It's August, and judging by the slump in my site-traffic stats (I'm back around the 600s per day), everyone is out having a good time away from the blogosphere. Good for them, I say. Sitting in front of a screen all day will kill you. Nevertheless, I shall persist with the blogging because that, friends, is my compulsion, my cross to bear.
So if you're out having a good time away from your various computers, congratulations, and enjoy your August. (You won't see this message, of course, because you're Out Doing Stuff.) Me, I'm not on break until my big east-coast walk starting this September and ending sometime in October. I renew my work contract, the current period of which ends right on my birthday, August 31. Later in November, I have to renew my F4 visa; that, too, was supposed to be renewed on my birthday, but because of the virus, the date for renewal was pushed back a few months. Meanwhile, I'll be thinking about switching to an F5 (permanent resident) visa, which I think gets renewed every ten years. More paperwork. More money.
In other news, I'm slightly behind on the manuscript for my current book project; the ms will be assembled in a few days, and then the next step is a ton of editing and formatting, after which I have to work on illustrations and cover designs, then put everything together and get the book out in e-book and dead-tree form. I'm still aiming to have my movie-review compendium out by the end of this year. I'm going to format the material several ways: (1) a huge e-book sold for cheap, (2) a series of small dead-tree books in which the reviews are divided by years-long intervals (2009-2014, 2014-2019, 2019-now, for example), and a physical version of the huge e-book for people who don't mind buying huge books. (Personally, I love their heft. The big books, I mean, not the people.) After I finish the movie-review book, I'll move on to making Dirty Grammar, a book partially based on the sort of work I currently do. And who knows? A work of fiction might appear down the pipe.
Perhaps my readership will return in September, or maybe this is it, and I'll never have daily visitors in the thousands ever again. Whatever the future holds, have a good August, and stay tuned for the next post.
I bought a domain name, the main idea being that I would have an email address that I could use in perpetuity. While I am sure that gmail, yahoo, etc. will be around in some shape or form, I figured that it would be nice to have some certainty. And if I owned the domain MYNAME.COM, the email address of MYNAME@MYNAME.COM would always be there (assuming of course I continue to pay the registration fee).
ReplyDeleteYou are probably wondering what is the point. LOL There is nothing live on my domain page, and there never has been. If you type in www.MYNAME.com, you get the equivalent of a 404 result. But when I look at my webpage statistics, I am still showing ~ 35 visitors a day (sometimes goes up to 50+ (and one time was 100), sometimes a bit lower), all of which must be bots. And regardless of what month I look at, 90% of the traffic comes during the 2100 hour GMT. Not sure what is up with that.
Brian
The F5 never requires renewal, just updating the photo on your card every ten years. And you can vote in local elections. So the walk is on? Will have to keep an eye on walking blog #5!
ReplyDeleteYeah, the walk is on. Stay tuned.
ReplyDelete