dayton on Facebook after entering the now discontinued ‘Strange New Worlds’ Star Trek short story contest. In the course of looking for some advice, I discovered Dayton’s site and blog. I’ve been a fan of Dayton and Kevin ever since. I never really expected either of them to actually notice me on Facebook, I was just a fanboy following around a couple of my favorite writers.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I have been experimenting with social networking and blogging. I wrote a silly little blog about the new Batman cartoon, Batman: The Brave and the Bold. You can read that blog here.

I am on Twitter. (Just follow howefitz) I’ve set up Twitter to automatically update my status on Facebook. So when I completed my Batman blog, I announced it on Twitter, which also announced it on Facebook! I can only imagine this is how Kevin saw it, and felt compelled to comment!

And that is how the very first comment on my modest little blog came from one of my heroes. This is social networking at work, folks! Thank you Twitter and Facebook! And I especially thank Kevin Dilmore. You’re the man! You single-handedly pulled me out of my funk today, and my wife and I thank you!

-Justin

GMail Themes

If you’re a user of Gmail, you may have noticed it looks a little different. That’s because they just added themes! If you go to your settings panel, you’ll notice a new tab called, you guessed it, ‘themes’. If you’re the more condervative type, there are several different color schemes to choose from. If you like to have a little more fun, there are themes such as Bus Stop (similar to the bus stop theme in iGoogle). My two personal faves are Ninja and Planets.

Xoopit

Xoopit is a plugin for Gmail that allows you to easily access photos, videos, and files that people email you. I’ve found this useful because I get a lot of email, and I’m working on selling a house in Missori as well as buy one here in Colorado. So when any of my real estate agents, loan officers, etc. send me forms I need to fill out, I can easily access them without searching for the email itself. You can sign up for xoopit at xoopit.com.

Tweetdeck

Last but not least, if you were a little confused and befuddled by twitter, check out tweetdeck. Tweetdeck gives you a dashboard to access the tweets that you follow, replies to your tweets, and direct messages. One of the features I really enjoy is ‘twitscoop’ that shows you at a glance what others are tweeting about, complete with clickable links!

I can see Xoopit and Tweetdeck saving me a lot of time, something I do not have in abundance. While the GMail themes are just plain fun!

See you in cyberspace,

-Justin