It’s silly really, especially considering that the old adage “Content in King” couldn’t be more suitable than a site wishing to focus on writing.

But when it comes to beautifying your work online, it’s highly likely you’ll spend more time tinkering with CSS during those nascent first steps than creating the all-important content.

It was during this monotonous process that it hit me: selecting a new blog’s appearance is quite similar to another crucial and painstaking process – choosing that one special woman to spend the rest of your life with. Or until she tires of your crap and issues divorce papers.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there are more than just basic similarities between what a wife is, and brings to the table and your very own WordPress theme.

Hard to pick – the longer you leave it, the worse it gets

You’re in Vegas. Maybe you’re even on a roll. And through the alcohol fuelled delirium of “the best night of your life” she seems awfully nice. And willing. Fast forward a number of missing hours and you’re speeding towards Reno in a frantic quest for a drive-through divorce hopefully before throttling the new love of your life.

Similar to picking a WordPress theme, getting rid of an unwanted wife is fairly easy – if you catch the mistake early. Of course, consummating the union/installing any sort of new plugin, and things are going to be harder to annul.

Leaving a wife or a theme to fester and it can be extremely difficult to extricate oneself from their nefarious binds down the road. If you install a theme and immediately think “I’m not sure about this”, that’s a deal breaker. Deactivate it as fast as possible. Failure to acknowledge an incompatible theme early will only lead to a life-long struggle and abject misery. You can try and force a theme that wasn’t tailored for AdSense compliant to your monetising ways or hack its CSS to be more “flowery”, just like you can make a wife live in a shed or call you Daddy. It doesn’t make it right.

Just like wives, themes make life easier

Let’s face it. The main reason we install a theme/get married is because we need someone to control our lives. Delving into the intricate inner-workings of stylesheets, HTML and Javascript, most men will start to rapidly lose consciousness. Themes, like wives, take life’s abhorrent and mundane tasks and hide them in the background far from your easily distracted eyes. What? You thought the house/dog/children cleaned themselves?

The reason we place our hands firmly into the willing hands of a theme author is based on the same logic of why we beg a woman to come take care of us – half the time we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. And if we don’t manage to empower some other greater force who can promptly intervene, we just might end up hurting ourselves. Where would we be without wives? Probably with ugly content and a fridge consisting solely of stale bread and potatoes that now answer when you ask them if they’re OK to eat.

Not all themes are created equal

By wary of flash, pricy themes. Sure, they may promise the earth but get them home and they’ll boss you around to such an extent that your life/content takes a back-seat. You become a slave to your theme; constantly upgrading plugins and rogue pages, rarely focusing on what’s important – your content.

Some themes are also free but don’t do exactly what you want from the getgo. Like a great marriage, working with a theme is all about compromise. OK, so some of your widgets are a little temperamental and you need to tweak a few margins. Would you rather write a calendar plugin?

There’s plenty more themes in the sea

The amount of themes available right at this minute is staggering. Big themes, small themes, themes with colourful pasts and others that appear demure and straight-forward but transform into unwieldy beasts as soon as you look under their hood. Themes that come with a price, themes that, just like those popular girls your mother warned you about (and your father taught you how to spot), have probably been called into service a little too much.  To each their own of course, but always remember – if you think you’ve found the theme of your dreams, it’s highly likely you’re not the only one.

The right woman for the right job

You know when your buddy shows up with his new girlfriend and, for whatever reason, you immediately think: “That’s just not right”? Such is the case with an inappropriate theme. If your blog is about technology, try to pick a theme that is clean, austere and functional. Just like your topic. Unless you’re specifically talking about technology no one gives two hoots about of course, then you can go wild. After all, no one is reading your treatises about the glory of the Acorn Electron anyway. If you’re writing about feelings or similar areas, feel free to go as bizarre as you like. In fact, the weirder the better.

Think about what you’re writing about and the obvious connections. Gardening blogs might want to show a flower or similar horticultural imagery. It’s not rocket surgery. The analogy with picking a wife couldn’t be closer. If you’re short, don’t Do A Stallone and marry a seven foot tall Elk slaying ice-maiden. If you like quite nights in … don’t pick a theme that requires a M.Sc. in Javascript to maintain.

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The most salient point is that your theme should compliment your content. A good theme will help you through the good times and the bad. In your blog’s sickness and also in offline mode. After all, you’ll probably want to tweak it and turn it into what what you really wanted in the first place anyway.

My name is Lee Cash. That’s me over to the right there looking a bit ridiculous and a few years younger than I am now. When I find a more recent photo that doesn’t portray me as either half-crazed or suspiciously portly I’ll be sure to add it to the site.

This is my new blog where I will chronicle my goal of becoming a paid writer. A bold claim you might think but, as I’m sure you’ve heard, writing online is the next big thing with publishers falling over themselves to give inexperienced new authors as much money as possible for their ramblings. If only it was that easy.

The Meta-Blog

In short: I am a writer. Or at least I’d like to think myself as one. I’ve been writing online consistently for over a year now with my work reaching a modest yet ever growing audience. The fact is, writers are a dime a dozen these days with new blogs sprouting up faster than most people can read them. I am hence under no illusion that this first post (maybe even this whole venture) could easily go unnoticed in the grand scale of Internet obscurity.

So, this is a meta-blog of sorts considering its primary goal is to unlock the conundrum of how someone who likes to write, has some knowledge to impart and also knows the difference between possessive “its” and the contraction “it’s” can break into a very exclusive club: the society of paid writers.

Why am I doing this and how did it come about? Some background. I graduated in 1999 with a degree in computers, a direction I admit is not necessarily the path most eminent writers take. Why I decided to complete a degree in this field and not a more literary qualification is a long story but, in short, it involves an encounter with an unnamed journalist when I was at a young and impressionable age. Unnamed I should add not because of some clandestine agreement we entered, never to reveal his identity. Unnamed as I simply can’t remember it.

“Journalism is very hard.”

I have always wanted to be involved with writing. But writing short stories and starting novels that I knew I had no chance of completing was all well and good. I knew my best chance was to go into journalism. Through my school it was arranged for me to meet with a very nice man from a national newspaper who I expected would pull back the curtain and decipher the mysteries of what it was like to be a writer. Looking back, I realise now that I actually recall exceptionally little from that important meeting other than the fact that the wizened and learned literary maven was friendly, informed and, unfortunately, starkly honest.

“Journalism is very hard,” he said solemnly, “What else do you like?”

I told him I liked computers which, in my precocious mind, was better than saying “I’m addicted to Sega.” He nodded, smiled and may have even given me a wink.

“Some good money in computers,” he stated, “I’d follow that dream if I was you.”

If I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly abandon my aspirations of going into journalism purely due to one possibly burnt-out journo strong-armed into meeting some 12 year old who wanted to write. There were other mitigating factors at play of which I might go into at a later date.

Fast-forward roughly ten years and I was living the “dream”, writing code and enjoying the trappings of being part of a burgeoning IT industry. To put things in context, when I was in university there was no Google. I didn’t have a cell phone. The whole social media explosion was far off in the distant future and the concept of writing online for a living was as abstract as telling someone that, in the future, you’d tell people you were about to make a cup of coffee or maybe watch some TV in 140 characters or less — and they’d follow you for the privilege.

Despite being decades old, the IT industry was going through a renaissance of sorts when I started college in 1995; a re-awakening brought on by the emergence of the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, IT is still very much challenging, interesting and captivating as we speed towards 2010. But there was just something about the 1990s that captured the imagination of droves of people as they rushed into the business head-first. And it was the nascent Internet phenomenon that fuelled this quest for knowledge, fortune and fun.

Out with the old, in with the new

My journey in IT has been a long and eventful one, a career not without its fair share of up and downs. I’ve worked with both big and small companies (including the one mentioned above, no – not Sega) and in numerous roles and diverse areas. Ultimately I ended up in Project Management, a discipline whole books have been written about in a vain attempt of unlock its esoteric concepts and practices. In truth I’ve always found it hard to explain what makes good project management as it’s somewhat of a Black Art. I’m sure I’ll mention this area again going forward.

By the summer of 2009, and with a new crossroads looming, it was apparent that I would be leaving the IT industry; at least for the short-term. After applying for a sabbatical to go travelling with my girlfriend (only for such request to be denied), I decided to partake of Plan B and applied for redundancy. With Ireland currently at the nadir of one of the worst recessions in the history of the State, my request was both begrudgingly, yet readily, accepted.

And here I am, still trying to be a writer. Still looking back at the last decade after building a life and squirrelling away some savings and thinking: is it possible to make the switch from IT professional to earning a living from blogging? And, if so, how the hell do I go about it?

Hence, this blog.

Unlike other blogs that promise to tell you how to get into writing and earn a living from the bountiful teats of the Internet, I’m not going to do that. Simply because I’ve not done it myself. I’m going to tell you what endeavours I’m partaking in to realise my dream and if it’s actually working. I’ll discuss sites like Problogger, news aggregation services like Triond and Examiner and the pitfalls of setting up AdSense accounts and registering a domain (more on that later). I’ll even engage with these services and see what works and what doesn’t. This is a learning blog and I am your eager guinea pig. If you are also trying to break into writing online I’d hazzard a guess that following me as I both make inroads and fall on my face might be helpful. If anything as a cautionary tale.

Turning Japanese

I should note that the topics on this site will be heavily influenced by what I want to write about. Sure, I might talk about Facebook acquiring FriendFeed and the implications to Twitter but, in general, this site will focus on areas that I know a lot about. For instance, I know a great deal about the gaming industry and writing for it but I won’t be posting gaming news stories here as my work elsewhere will take care of that niche.

I’ll write about what I’m passionate about. Topics such as the Japanese language and how to keep fit as you enter your thirties and when your body starts to rebel against your better judgment. It’s my firm belief that people who spend endless hours at a desk should counter such behaviour by being active and getting their asses to the gym/engaging in equally energetic endeavours. The stereotype of geeks being unfit is just that – a stereotype, and something we should not be perpetuating.

Finally, and I’m well aware I’ve already broken the primary rule of blogging and making this far too long, this venture has been inspired in part by the following from relatively new blogger Josh Hanagarne who, in a guest post over at Problogger, mentioned something that really connected with me. Josh comments that one of his readers has stated that he or she enjoys Josh’s work, not necessarily because of the topics he writes on, but because Josh wrote them.

It’s my goal to have readers just like that.