The Daily Dose/October 20, 2023
By Gaylon Kent – America’s Funniest Guy™
A Note From Gaylon:
Ten years ago today the first entry in the Diary of a Nobody appeared at the old Writer’s Shack. It was based on the 19th-century British novel of the same name that we found online and after reading about half of it – all of it brilliantly dull – we told ourselves we could do that so we dove in.
The Diary is, of course, a fictionalized account of my life, the name Sparrow coming from the last name of the X-Ray character in our Backstairs at the Monte Carlo memoir.
365 times ten is 3,650, but there haven’t been that many entries. An official tally is neither desired nor available, but we figure 3,500 is close enough. We tend not to write on vacation and there was the three-month period in 2019 when life was hard and we didn’t want to write about our day because living it had probably been beyond tolerance.
That’s really it, though, and at about 800 words per entry, that’s a corpus of, more or less, 2.8 million words, a nice body of drivel.
With one exception, everything in The Diary actually happened: that was when Sparrow officiated a high school state championship basketball game. We didn’t work the playoffs that year and had decided we were retiring, but the experience was based on high school state championship games we had officiated earlier in our career, so we had earned the feelings we wrote about. Which is what you pay us writers for: to tell you from the heart what we feel needs to be said. Anything less and we’re not writing, we’re typing.
We don’t have a celebration planned – Sparrow really wouldn’t want one – but we do want to thank our reader(s), especially those who have been here since the beginning. Your companionship over the past decade – unseen but hardly unfelt – is one of the great prizes of writing.
We had thought about ending The Diary today, but it’s still fun to write and besides, you never know what will happen to a nobody and Sparrow will want to share it with you.
Every good wish,
Gaylon
Today At The Site
Writing worth reading. Usually.
The Diary of a Nobody – Sparrow has to make a judgment call. Today’s Diary.
The big decision today was whether or not to put the flannel sheets on…
———
Click here to get in on the laughs.
4Ever & Ever ($8.99) and monthly ($2.99) plans available.
Click here for complimentary chapters of all of Gaylon’s books.
It’s easy reading on any device.
