Publisher and Preacher

I’m in a weird spot as far as personality types go. I’m a classic introvert who doesn’t especially enjoy going out and being around people I don’t know, and generally the bigger the group activity, the less I want to do it.

Activities like these seem to give more energy to the more extroverted people I know, but social interactions sap my energy. It’s a one-way street for me.

And yet! I am equally compelled to share what’s in my mind with other people, and amusing people seems to bring me delight. I yearn for feedback, too: I want to make sure my ideas are being heard and not just passing through the cosmos.

I’ve realized that I enjoy interacting with other people quite a lot, just on my own terms. I don’t like to be surprised by social interactions. This limits my options to preaching and publishing, the way I see it.

Preaching is getting in front of a group to disseminate your message. This manifests these days in my teaching group jiu jitsu classes, but there’s a long tradition of preaching in the Smith family:

On your first birthday, a Bible and a hammer were placed in front of you. If you went for the Bible, then you were going to be a preacher. If you went for the hammer, then you were going to be a carpenter.

Preaching gives me the ability to coordinate the time I’m in front of other people, so I can be prepared in advance and breeze through my routine. By contrast, publishing lets me put something out there that I want to say right now, but gives other people time to experience the publication.

As such, I want to catalog the things I’ve published during my lifetime. This list won’t be comprehensive because there are just too many things for me to remember, and I’ve lost track of some projects. Still, I hope this is as fun for you as it is for me. Since these are my memories, I’m at an advantage in the fun department, so I’ll try to intersperse some fun GIFs and pics of things I’ve published.

In fifth grade, our teacher had us create yearbooks from cardboard and paper. Instead of paying for a collection of printed yearbooks for an elementary school, this DIY solution showed me that it was possible to make something that was kinda-sorta as good as something professionally published. At any rate, it would serve a similar purpose.

I think this project gave me the confidence to try making my own zine a couple years later, once I had gotten to know my friend Tim well. With Tim’s help, we created a publication of sorts that was like Mad Magazine for rumors and information about what was going on at our middle school, from the kids’ perspective.

I don’t have a picture of this, but for some reason the zine was called The Blue Dolphin. You’ll have to imagine something even more incredible than my 5th grade yearbook for this visual. The difference here is that this was for mass consumption, meaning we made copies of the pages and then stapled them together. Our distribution network might have been a handful of friends, but it was a publication for the masses in principle.

That zine, in turn, gave me the confidence to publish a punk zine with other folks, where I interviewed a local band and wrote a column or two, and figured out how to configure the pages and stuff like that. The earlier practice helped.

In turn, this practice made it easier for me to publish my own zine, where I interviewed the legendary punk band The Misfits, among other things.

That publication gave me confidence to tackle writing and publishing on the early web, and so I learned how to build websites during the late 90s. This seemed like a very natural extension of DIY publishing to me: you could reach an audience that few people were reaching, but it was going to take some elbow grease.

I was motivated enough! My band was semi-professional now, and we wanted to have a web presence, and so I built a page with the very basic HTML and Netscape Composer tools I had at my disposal—keep in mind that uploading a single image was a bit of a feat at this point, but having any knowledge of how to build stuff on the web was scarce and potentially valuable.

Web publishing led to e-commerce, which led to more web publishing. With the help of my friend Aaric, we turned my passion into a much more serious career. I was becoming an authority on MMA and jiu jitsu by virtue of writing about it a lot, but also: I really was an expert of sorts since this knowledge truly was scarce.

NHB Fights was the MMA arm, and BJJ News was the jiu jitsu arm of my publication empire. By “empire” I mean that I got to travel and spend my time doing things I enjoyed for a lot of this time, but also: it was a ton of work. Fortunately, I had a ton of bandwidth to match.

Writing and publishing web stuff about jiu jitsu events made it a natural fit for me to write more about jiu jitsu technique and theory, and many of those articles eventually became a book that I had a hand in publishing. Some of those articles were initially conceived on Hubpages, where I practiced writing and publishing for several years.

Eventually, BJJ Path evolved from the technical side of article writing. I think this is going to be rebuilt entirely soon, but for now it’s still a really useful encyclopedia of my jiu jitsu mind, in a manner of speaking, and our instructors and students reference it all the time.

Here on Substack, the itch to publish things gets scratched every single day, and I’m grateful. I get comments from smart folks (love you guys!), but I don’t have to respond to anything immediately. This place scratches my current publisher itch.

Over the decades, I’ve published writing, music, and videos of all stripes, and I can’t seem to help myself. The medium I use hasn’t been nearly as important as the message, but I’ve enjoyed trying to figure out the best way to get that message out through each medium.