Writing Newsletter Third Quarter 2025

 

This quarter, I wrote “Too Stupid” and “Sacrifices Must Be Made” as part of my Monthly Stories.  The reason there’s only two stories, is I didn’t post one in September.  I started two or three stories, but didn’t finish any because of burnout, and probably a few other reasons.  But the most recent story I started – which still doesn’t have a title – I’m 99.9% certain I’ll finish it up and post it as my October story.  My Ko-fi post for this quarter was my story “Perchance to Dream.” On one of my blogs, I posted the stories “Bated Breath” and “The Fall,” as well as reposted the story “Star-Spangled Ploy.” I also posted the poem “Nighttime Vision” on my Mastodon profile.

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If I counted correctly, this quarter I posted one new microfiction as well as reposted one.  I also posted two new haiku, and reposted three.  The microfictions can be found on my Untitled Works Page, and the haikus on my Haiku Page.  The low numbers are a result of general writing burnout, as well as 114 other projects in the garden and around the house.  Not to mention all the videos, and shows, and videos about the shows that somebody has to watch.

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I’ve been meaning to polish up a story and post it on Draft2Digital, but hopefully things will slow down enough in this next quarter that I’ll finally get around to it.

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Image from Pixabay.

An idea for a story anthology for people more organized than I

A month or so ago, I was at work hating my job, when the phrase “A world not ruled by money,” came to mind.  I started thinking about it, but had to stop because I was depressing myself.  But I had the great idea of an anthology of stories based on the prompt of “A world not ruled by money.” That is a great idea, but for somebody else to do it.  I don’t have the patience, organizational skills, or money to do such a thing.  (While the stories would be about a world not ruled by money, we unfortunately live in one that is, so selected stories should get something, even if it’s just $10.) So if you are a person who could put something like that together, please do.  And then let me know so I might submit a story.

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To show why I was getting depressed, here was what I was thinking.  I was just getting an idea for the world, I hadn’t figured out a story for it, yet.  I’m not worried about someone stealing this idea, because one possibility would be to have all the stories set in the same world, and this could be it.

So in this world, everyone gets, say 1000 Credits each month.  Someone could have a modest one-bedroom apartment with water, electricity, and internet, all the healthy food they’d want without any worry of going hungry, no worry about any medications they need, and they could take classes – online or at a university – either for a degree or just out of interest, and once a week they could hang out with friends at a bar, or a game, as well as have a date night of dinner and a movie, all for, say 900 Credits a month.  And with what they save up they could go on a vacation or two each year.  Basically, you could live a healthy happy life without much trouble.

Now if you wanted a car, or a house, or more vacations, you’d have to get a job.  In this world a lot of the manufacturing jobs would be done by machines, so humans would be left to the more human jobs.  Skilled jobs – doctors, teachers, etc. – you’d have some set schedule, but a full-time job would only be like 15-20 hours a week.  For “unskilled” jobs – wait staff, janitors, etc. – it might be the company would have a list of workers and they would call them up and ask, “Can you work five hours on Thursday?” Some people might stick to one company, but I can also see people working at a different place each week.   

The beginning idea for the story I had, was a “Day in the Life of” type.  Character wakes up, not with an alarm but they just wake up, and they have breakfast.  Then they get on a subway to go into town.  Their phone has a cracked screen, so they stop at the phone store to have it replaced, and maybe they put in a new battery since it’s a couple years old.  Because if the phone companies weren’t so motivated for you to buy a whole new phone, they’d be easy to repair.  And maybe they get a call to see if they could come in to work in a store because someone is sick, and they go in and it’s a pleasant experience. 

This is where things started to depressing for me, because there are so many weird things the store I work in does in the name of capitalism.  Like, we have different sized drinks, but the bottles twice as large cost half as much because they’re not cold.  People want a cold drink, so they’ll buy the more expensive version because it’s “convenient.” And I don’t know how much of my time is spent just dealing with putting up and taking down sales.  The point of sales is take the $5 item that you don’t really need and would normally walk past and make it 2 for $9 and you think, “That’s a deal!” so you get two of these things that probably only cost $0.50 to make.  Shit like that wouldn’t happen in a world not ruled by money. 

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So that’s the interesting idea I had.  But unless somebody puts together such an anthology, I can’t afford to put time and effort into it.

Random Writing Tips – Shameless Self Promotion

Back when Twitter was still a thing, I had two accounts.  One was my personal account for everything, and one was just for writing.  After a couple years of trial, I ended up with a way to promote my books.  For each of my books, I worked up fifteen or so tweets with the title and link.  Most were nearly identical, with me just rearranging the order of hashtags.  One day, on my personal account I’d tweet out something for Book X, and the next day on my writing account, I’d tweet out something for Book Y.  And I’d just go back and forth.  The reason I did different books was to try to see which account I got more sales from, but what usually happened is someone would buy Book Z.  I knew what I was doing was just screaming into the void, but it was Twitter, that’s what you did.

When I went to Mastodon, and later Bluesky, I was tempted to just do the same thing.  But I saw a lot of posts going on and on about how these sites didn’t want to just carry over the bad stuff from Twitter.  So I held back, and only occasionally promoted my books.  Was that the reason my sales – not great to begin with – basically disappeared?  Probably, although I will admit there are other real world reasons people aren’t spending money on ebooks from Amazon. 

Lately, I’ve been trying to do more shameless self promotion of my books.  But I don’t want to just go back to my Twitter system.  Occasionally, I’ll get a follow from someone and when I check out their profile it’s just post after post after post for their book, and it’s like, I want to block ads, not follow an account that is nothing but ads.  On Twitter, I did other things so it was more, ad for a book, funny video, ad for a book, thought provoking video, and so on.  But my latest attempts at self promotion have been … barely noticeable.  It’s more like, funny video, link to a story I wrote on my blog a couple years ago, thought provoking video, ad for a book, and so on.  Instead of doing very little, I’m trying to do a little bit of everything to see if anything works for me.  Early results are … nothing’s working, but some of my ideas I’ve only started a week or two ago. 

Promoting myself is like pulling teeth.  Yes, I did stuff on Twitter, but that was basic, simple and ultimately of little value.  Can I find a way that works and that I can actually do?  Only time will tell.  But, for now at least, I’m trying to do something.  Which has to count.  Right?

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How was this a tip?  Oh, ah, don’t limit yourself to what you’ve done before or are comfortable with.

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Image from Pixabay.

Some thoughts on AI “art”

A couple years ago, when ChatGPT first came out, most of the news about it I saw was just that it was terrible.  I think it took a few months for the main story I saw about it being that it was stealing work.  Anyway, I was hearing about how AI “stories” were terrible, and I had the idea of a writer who took an AI “story” as a first draft and edited it into a real story.  (Like all your story ideas are groundbreaking.)  But a few seconds after I had the idea, I wondered if life should imitate art and I should edit whatever the AI gave me.  So I found a site that let you get a sample of AI writing, and made a prompt along the lines of “Make a short story with aliens.” It started spitting out words, but after a paragraph or so I stopped it because it was basically gibberish.  Polishing this turd into something halfway decent would take longer than just writing a halfway decent story.  I know some will say I needed a better prompt along the lines of, “Make a short story about aliens in the style of Hemingway,” or whatever, but in the time it would take me to learn how best to use AI, I could just learn better time management skills so I could spend more time writing.  That is the only time I’ve ever tried to use AI for anything, and I never got around to writing that story.

Now you probably expect the standard screed against any and all things AI.  But I know that “AI” seems to just be a term applied to any fancy computer program.  Some of these may have merit, especially in regards to number crunching and pattern recognition.  I imagine someone having an “AI” look at tens of thousands of medical records and finding possible connections.  Like, maybe it would find evidence that having a banana a day cuts your chance of dying from a heart attack by 2%, but increases your chance of getting colon cancer by 1%.  This evidence, like all evidence, would need to be studied further in tests to see if there is an actual link or if it is all coincidence.  That type of AI I don’t mind.  As long as the medical records are used ethically and the results aren’t blindly taken as fact. 

The AI I do mind is what is used for “art,” and especially for writing.  There is a crafting-side to writing, which on my best days I’d still rank myself as below average, and there’s a business-side to writing, which I’ve largely failed.  My … disgust I guess at AI “art” is that they’ve cranked the business-side dial to 11 while also cranking the crafting-side dial to 0, or even -11.  In the time it takes me to craft a story that will make $X, an AI can “write” a billion stories that are all worthless, but each one only needs to make a penny or two for them to add up to $100X.  And in a world run by “More money is more gooder,” people, there will just be more and more well-crafted stories buried in a sea of AI slop. 

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I had an idea for this post, but it didn’t go in that direction.  So there may be future installments where I give my thoughts on other aspects of AI.  I’m sure you’re really looking forward to that.

Random Writing Tips – Blog lists

 

The basic reason I write these Random Writing Tips posts, is the idea that the more things I have out on the internet, the more likely someone will stumble upon them, learn that I exist, be interested enough to buy some of my books, and I make a tiny fraction of the money I make from my hated day job.  I guess there’s also the hope of building up a friendly group of fellow creatives.  But instead of just writing posts on random topics, I’m trying to write some that are loosely connected under the topic of Writing Tips. 

That’s nice, but why am I telling you that?  Well, I was trying to think of a tip to write up for this month and I had an idea.  But after thinking about it for a bit, I wasn’t sure if it was a new idea.  When I first started these, I kept a list of the posts I had done, but I’d forget to update it and whenever I remembered I had to add the last four or five posts.  (So, I have a Word doc for Writing Tips.  The first page or two has the tips I’ve started writing, and then there’s like four pages of ideas, and then I have the archive.  But I rarely scroll that far down, which is why I keep forgetting about it.) So to see if I had done the idea before, I had to click the Random Writing Tips label in the blog, and scroll through all the posts.  And while I did find that the new idea was new, it was very similar to an old idea. 

This took a few minutes of my time, which isn’t that bad, but I did wonder if I could do something better.  I also may have just needed a little project I could work on for a few days.  So I made my Random Writing Tips List page.  It’s just a list of all my writing tips, along with the day they were posted and a brief description.  So now when I get an idea, instead of spending a few minutes scrolling through my blog to see if I’d done it before, I can spend a minute scrolling down a page. 

Cool.  But does this really warrant a blog on writing tips?  Well, if you write a blog where you review movies, it makes sense to have a list of what movies you’ve reviewed somewhere, either sorted by release date, genre, however you score them, whatever.  But if you’re doing something as nebulous as Random Writing Tips, you may not think to keep a list.  And a list makes it easier for people to check out whatever tips sound interesting without having to scroll through my blog.  Will this list increase the chance someone will buy one of my books?  There’s no way to tell, but it can’t hurt.

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Image from Pixabay.

Save America EBook Sale

I think for the past decade, every Fourth of July I’ve had a sale for some of my ebooks.  Which ones vary over the years, but Political Pies, my collection of forty short stories of a political nature, is always included.  The sale is usually just to mark the Fourth of July, but this year – with an ever-quickening slide into authoritarianism – I’m making it a Save America Sale.

How will my ebooks save America?  Well, I could argue that most of my stories are science fiction and show worlds where very alien aliens have learned to live and work together, thus showing the idiocy of people being upset their neighbor doesn’t have the exact same shade of skin color.  But really, my ebooks don’t contain some magic formula to save America.  It’s just a nice gesture.  If you’re fighting authoritarianism, then it’s likely you read, so here is a collection of free ebooks you can pick up.

In previous years, I’ve had sales at points throughout the year where I asked people to also register to vote or to vote.  But apparently, offering anything to get people to register or to vote is technically illegal.  I doubt they’d go after some unknown author giving away free ebooks, but I’m also not a billionaire who can just bribe his way out of problems.  So for this Save America Sale, I’m not asking anyone to do anything.  If you do decide to register to vote, or run for office, or march in the streets, that is entirely on you.  But if you have some time waiting for the march to get going, some of these ebooks are collections of short stories you can read in a few minutes. 

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From Tuesday July 1st through Saturday July 5th, the following eight ebooks will be free to download.

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Rise

“Rise” is a standalone story set in my Human Republic Universe. The story follows the events after the tragic deaths of the colonists on a small colony in a distant star system.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

The Only Certainty

On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, The Only Certainty follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.

Lonely Phoenix

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

The Future is Coming

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

Writing Newsletter Second Quarter 2025

 

This quarter I continued writing a story each month on my website, publishing, “On Your Sleeve,” “Mountain out of a Molehill,” and “Black Sheep.” My Ko-fi post for this quarter was reposting the poem “For the Public Health.” On one of my blogs, I posted the stories “Someday” and “A Sealed Fate.” I also reposted my poem “Loss” on my Mastodon profile.

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If I counted correctly, this quarter I posted one new microfiction as well as reposted four old ones, and posted four new haiku.  The microfictions can be found on my Untitled Works Page, and the haikus on my Haiku Page.  These were fewer than in previous quarters in large part because I’ve been overworked trying to get stuff going in my garden.  I do what I can in between rain showers, and the few days it doesn’t rain it’s in the 90s, so I can only do so much before I have to stop.  But the weeds keep growing.

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Last quarter I hinted that I might publish a story on Draft2Digital.  Well, I started polishing up the story, and then there was just so much bad shit going on that I became somewhat disinterested.  And then all the garden stuff, so I still have a story that needs polishing.  Will I get around to it in the next three months?  We’ll have to see.

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Image from Pixabay.

Thoughts on Doctor Who

In the past year or so, I’ve gotten into “First Time Watching” videos on YouTube.  Basically, some 20-something will film themselves watching The Terminator, or Iron Man, or whatever and post a half-hour long video of their biggest gasps or reactions.  What I find appealing about these, is they will be watching a favorite movie of mine, but one I haven’t seen for a decade, and it’s like I’m watching it again with … not a friend, but a person I vaguely know who has no idea I even exist.  Also, I forget how many people I’ve seen shocked at the “chest burster” scene.  That’s fun. 

There are twenty or so of these reactors I follow on YouTube.  And recently, four of them have either started watching Doctor Who or I just found them.  So I’ve been seeing the highlights of these … not old-old Doctor Who episodes, and since season … whatever just ended, I figured now was as good a time as any to write up some of my thoughts on the show.

First off, back during the time of the Tenth Doctor, if you had asked for my Top 10 TV shows, Doctor Who would have made the cut.  Now, I almost need to be reminded it exists.  For me, I’d say the Tenth Doctor was peak, and it’s been going down – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – since then.  If you asked why I thought that, I’d say I think the writing isn’t as good.  But if you then asked for concrete examples, I could only shrug.  Because it’s all subjective.  For example, there is an episode that started strong, I thought had an interesting premise and I was eager for the mystery to be solved.  And then the episode kind of petered out and ended.  So it’s an episode that I do not care for.  But, the one First Time Watcher who is far enough ahead to have seen it, loved it.  And I think when it first came out the “consensus” was that half the people loved it while half hated it.  And I was just in the hated half.  And that just seems to be where I always end up.

I understand that no book, song, TV show whatever will be loved by everyone.  That’s … life.  But the more I thought about it, I think what happened with Doctor Who is it’s not just they have more episodes I dislike than like, but they keep going back to the episodes I dislike.  There will be an episode I don’t care for, but instead of letting me move on and forget all about it, four episodes later, that villain comes back and is just as lame and uninteresting.  Or next season there’s a sequel episode, or two seasons later this character I’ve completely forgotten about comes back to play a super important role and I’m just confused trying to remember who they are.  And while there are some characters I’d like to see return, I would rather have more new stuff with less callbacks. 

If, somehow, the people at Doctor Who see this, all I ask is they do more new stuff.  New, good stuff.  Stories where the villain isn’t one dimensional, or the mystery is “solved” in a satisfactory way instead of just petering out in some artsy-fartsy way.  And if you do bring things back, maybe do them in a way where we don’t need to have watched fourteen episodes over the last fifty years to know what’s going on.  You have all of time and space to work with.  Do something new, that’s also good.

Random Writing Tips – Maybe write bad stories

 

I’ve easily read over a thousand short stories.  I have numerous short story collections, and I used to subscribe to a couple magazines that published 10-12 stories each issue and I read all of them.  Now I am terrible with titles or names of authors, but if you had me describe the plot of a story, I probably remember … fifty or so.  But if you handed me a story I read a decade ago but couldn’t remember, there’s a fifty-fifty chance I’d remember something as I was reading it.

This all came up recently, because there is a short story I really enjoyed and I wanted to find it.  Partly just to reread it, but also to see if it was online anywhere so I could share it, since it has some relevance to everything going on in the world now.  But I can’t remember what it was called, or who wrote it, or what magazine it was in.  And when I searched for it using basic terms that fit the story, it turned out there is a novel with that basic term as a title, which were all the results.  So I’m still searching for that story.  If I ever find it, I’ll come back and leave a note.

Now what does all that have to do with the title of this post?  Well, of the hundreds of stories I read in those magazines, that one story is the only one I remember truly enjoying.  The dozen or so other stories I remember I … disliked to hated.  Which means, most of the stories I read I don’t remember because they were just okay.  Maybe okay good, or okay bad, but ultimately forgettable.  The vast majority of the stories I remember, I remember because I did not like them.  Like, there’s a story about this futuristic sports doping scandal that falls apart because the people that spent time and money on this doping technology forgot to tell the athlete they needed to train differently.  Or the group that built a time machine and are sending someone back to study this lost civilization decide on the loose cannon with no training over anyone better qualified.  Or the President who hints multiple times they have a secret plan for world peace, but when they have to reveal it, it’s just we’re going to bomb people who disagree with us.  And they weren’t a “How the hell did this asshole become President?” type, but someone up until then shown to be diplomatic and understanding of the power of their position. 

I was thinking about all of this, and I realized that maybe writers should write a bad story, just in case it gets published and someone remembers it because they disliked it.  I mean, being remember that way is probably easier than being remembered for writing a good story.  Something to think about.

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Image from Pixabay.

An interesting history YouTube channel

I have an interest in history.  There’s the standard WWII and ancient Rome, but also the history of spaceflight, technology, and anything dealing with the hundred or so other minor interests I have.  As such, I follow I don’t know how many YouTube history channels.  But for this post, I want to talk about one in particular: Cambrian Chronicles, the “number one Welsh history channel on YouTube.”

It was probably about a year ago, I was on some video and I scrolled down to read some comments, when one of the recommended videos on the side caught my eye.  I forget what it was, but it was probably something like “The Lost Welsh Kingdom.” I’ve never taken one of those DNA tests to see where I’m from, but growing up I heard my family was mostly German with some Irish and English.  So there’s probably some Welsh in there as well.  And for some reason, at the time the idea of a lost kingdom or whatever sounded interesting.  So I checked out the video, enjoyed it, and followed a new channel.

I would say that a “typical” Cambrian Chronicles video would be there’s a manuscript from the year 750 that names a dozen Welsh kings.  We have “good” historical records for ten of them.  Here’s the best evidence/theory for the other two.  And we go through five or six other ancient manuscripts to piece together how something was likely mistranslated or the truth is likely right out in the open, but nobody noticed.  A good actual video is The Royal Title that No One Can Remember.  Basically, there’s a list of a dozen or so people with a “title” that can’t be translated.  We don’t know why these people were called it, or why other similar people weren’t. 

All of this is interesting, but why talk about it in a blog about writing?  For one, someone could easily write a story where that Royal Title just meant that they were aliens, and nobody could argue about it because the historical record doesn’t say otherwise.  But more importantly, hearing about kings or kingdoms that – a thousand years later – we only know existed because of some scraps of parchment, is a reminder of how … temporary our existence is.  Hell, given enough time, Shakespeare will be forgotten.  I believe most people know that, on some level, but few have come to grips with that reality.  And right now, too many people are ignoring reality for all our detriment.

Random Writing Tips – Repost your stories

 

Ten or fifteen years ago, I came across a site where you would post a blog/story/whatever, and for every view it got you would get a penny.  So I started posting whatever I could thing of to get some money.  In the following few years, I found a dozen or so such sites.  Some I actually did get money from, but others would have like a $5 payout minimum, and I’d be at $4.50 and they’d go belly-up.  All the sites I knew of eventually died, and I don’t know if such sites still exist.  I imagine they’d be quickly overrun by AI crap. 

Anyway, besides all the general posts about movies and society and whatnot, I also posted some of my stories.  For the simple reason that if someone read one and liked it, maybe they’d go and buy some of my books.  I don’t know how successful that was, but it did lead to some issues.  For one, most publishers won’t take previously published works.  Even stories posted on little known sites that died after three months, count as previously published. 

So what to do with a bunch of stories I can’t submit to publishers?  Some I republished myself as part of a collection.  But that still leaves a bunch of stories.  These may not be the very best of my writing – since those stories I put in collections – but they’re not garbage.  Well, most of them aren’t garbage, hopefully.  But instead of letting them gather dust in a forgotten corner of my hard drive, I’ve started reposting them, mostly on my blogs.  Because the main reason I still post stories is to give a free taste of my writing so maybe someone will check out and buy one my books.  And while writing a new story each month for my blog would be fantastic, there is this thing called life that often gets in the way.  So these okay stories that I can’t really do much else with, are prefect to fill in the busy months.  I spent who knows how much time working on them, I might as well get as much use from them as I can.

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Image from Pixabay.

What counts as writing?

Many years ago, I read some famous author saying that to make a living as a writer, you needed to treat writing like a job.  You punch in, do the work, day in and day out.  A few years ago, I was trying to think of some way to boost my writing, so I decided to try making it a job.  The first thing I needed to figure out was how many hours a week I wanted to write.  I quickly decided on 42, because that works out to six hours a day, and it’s also The Answer.  If I had six hours a day to write, that would be great, but I also have a part time job to pay the bills.  So instead of trying for 42 hours of writing each week, I go for 42 minus however many hours I work that week.  (I’ve also started counting my commuting time.)  So this gives me my weekly goal of hours of writing.

But what exactly is an hour of writing?  If I sat down and started typing, “Chapter 1, It was a dark and stormy night,” and continued for an hour, we’d agree that would count as writing.  (I never said it had to be good writing.)  But what if I sat down the next day and spent an hour revising what I had written?  Would that also count as an hour of writing?  I decided that, no an hour of revising would only count as thirty minutes of “writing.” I set this up years ago as a trial and I’ve just continued to do it, so I don’t remember my exact reasonings, but I believe it is because I can get stuck just doing revision after revision after revision.  Part of my goal was to put more words on the page, not just polishing the ones already there.  By only counting revising as half the time, I should be more motivated to write stories.

But what about blogging?  Some of my blogs are just random thoughts I’d like to put out to the world, but I have to admit part of it is the hope that someone goes, “This guy has an interesting take on … exploring Mercury, I wonder what their fiction is like.” It’s a slim hope, but we have to do what we can.  Just to keep things simple, I decided that an hour of blogging would also only count as thirty minutes of writing.  Even blogs about writing, which I don’t care to think too much about otherwise I’ll give myself a headache.

The final writing related thing I decided to count as writing, is social media crap.  Because it doesn’t really matter how many stories or blogs I write if they’re never seen by anyone.  So I spent time each week on Mastodon and Bluesky, just trying to find new people who might take an interest in anything of mine.  But I do see spending time on social media as less important than blogging, and so I don’t waste too much time, an hour on social media I only count as six minutes of “writing.”

I’ve been doing this for years, and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually hit my goal.  I think the only time I came close was when I picked up some extra shifts and worked thirty-some hours, meaning I only needed to write for a couple hours that week.  But even then I don’t know if I made it because I also basically have a third job of taking care of a bunch of stuff around the house, which usually leaves me too tired to do anything but veg in front of a screen binging shows or YouTube videos. 

I still write, just not as much as I want to.  I guess I need to come up with some new motivation to make sure I put in the time.  Any suggestions?

3,000 Days!

If I’ve mathed correctly, then today – after I spent ten minutes polishing up a story just after 1 AM – marks the 3,000th day that I’ve “written” something.  Apparently, the last day I didn’t “write” was January 26, 2017.  Which, you have to admit, is rather impressive.

You’ll note that I did say “written” something, because to be perfectly honest there were probably hundreds of those days where I wasn’t feeling well, or had 8,000 other things going on, so I just opened up whatever story I was working on, typed “And they lived happily ever after,” and called it a day knowing full well that would be deleted the next time I got around to actually working on the story.  Not to mention the days when I realized I hadn’t written something about 11:55 PM, and just went and changed a word just to say I did something.

A few months ago I wrote a post on You’re allowed “sick” days, where I talked about writing every day and I didn’t know if I’d continue after hitting 3,000 days.  Now that I’m here … I mean, it’s not that far off to ten years. 

Random Writing Tips – Some quick tips

 

The way I usually come up with these tips is I’ll think of something – usually while at work or while driving to work – make a note of it, and then forget about it for a few weeks or months until I need to write a post.  Then I’ll go through the notes to see what I can do.  But sometimes what I figure is a good idea, can’t really be stretched to more than a paragraph or two.  So here are some of these quick tips.

Be careful with slang

This started when I got a notice that someone had replied to a YouTube comment.  I read the reply and didn’t know what they were talking about.  Turns out, it was a reply to a comment I made a year or so earlier.  I went back to that video, read my comment and I think a couple earlier replies, then the new reply, but still didn’t know what they were talking about.  Part of it was they used a term I had heard the kids use but only had a vague idea of the meaning.  I looked it up, got the official definition, but still didn’t know what they were talking about.  Either there is some other meaning to this word, or they didn’t make their case that clearly.  So if you use the hip new slang all the kids are using, just know there’s a chance some of us old fogies won’t know what you’re saying.  But old fogies aren’t the target audience, so what does it matter?  On one hand, you can’t write something that will be of interest to everyone, but on the other hand, the more people that can understand your writing means the more people likely to read it.  There is a balance one needs to find.

A Something File can be useful

This began with a microfiction story I wrote.  At some point I had started a “To Do” file, where if I had an idea – for a story or general thing to do – I could just open it and type out my idea.  And then every few months I’d clean it out and find better places for the story ideas.  Sometimes, when I wasn’t feeling well, I’d open this file to just write “something” so that I could say that I had written something that day.  I was thinking about it one day and decided that I’d keep the “To Do” file for non-writing ideas but I should start a new “Something File” just for my writing ideas.

Sexbots

Years ago, there was this site – which is still up but the pages are corrupted – where you could post stories of a few hundred words.  One day, I wrote a story with “Sexbot” in the title, and in about a day it had more views than some of my stories got in a week.  Sometimes, it can be useful to jazz a title up a bit, to get more notice.

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Image from Pixabay.

Writing Newsletter First Quarter 2025

 

This quarter I continued writing a story each month on my website, publishing, “Legacy,” “Stamp of Approval,” and “I Wish.” I also decided to post/repost at least one story a quarter on my Ko-fi account.  This quarter I reposted “Check Brain.” On my blogs I posted the stories “Plans,” “A Line in the Sand,” and “Not Worth It,” and reposted the stories “The Unerring Word” and “Ticket to the Future.”

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If I counted correctly, I posted twelve new microfiction stories and eleven new haikus.  Last quarter I said that I would need to do a better job keeping track, which I sort of did.  I think the biggest issue was I changed how and what I counted after a month or so, so the numbers are a bit iffy.  But going forward, I now have a better way to keep track of them.  Regardless, all of microfiction stories can be found on my Untitled Works Page, and all my haikus on my Haiku Page.

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Something I’ve thought about over the years is moving away from only having my ebooks on Kindle.  But I never really looked into other sites.  There’s a chance in the next quarter I’ll publish a story on Draft2Digital.  I have a story, it just needs some polishing.  There’s just so much other stuff going on that I haven’t felt motivated enough to do the polishing.  But hopefully in the next three months I’ll get around to it.

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One … positive of all the crap going on is that I seem to have more ideas for blogs.  There are things I feel I need to say.  Before I tried to fit all my blogs into a schedule, but from now on I think I’ll keep to the schedule as well as do some bonus blogs.  So while it isn’t the writing I wanted to do, I do seem to be writing more.  We’ll just have to see how this goes.

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Image from Pixabay.

Daredevil: Born Again theory

During episode 6 of Daredevil: Born Again, I thought I noticed something a little odd about a character.  After some thought, I came up with a theory.  Now, I do watch a few YouTubers who discuss the show, but I haven’t heard this theory.  While there is a good chance my theory is wrong, I figured I should at least write it down so if, somehow, I’m right, I can at least brag about it.

I guess there will be some spoilers for the show, but if you’re not watching the show, why are you bothering to read this?

The character in question is Powell, the cop who has had a few run ins with Matt.  First off, in episode 2, I thought it odd that he didn’t just shoot Hector when his partner died.  I mean, he could have just said, “This guy attacked us and killed my partner.  I shot him in self-defense.” Nobody would have questioned it.  At the time, I figured it was because, really, the train should have stopped and there would be witnesses that Hector had his hands up.  I believe in the show they just have the train continuing on, which seemed odd to me.  But it could just be that the effects people messed up. 

Anyway, in episode 6 there’s the scene where Fisk starts his task force.  And there were a couple shots of Powell looking around at the other cops.  I don’t know why, but there just seemed to be something odd about it.  Why are they focusing so much on him?  This led to my theory: Powell is working with the FBI to get into the corrupt cop gang.

This would explain why he didn’t just shoot Hector in episode 2, he’s undercover, but not a murderer.  It also explains why he doesn’t know who killed Hector because he’s not far enough into the group.  And in a series all about how those – apparently – on the side of the law aren’t always good, while those outside the law aren’t always bad, having this “Are they a good cop that’s only acting bad for good reasons?” would be yet another shade of grey.

But what about when he put the gun to Matt’s head in episode 2?  That was a problem.  But then I thought, what if Powell’s plan was to put the gun to Matt’s head, but then say something like, “You’re lucky too many eyes are on me right now.  Otherwise, it would be easy to kill you,” or whatever.  And then he could have hit Matt with the gun.  Maybe Powell just wanted to scare Matt without breaking cover.  And he could have gotten away with it, except Matt let the devil out.

So that’s my theory: Powell is a good guy trying to take down the corrupt cops.  We’ll have to see if that is the case.

Typing

Something happened to my left, middle finger.  There’s a chance it’s just arthritis because I’ve been having issues with it for some time, but last week something else happened and it hurt to bend it.  So I jury rigged a splint out of half a popsicle stick and a couple of band aids.  It stopped my finger from bending, so that worked, but the stick either slipped or dug into my finger.  Then I realized I could just put a band aid around my knuckle, which was enough to keep my finger from bending too much.  It doesn’t hurt as much as it did, but if I bend it too much it hurts.

Anyway, the first day I used the stick, I thought things were going well, until I went to type up something.  I could bend my finger enough for the letter “d,” but I couldn’t hit “e,” let alone “c.” But do you have any idea how many words have the letter “e” in them?  I actually had to be typing, and when it came time to hit “e” I’d move my hand to hit it with my index finger.  It was clunky, but it didn’t seem to slow me down that much.  If I had kept at it – instead of seeing it as a day to take things easy – I might have learned how to type without using a finger.  Which is a skill I hope I never need to have.

But this got me thinking about typing.  Not to show my age, but I learned how to type in high school on a typewriter.  I was about to say my typing skills are probably fair since I’ve typed so much over the years, but then I remembered there are tests you could take.  I just took one and I typed 65 words in a minute with a 95% accuracy.  I guess the average typing speed is 40-55 words a minute, so I guess I’m above average in something.

I didn’t really have a plan for this blog.  It was just something vaguely writing related.  And really, I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about typing.  If you sat me down at a desk and asked me the order of the keys on a keyboard, it would take me a minute to figure them out.  But I just typed out the alphabet about as fast as you’d sing the alphabet song and only made one mistake.  (If you’re wondering, I somehow hit “x” instead of “s.”) I’m actually a bit worried that if I started to think about typing, I’d forget how to.  There’s probably a lesson there.