The Short Version of course

Thursday, May 21, 2009

My Story

When I graduated high school, I made a choice. I decided to skip the idea of going to college and took a job as a draftsman in the automotive engineering field. After all, why spend years learning to do the same thing I was already going to get paid to do? I was young. I did not understand how powerful that little piece of paper called a degree would be. Today I have hit my limit in the field. I have been told straight out that there is not much I can do to improve my position in the field. I watch young men half my age come and rise up above me while I can barely pay my bills, all the while knowing they will continue to move up the ladder and I will continue to watch my wife stress out over financial struggles.

I have come to accept that I have no future in the engineering field. I continue to go to my job and work 50 to 60 hours a week, but my heart is no longer in it. I do it strictly for the pay check and with no hope of getting ahead. During my lunches I write. Every day! In the evenings, in the few hours after my wife goes to bed, I promote my books, work on adding friends to twitter and sometimes write some more. My only goal now is to get to the point where I have a career in Writing.

There is another thing that soaks up my hours in the warmer months. Spiders. I never saw it coming and never would have believed it would happen, but spiders have become a huge part of my life. It started in 2009 when I found a spider in my living room and wanted to know what kind it was. My entire life, people have told me what kinds of spiders were what and often the same names came up for different spiders. So I decided to go on-line and look it up. It took me hours to search through the bad info as well as the good and figure out which was which. The thing that bothered me was that I could not find anything about what spiders were here in Michigan. So I decided I would start making a guide on my own for others who would be curious as I was.

After only a few years of it, my blog, Michigan Spiders has become a solid guide for information on Spiders in Michigan. In the summer, I get anywhere from 800 to 2000 visitors a day and upwards to ten emails every day from people sending me pictures, asking me to help identify spiders. Michigan Spiders has been a part of getting an extremely rare Brown Recluse infestation officially confirmed and has helped hundreds feel at ease that the spiders they have in their homes are not dangerous. Yet the greatest moment is still the message I received from a woman letting me know how much Michigan Spiders played a part in her children getting over their fears of spiders. They were terrified of them and she didnt know where it came from, so when they saw a spider, she caught it and got them to look it up on-line and found Michigan Spiders. THeir fears were soon replaced with the intrigue of finding spiders and looking them up together.

As large a part of my life as Michigan Spiders has become, it is still not my love. My love is in writing. Allowing my imagination to run free. The day I can leave my job with the satisfaction of knowing my writing will pay our bills and we, for once, do not have to worry about if our bills will get paid, that is when I have seen my dream come true. I will never stop helping others with spiders, but my God, would it be great to give up the engineering world.

Recently I have expanded my position in the spider world by adding a new blog. The Spider Guide will be to help people from all states in America and not just Michigan. It is in its early stages and it needs your help. I need others to help me spread word of the site, and get people to click the google+1 button. 

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