Catharsis of the Bogue

Oddities, Profundities, Profanities and Dad Stuff

Tag: pre writing

Running Out of Either Steam or Caffeine

May 27, 2014 / / 8 Comments

Hello and welcome to Thursday!  I have to apologize for yesterday, domestic tasks needed to be taken care of  and the computer was few and far between.  Yet another reason for the pre-writing challenge and having a queue of posts built up.

An update on the challenge:  it has been nearly 1 week since the challenge started and so many of the participants are  producing fantastic blog posts and ideas.  I don’t have any posts written yet but the titles are in my drafts queue and waiting for fabulousness!  I have to let life catch up without losing focus and blowing off the challenge with procrastination.

So I am at the point in my blog where I can see many people giving up.  The novelty of the blog is gone and the work is really beginning.  Posts are still not hard to write, it is harder to get to the writing.  I can produce better content but is it fulfilling a need somewhere or just belching out crap from my brain that no one cares about?

I really feel like my posts are better with some facts and research in them.  I like to brag some about my blog and how it is doing.  Yesterday I did zero promotion on my blog.  Zero and my stat press recorded 48 visitors.  Today as I write this there have already been 12 visitors.  That tells me I have been doing something right.  My Alexa rank has gone from 12,850,206 on Feb1 to 1,149,880 today.  I am not obsessing with Alexa but many places look at it and it is a good universally compared to ranking.  People are looking from all over the world.  Alexa lists the UK, Philippines, and Australia on it’s list.  That is so freaking cool I can hardly contain myself.  I love the internet.  With all of this in mind, I really need to keep up with my posts and comments.

I haven’t been reading and commenting as much as I need to to bring more traffic in.  Like I said the “work” part of this online journey is really beginning.  I have to take a page from my buddy James at the infopreneur, (I talk about him a lot.  He is going to get a big head) and get my stuff in a pile.  That and write and comment!  I am approaching 2000 visitors to my site so I can’t give up now.  I am only 1 month away from the magical 3 and not being one of the statistics.

Yesterday was an interesting introspection for me.  I was catching up on housework and helping the kids with homework when I realized that all of the organization, prioritization, and time management stuff I have been reading and talking about is barely getting incorporated.  I have been doing the stay at home dad thing for quite a while now and I still try to figure out how my Mom always had it together and kept everything clean and running.

I don’t think I am running out of steam on my business, I just need to stoke the fire and get it flowing again!  Therefore, I need more caffeine and less excuses.

If you are reading this, you are awesome.  Pat yourself on the back and then go enjoy the day.

Justin

Digging for and Dusting Off Post Ideas

May 27, 2014 / / 6 Comments

hey folks.  Today is the day.  Well technically Friday is the day the Pre-Writing Challenge starts.  Today I plan to raid my old notebooks and search out all of the bits of paper that I can find with any sort of writing idea on it.

I should have enough ideas to fill my challenge list and much more. I was reading through some papers that I had in a box a while ago. Most of them were drafts of projects from high school and different writing projects that I have done. I looked at these and said, “I should rewrite this one”. I have a few stories like that. I am going to rework some of them and maybe they can be published.

I have one set that I have always loved. It is a first person detective comedy that is filled with rampant sarcasm but not very good writing. I have 4 stories in the series that get better and better. I always thought they could be published together as the ZXC Chronicles. I have notes for part 5, I think I am going to rewrite that whole thing.

If that same box there are several little notes with band names, story ideas, snippets of song lyrics and words that sounded good together at one time.  Many of these snippets could be blog posts and some could be quite good or quite profound.  Maybe just something funny.  I think that as part of the Pre Writing Challenge I will try some different styles of posts.  Funny, ironic, list, classical hungarian, ok maybe not that one.  I am going to use this challenge to not only write more, but to expand the depth of my writing, which is one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place.

Short one today, have to get the munchkin to the hospital for tests.  Kidney Transplant doctors are paranoid when fevers top 102 degrees.

Until Tomorrow,

Justin

PS Did I mention my Pre-Writing Challenge Page???  check it out!

To Pre-write, ahh the value

September 26, 2013 / / 4 Comments

So we are starting this Pre writing challenge (see my page here) and today is one of those days that it would be incredible to have a few posts lined up I could just hit publish and be done with it.

This morning, I went out and turned on the car so it would be warm when I took my kids to school.  I do it most every morning because it is cold.  A few minutes later, we went back out to the car to go to school and it was making some strange sucking, bubbling sound.  Of course the kids start to panic and I did a bit when I looked under the car and there was a huge puddle of transmission fluid!

Now I am paranoid about transmissions.  They break way too easily in my opinion and are incredibly expensive.  I do a lot of repairs on the cars and can do most things short of tearing down the engine or fixing the transmission.  I did a bunch in high school shop but it didn’t cover transmissions.

So we took the other car to school and I am dreading what I am going to find.  I hope it is a gasket on the pan, or a screw has fallen out, something I can repair.  I finally get the car jacked up and get under it and guess what.  It wasn’t the transmission after all.  I almost peed myself with relief.

Come to find out, Chrysler had some brilliant idea that the power steering fluid needs to run through a small cooler like a radiator.  One of these hoses had burst and the power steering fluid in a Dodge Caravan is actually transmission fluid.  There were several unprintable 4 letter words used to describe the lineage of certain engineers and their anatomical deficiencies.

So this is an easy fix for the car.  If it were not for the internet and auto repair forums I would not have known all of the things that I needed to fix it.  The net is like that.  Out there and waiting to suck us in.  Larger point, I have a bunch of stuff to do today and i am putting some of it off so that I can write this post.  My normal writing time was spent outside under the car.

This brings me to the value of having a few posts in the queue waiting anxiously to emerge.  I have been thinking for the last couple of weeks that I would like to have 3 posts available for this because there are days when Doctor appointments and other things just prevent me from writing.  Then along comes Carlos Velez at Conscious Me.com; with this guest post about how Pre writing is your friend.  Struck a chord with me and over a few days the Pre-Writing Challenge was born.  See my Pre-Writing challenge page for more info on how to join.

It would have been nice today to say, “I just am not going to write right now.  I’ll post #7.”  Didn’t happen but at the end of the challenge it will be so.

Thanks for being here!

Justin

Long Day’s and Taking a Day Off

September 26, 2013 / / 6 Comments

Hello all. You will notice that this post is somewhere close to 7 hours later than I usually post. It has been, as the title suggests, a long day. I am not just trying to complain. I could do that. But I won’t. I did however learn how to take apart my laptop and get the punch out of it. Presidents Day and the kids home from school do not necessarily make for the writing time bliss that I have allocated for a normal day.

Suffice it to say, I have post ideas now but no posts written. Yet another reason to join the Pre-Writing Challenge! We are beginning February 19th and will be going for a month in order to have 2 weeks worth of posts prewritten. See my page Here for more info. Would have come in handy for today as it would have on Friday!

So this brings me to today’s post. I have been debating the virtues of taking the weekend off. This weekend I scheduled some tweets to go out on Saturday for my fiction posts and then I didn’t get back on the computer for much of anything! It was kind of nice, not chaining myself to my laptop but I have hardly any traffic to show for it.

This may not be a bad thing. The good news is that I actually had traffic for 2 days with hardly any promotion. Not much traffic, mind you but some. That is the first step to becoming one of the big bloggers I think. Getting traffic without doing anything. Of course if I don’t do anything during the week my blog will fade and I will turn into nothing but a statistic; one of the failed bloggers.

I still am not going to post on Sunday. I am still going to post fiction on Saturday and put out e-books of said fiction when they are all out there. I will have some posts to post when I have issues with life. I was beginning to question whether it was worth posting or commenting on the weekends. It may be. I don’t think I will be doing anything different though.

If you are reading this Thank you! I will have more tomorrow at a more reasonable time. And it will be about hitting things.
Justin

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