So... what's new with you?
by Bob Collins

(May 10, 2007) -- My oldest son left home when he was 18. I knew since he was old enough to walk that he would leave much earlier than I had anticipated. As a little kid, he was always straining to get ahead of me, the sooner to see what was around the next corner. When I'd drop him off at school... he'd go running up the walk to the door, turn around and wave, and then keep running in. Then one day he stopped waving, and kept walking. Behind the joy of every parent, I can tell you, there's a struggle going on -- to remember what holding them as babies like little footballs feels like, to pretend that -- especially in their cute years -- they'll always be cute. It's a struggle because it doesn't last and it's not supposed to. It becomes a race to absorb as much of them as you can each day, because each day, they're much different than the day before.

This week I said "see you later" (but not goodbye) to another son: The RV Builder's Hotline. I knew when I started it in March 2006 that sooner or later -- probably earlier than I anticipated -- I'd let it go too. That's what I do. I like to experiment and try things out to see if they work, get them going, and then hand them off to the world and see what happens.

Now, a lot of folks who do this for a living have made a pretty good fortune with this technique. The difference between them and me is they know how to actually do something, and I know only how to write about it.

Earlier this week, if you've been following closely, I decided that it was time to let the RV Builder's Hotline go. I had experimented long enough, had developed it about as far as I could, enjoyed it like watching a small child grow, and ran out of time to give it the attention it would need in its next stage.

I never dreamed the announcement would result in the kind of response that came in. Lots of nice people -- that's you -- saying very nice things (a few of them deserved, most of them not). "Should I reconsider?" I thought to myself on Tuesday, because, hey, I've got an ego too, you know.

But I also have a brain and the same analysis of my time and priorities that led me to announce on Monday that the Hotline was now too much, kept reminding me that that part hasn't changed. When you're the online news editor of a 24/7 Web site, you basically have to be a 24/7 worker, at least if you have any integrity and believe in what you're doing.

This is a perfectly awful time to be in the media business, but here I am at 53 and I don't really get to choose these things anymore. Plus there are other things I want -- and need -- to do, like build an RV-7A (preferably the one that's half-built in my garage), hop rides with other RVers to fly-ins (yes, that is, in fact, a huge hint I'm dropping), take my wife to San Francisco, get the dandelions out of the lawn and finish the deck in the backyard.

The Hotline consumes about 20-25 hours a week to do it right and unlike my airplane construction so far, I don't really want to do anything without doing it right.

Then Rob Riggen called. Rob, as I've mentioned before, wrote the architecture that gets the Hotline into your INBOX every week, and he's always thinking. He had some ideas for keeping the Hotline going. And it became clear pretty quickly that he was the best one to keep it going. He's going to write some more programs that somehow magically acquire a lot of the material I found the old fashioned way, and augment it with other material. And I'm going to be involved, too. The best way to describe it, I guess, would be 'contributing editor.' I'd like to keep writing the occasional original article -- with more time to build, I should have more articles about how to fix screw-ups -- and I've grown rather fond of banging out this particular column (for which I'll need a name, I guess)when the mood strikes. I see a column that involves more mailbag material, you are all newsworthy and deserve to be exposed for the RV pioneers you are. But Rob's your man for the job.

I hope one of the magic wands Rob builds is a tool of some sort you can use to submit material that you find in your weekly browsings too. See a great thread on VAF? Submit. Find or have a photo? Submit. Stumble across a building tip at the EAA chapter meeting? Submit. Hotline is, after all, an aggregator of other great sites and works. The hard part is finding them, which is too bad because there's a lot of it out there.

Chances are, however, that I won't be doing as much building as I plan on doing. There's always something else to try. Just this afternoon, ironically enough, the boss called me into his office and told me he wants me to get "out of the newsroom" and create a new method of marrying the Public Radio audience with the Internet audience. To go where I want to go and write essays and develop something -- we're not sure what -- that will allow me to create a bond between reader, listener and, I guess, me. It's something I've wanted to do for awhile but didn't think any media organization would take a chance on it. But, frankly, MPR is not just any media organization. Who knows, maybe this'll end up being the next Prairie Home Companion.

"What if it fails?" I said to him.

"In the nine months I've been here, I've pretty much seen that everything you touch turns to gold," he said.

He's obviously never been in my garage.