I’m going to get things rolling here with an introduction to the regular cast of characters who’ll be populating the Shallows, starting with me. I am the author, after all. The blogger. The dad.

Shortly after I made this blog active, I was reading about blogging strategies (yes after), and the best suggestion I came across in the advice soup of the Internet was to make sure your blog has a point. A goal. A purpose.

My two personal life goals (verifiable by friends and co-workers) are to save sharks and end rape, though not necessarily in that order. Those are lofty endeavors, sure, but I think they’re good ones. I may someday start two blogs dedicated to those respective efforts (or one blog devoted to both), but this blog’s primary purpose will be to present a picture (and a hastily sketched one at that) of fatherhood. I don’t intend to portray myself as a fathering guru, nor as a parenting expert, nor as the very model of a modern social-media-savvy dad. All I have are my stories, my experiences, and my creepy, cockeyed doodles.

My secondary purpose will be to entertain. If I think it’s funny when my 6-year-old daughter watches Han Solo moving in on Princess Leia and shouts, “Don’t kiss him! Only kiss Luke!” I figure other people might think it’s funny, too.

My tertiary purpose will be to earn a lot of money doing this. (I may need to scale this stated purpose back a bit.)

And if some sharks are saved and some of our society’s rape culture is dismantled along the way, well, I couldn’t ask for anything more.

I could, however, ask you what you’d hope to see on a blog such as mine. Got any requests?