A glimpse at the interior of my new career... the old newsroom has no windows! But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I didn’t even know what a copy editor did, but soon I was in charge of the thing, overseeing a revolving staff of 0-2 people in the proofreading of stories. I did a stint as opinion editor, where I really crafted my writing style, but soon took a part-time job at the town’s actual newspaper, the Bowling Green Daily News.

A few months later, part-time became full-time; a few months after that, I got promoted to weekend editor: basically, the guy who runs the show when no one else wants to because they have lives outside the office. Here I added to my knowledge, learning page design and news judgment and some management skills.

A couple years later, burnt out from all that jazz, I bought a coffeeshop. (Note, I had not — and still have not — returned to college). Which I still have, and which is cool, but it doesn’t quite “pay the bills” for a married dad of two kiddos, one of whom is special-needs. So I headed back to the newspaper, got my old job back, and kept the coffeeshop… thus making me a “beancounting journalist,” to paraphrase my friend Nathan’s astute observation, which links back to a Kurt Vonnegut quote.

Well, late last night the beancounting journalist made yet another stark departure: I accepted an offer to become the Creative Director of Earnhart+Friends, a boutique (read: small but good) marketing firm based here in Bowling Green.

It’s truly a blessing, for a number of reasons. The schedule is more flexible (this helps my family and my business), the job is more creative and less cyclical (new projects every day, few if any “rules” that have to be followed), and — let’s face it — journalism isn’t the field anyone wants to find him/herself stuck in these days. (It’s not a terrible gig, but an escape plan is a must.) A close friend of mine is the Art Director, which means he and I will essentially be the firm’s top-tier tag team (underneath the owner, of course). And to find a job like this in a town like this is a dream come true… I am certain it is the only one of its kind in a 90-mile radius, at least.

In the previous few months I’ve taken part in writing TV scripts, rebranding a widely available retail milk, conceptualizing a new restaurant, crafting a new direction for the company itself — and all freelance, while keeping the other flaming clubs of my life going up and down in this juggling routine. Come July, however, my days as a muckraker are over — at least for now. What the future holds, I can’t tell. But the present is looking pretty good.

Oh! And the millions of you reading this will be glad to know that I’ll probably be able to get a bit more blogging done too.