About the Blog

The Fishing Blog Continues

My previous blog, Litton’s Fishing Lines, is well known not only for being informative and well written, but for being personally honest in a world where some writers find themselves in the awkward spot of being incapable of the same. I don’t mean to put myself on a pedestal, though, because it’s always difficult to get the words right, which makes me humble. Nor do I mean to imply personal honesty is not there in others, such as friends I fish with, my readers, and other writers I read. Instead, it’s a friendly reminder that some writing doesn’t put in enough time to get there, even though I encounter the sincerity that makes me want to read more. And I do.

We live in a society that rushes us along. Some writers might want to make a certain amount of money on the hour, rather than make sure every letter and punctuation mark is perfect. Perfect at least most of the time. I make mistakes, too, but I always try to finish a good, clean story for my readers, and it takes time. Often, after I’ve already read a post after publishing it, I’ll read it again a few days later and still find a few minor errors to correct I just hadn’t caught. And about money, when blogging, I don’t earn any money directly. Indirectly, it’s possible I’m interesting some of you in the books I’ll publish.

I don’t think every story hits the high mark, either, as I often feel later I let everyone down. But I don’t delete the posts I feel are questionable; sometimes when I do read them later, I rework them a little. And yet sometimes they seem better later, even if I do no reworking.

Ultimately, my persuasion that we uphold standards speaks to a continued commitment on my own part to deliver. Naturally, “the blog” continues here on the new website. My hope is that my many readers make the transition easier than it is for me to have built the new site!

I May Post Fairly Frequently Otherwise

It’s clear the authority of Litton’s Fishing Lines comes from observation and experience (or participation as I often specify it), as well as thoughtfulness and—sometimes I surprise myself—even wit. Not to mention ages of reading articles and books. You can expect the same authority to grow out of my blogging on Fishing here on the new website, as well as my blogging on Photography in a separate category.

Blogging Literature and Philosophy may rely more on references to books, although blog posts I may duck in to write fairly frequently may come purely from the drivenness that occupies me only in handwritten notebooks thus far. Likewise, for the Photography blog category, I might write fairly often from my experience. I don’t shoot as often as I had planned to after I quit my job, but I do on occasion.

And regarding books again—I’m thinking of my Literature and Philosophy category—I recently read in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, John Gardner’s argument to the effect that anyone seeking to become a novelist who doesn’t graduate with at least a BA is lost on what books to read. Makes me think of Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open,” about the “rebel without a clue.” I would have liked to have told Gardner that when I dropped out of St. John’s College, I had the four-year syllabus in hand when I went to the college bookstore and bought armloads of Great Books. Besides, I already knew about most of them before I studied the syllabus.

The Life of the Mind

No, not only can you expect me to deliver in relevant ways to life in America as the 21st century begins to approach its midpoint, even though I never graduated college with better than an associate degree'; your engaging the material is just as important as my producing it. Texts are created so that the mind has material in which to find new beginnings. They validate the life of a human being, which requires that the mind be substantiated. We who read literature and philosophy live the life of the mind, and my posts will address that.

And even more yet about books: I place great value on philosophical texts. It’s not so much that I’m trying to understand existence or myself, as that the exercise of my intelligence in understanding a text written by a great mind is enjoyable. And I have a persistent wish to become a great writer myself, so I like to read the material and remind myself that I enjoy it for the comparatively limited understanding I find I have while I read. That’s not to say I don’t often have overarching insights that place the context of a passage within the history of philosophy, or otherwise come to understand it in relation to other of the author’s works I’m familiar with. There are all sorts of referential instances I experience by which I know I’m a good reader, but I’m just as good at inferring from the like that the author is beyond what I can hope to do myself.

Challenging my own beliefs like that keeps me sane and sound, two qualities far better than any imagined greatness. Reading goes better, however, when that tension between a presumption of genius, and a careful accounting of what really happens as I read, is fully forgotten and overcome, so I appreciate my getting over It and encountering a text freely. Novels and poetry, too. And I ‘ve been reading a lot of fly fishing books by John Gierach, summer and fall 2025, and have read many other essays on fishing, too. Thomas McGuaine, Christopher Camuto, Zane Grey, Ted Leeson, Will Ryan, all of these names have written material that enthralls me, as have many others. Besides reading, I deeply enjoy stage plays, and though a movie in the theater can absorb my attention, I infrequently watch television.

Most of you will be interested in only one of the blog categories, though all three are interrelated. Rather than suffering the pain of a fragmented life, all of my interests imply the others. Nothing’s tested me more than building this website has of recent. Before, it was always my job at the supermarket I would rather have done without. Building this website has also been a job, although the actual work on the site itself I’ve enjoyed. The building of it has been creative. It’s all the figuring it out beforehand by use of Google AI that got annoying.