Tag Archives: update

Shifting Focus: Why I’ve Been Doing Mostly Reviews Lately

Hello all! This is just a quick, impromptu update post to explain a slight shift that some of you might have noticed in the past few months.

Namely, my website posts have been almost entirely of reviews, with little in the way of quizzes, poems, or traditional articles. This may be an unwelcome change, as a lot of you come here specifically for my original content, and don’t want to be directed away from content that’s original to me. I want to stress to you that my original content is not going away. Rather, I want to explain why my content has taken this shift.

  1. I genuinely really like doing it. This is an often-overlooked aspect of writing and content creation that a lot of creatives encounter some time in their career, including myself. It’s easy to lose sight of your purpose, falling into a trap of creating content that you feel your fans want to see, rather than things you actually want to create. This is something that tripped me up for a while; I would spend months working on a few rather bland articles that would undoubtedly get a lot of clicks, but that were an absolute pain to write. I want to start creating for me just as much as for you again, and this is the most recent thing I’ve found that fulfills both of those. There is a lot of other content I genuinely enjoy making, but most of it is not posted here, for the other reasons listed.
  2. I have a vision for something bigger. While I love writing poems, especially as of the past year or so, I have plans for what I want to do with them rather than posting all of them here. The most prominent of which would be creating a poetry collection and publishing it, or incorporating my poems into some of my other works. Now, I don’t want to seem like a sellout who is just milking all of their content for a profit. If I could write full-time for the rest of my life without making a single penny from it, I would. Alas, in order to devote more of my time to my work, thus bringing you bigger and better projects, I somehow need to make more money off of all this. Rest assured that I see and understand your concerns. I plan to look into options for how I can make my future paid content more accessible for lower-income fans.
  3. It helps others like me. As an indie creator myself, I know how hard gaining exposure can be. In a lot of ways, getting your work into the hands of those who will enjoy it is the hardest part. How are people supposed to know how to chose your work, rather than anything else they may come across? I want to help others who are going through my same creative struggles. Writing these reviews may help some of them kickstart their careers, giving them that little push it needs to spawn a fanbase, an income, and a living off of it in the future. In simpler terms, I want to let people know about all the great undiscovered books* they should read (and which they shouldn’t, of course.
  4. Related to point #2, these reviews are perfect for this online format. Again, it’s important to find a balance. It’s best to find something that you both a) like to create, and b) earns you money, and c) exposure. These reviews accomplish all of these. I like creating them, and they generate a good amount of traffic, so they earn more money while also directing people toward my website, where they can learn about all of my other content.

I hope that this change is not a difficult one. As I write this post, I have a few ideas for how I can create some new original content that’s better suited for this website. If they materialize, I’ll post the relevant updates. As it stands, I’ll continue writing more reviews, and even have a new review series that I plan on announcing very soon–and this one won’t be focused on books. Stay tuned, and thank you all for your support!

P.S.: Don’t mind any minor spelling, grammar, formatting, or other related mistakes. I plan to publish this page almost as soon as I’m done typing it. The date and time you see attached to this post are pretty much the same date and time I finished writing it.

The Things That Have Happened, The Things That Occur

There’s a certain phenomenon that pretty much anyone who wants to do something experiences. What’ll happen is you’ll be experiencing something that you connect with. An artist will be at an art gallery, an athlete will be at a sports game, an actor will be watching a play. It’ll be the best of it’s kind, something top notch and undeniably appreciable. But you can’t stand it. But not because the product is bad, but because you understand it. It vibrates with you on a wavelength so perfectly in tune with your life goals and desires. You understand the content, and you understand the creator–and you realize that that person needs to be you. Your heart aches for greatness, to express your thoughts and to show people just what you’re capable of doing. But for whatever reason, you can’t. Maybe it’s needing to complete school, or waiting to make the team, or trying to score some more auditions or something. But something’s holding you back. You’re stuck there; you can’t move. And you resign yourself to persisting to try to progress while you watch someone else do whatever it is you love on a level you can only hope for.

I’ve been stuck in that zone for a while, a long while, and now I’m finally breaking through.

The past several weeks have been eventful for me, and insightful. Both in the way things have played out and the actual things that have happened. I’ve been tried and tested and had several firsts and learning experiences. And I’ve wanted nothing more than to divulge it all on here, to freely express my thoughts on one of the best platforms on the internet for doing so. But, running a website like this, you sort of become a curator at the same time. Your site is a museum and you decide the pieces, the exhibits and everything. You work so hard on it and you try so hard to please; you don’t want to muck it up. So you filter out a lot of the stuff that you wish so sincerely that you could show, because you think it’ll make it better for everyone. For me, it’s taken the form of filtering out a lot of the personal stuff I wish I could post, for the sake of quality control here on this blog, and the desire for it to be about more than myself. But I feel now that that makes the whole thing feel a bit too impersonal, and while I will maintain this quality control, I’ll keep you more informed about my life in the future. For now, here’s a quick rundown.

I’ve been super busy with life recently, focusing a lot on myself. Financial problems due to my parents’ divorce has caused a lot of personal changes that have had varying amounts of ramifications throughout my life. Especially starting late last summer, money for me has been tight, and I’ve had to save and improvise in areas that I haven’t before. Financial freedom is something that has been different for me. Without going into too much detail, a several different factors have caused these difficulties, and although I’m working hard to fix them, they’ve taken their toll.

The first eventful thing that happened was that I got a job at Target. It was okay, besides my shitty ableist coworkers. I got fired a few weeks afterwards, but it was deeply unjust, so I decided to sue the company. That’ll be a whole other post on it’s own, though; you can rest assured that the issue will get it’s own post once the issue is settled. I also rekindled relationships with several friends. I’ve started talking with those that I used to talk to a lot, those that I never thought I’d talk to, and those I never thought I’d talk to again. Both friends and enemies alike, old issues were brought up and settled. Some of these issues will be brought up again in the future, too.

This has also marked a huge era of progress and recovery for me. Record lows in depression, loneliness, and other things that I’d been known to suffer from. But one of the biggest things in my life these past few weeks has been my plans for this website. I plan to turn this into something much bigger and better than what I ever thought it could be. You’ll know exactly what I mean very soon in the future, but I’ve been investing large amounts of my time into it. I have to, in order to fulfill that burning desire mentioned at the beginning of this article. Ideas, thoughts, and all my hopes in life will all come together in one project–although calling it a “project” seems like an understatement.

Lastly, my birthday is happening on Monday. I will turn 20 years old. One thing I’m prone to is trying to scramble to do 1,000 things to prepare, because I feel like I have to commemorate the event. No longer a teenager, I feel like it’s especially important to do that now. What I want to do is this thing, a practice wherein you write a letter to yourself in the future, so your future self can read it and see how much you’ve changed. I want to do some form of that, but for varying lengths of time. Like one for 1 year from now, one for 5 years, and so on. I want to also start some sort of birthday tradition, too. As you can see, memories are one of my best friends.

More content and important information should be coming up soon, so watch out for that. And to clarify; I feel fine and all, I just definitely have to get some things in order. I’m sure you all have been itching to see more, and of course, I will deliver. Hang tight and stay sane, and just to let you know, your thoughts are real.

An explanation, rather than an apology

78 days. That’s low long it’s been since the last time I posted here. I’m sitting here typing and thinking about how many days that is. If you started learning a language from nothing, after 78 days you’d be pretty much conversational. If you planted a field full of cucumbers, you’d be able to harvest them all 78 days later. And, more topically, if I had started working on even one of my minor projects 78 days ago, then I would probably be done by now. And I can’t get over that now.

My lack of transparency has been quite regrettable, I feel like. I’ve neglected giving a ton of updates in order to avoid having my content being too focused on me, but I feel like that’s been detrimental.

Once I get things straightened out, I’ll definitely be posting a more lengthy update to explain everything and the (positive!) changes that are soon to come. Until then, I’ll try to post a few things here and there that I’ve done. I just thought it’s only fair to let you know instead of just suddenly posting content again without saying a word.

Anyways, I’m perfectly fine, and things will hopefully ramp up soon! I appreciate all of the support.

2017 Update!

Well everyone, believe it or not, we’re already 1 week into 2017. For many, 2016 was a doozy of a year, with many celebrity deaths, a leap day, a summer Olympics, and a very heated and unpredictable presidential election. Now that that’s over, we can all look ahead to the new year and hope that it’s better than the last.

First of all, there’s my posting. It really is a bad habit of mine to have several posts planned and partially typed but never getting around to posting them. That happened to me just last week, actually. I had a post planned filled with thoughts and predictions for 2017, what I think about New Year’s traditions, et cetera. But I waited much too long to post it; now it’s the 8th of January and the line of 2017 predictions has mostly worn off. I may still post it, but if not, I’ll just queue it to post during late December, so then we may look back and see how accurate my predictions are.

Other than that, there are a few things that I’m looking forward to posting on this blog. There’s a lot I’m working on that I think will be very interesting for you to see! Among them are a painting, an ongoing fiction story, and maybe a contest or giveaway, in order to bring awareness to this blog. The new year will bring a lot of new content for you guys, so watch out for that! Posting more often will be in order too, and I hope to formulate a posting schedule, as well.

Just thought I’d give you guys a little update.

Oh, goodness. You’d think that not very much could happen in just the 2 short days since my last blog post, but that is in fact not the case. Lemme tell you how it went down.

I felt perfectly fine after making that last post. I went to bed right afterwards, and woke up the next morning and went to school. Perfectly normal. It’s a rotating schedule, so it started with 5th period, World History. It went well, actually, and we finished watching a movie that I really like. I started to feel kinda sick in the middle of 6th period, though. My stomach felt like it was being tied in knots, and i thought I could just ride it out–but I was so wrong. Long story short, I ended up uncontrollably vomiting during a therapist appointment, causing me so much embarrassment that I retreated back home without doing any of the other things I needed to do. 

After that I just laid in bed, and that’s pretty much where I’ve been ever since. I feel so yucky; my back aches, I’m hungry but don’t wanna eat, and I’ve only gotten up either to be sick again or to get something to drink. I tried sitting in the living room and using my laptop,  but even that is too much. So my only option is to lay here until I eventually feel better.

I really hope this doesn’t affect my ability to post some of the ideas I’ve had recently, or the plans I have for my birthday this Saturday. Please send me some good vibes, as I could really use them right about now. Have a great day, my lovelies!

-Blu