About Rich Lane

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I guess introductions are in order

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Written by Rich Lane

Sunday, 30 March 2008 19:26

This "about me" stuff is the most awkward part of putting together a personal website. How much do you as the reader want to know? How much do you need to know? At what point does it go from helpful background information to babble? Do I talk about myself in the third person like an omniscient narrator of my own life?

"Rich Lane is an English teacher in a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania. "

That just feels weird to me. There's an aura of pompousness there I'm not comfortable with. So do I abandon the illusion of a narrator and talk about myself in the first person? Seems more natural, but there's the potential to try to get too clever and become enamored to the sound my own "voice." Still of the two choices, I guess I'll go with natural.

Hi.

My name is Richard R. Lane. You can call me Rich or even "Ricardo" (my wife's name for me) if you like. I answer to both. Don't ask me my middle name. I won't tell you until I get to know you better.

I'm in my mid-forties, and I teach high school English in Pennsylvania (didn't the omniscient narrator already say that?). I've been doing this for more than fifteen years now, and I enjoy it quite a bit despite the No Child Left Behind Act and it's efforts to thoroughly drain any kind of individual thought from education.

I was born and raised in PA, but I lived for most of the 80s in Albuquerque, NM, where I received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of New Mexico and met my wife Dolores. We moved back to Pennsylvania in 1989, and I picked up my teaching credentials from Edinboro University. Dolores and I have four kids, Dale, Linda, Patrick, and Kathleen, as well as a feisty Lhasa Apso named Scooberto Antonio Doo Lane.

Like many bloggers, I'm an aspiring writer. I did manage to check at least one thing off my "Things to do before I die" list a few years ago; I wrote professional for Wizard magazine for almost a year right before the bottom dropped out of the comics market and they had to cut all their freelancers. Currently I'm working on a comic book that I hope to pitch to publishers soon. As that's a big part of the reason for this blog, you'll probably be able to read quite a bit about the process here.

The title of this blog comes from my favorite poem, "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, specifically the lines:

I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.

I like that idea, the notion that as you get closer to what you are seeking, new vistas coax you out ever further. It's a good way to live your life, be it physically, intellectually or spiritually.

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