Wow. I just noticed that my WordPress post count on DaddyTales has reached 1000. That’s a number that’s pretty hard to believe, so much so that I’m going to take a break from my regular storytelling and take a moment to talk about the DaddyTales themselves…

I started DaddyTales on April 13th, 2005 with this introduction. I had one goal in mind, and that was to tell fun stories. I wasn’t interested in politics or the blogging community. I just wanted to tell stories about my kids.

I did have a few ground rules for myself. First, I was never going to embarrass anyone. There are no “dumb kid” stories in these tales, nor are there any stories that are insulting to my wife. I’m the only character who ever gets to look like an idiot. Also, everyone in the family has veto power. If I write something and someone says “take that down,” it gets taken down.

Finally, my wife told me that she absolutely did not want me to use the kids’ names online. Instead, I used their initials.

When the Seminole Chronicle picked me up in 2006, I realized that I couldn’t use the kids’ initials in the newspaper, so I started trying to figure out how to write the tales without using names at all. It was a fun (and challenging) writing exercise. How do you write stories about people without ever using their names? It took me a while to figure it out.

With the Chronicle, I started out trying to write a column that was a mashup of a daddytale and a review of a local business. Sort of a “here’s a fun story, and look at this cool restaurant” kind of thing. After a few columns, though, Alex (my editor at the time) told me “skip the reviews. People love the stories for the stories.”

It was both humbling and exciting. Sure, I’d bungled the review side of things, but the stories, apparently, were working.

At some point, I recognize that the Daddytales will have to stop. As the kids get older, the chance of them being embarrassed by them increases. As soon as that happens, I’ll have to put an end to them (the stories, not the kids).

Until then, though, I’m going to keep on writing. Life is just too funny to do anything else.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!