Bloggers need not apply?
Last night I was sitting in my living room, listening to the County Council meeting on PAC14, when my jaw just about hit the floor. The question of the county’s Redistricting Committee was brought up, and objection which floored me was registered by District 1 Council member Sheree Sample-Hughes.
Her point of contention with the list of nominees was based on the fact that one of the seven members who volunteered is a fellow blogger, and the concern was that any of the proceedings would necessarily find their way onto the internet. She was also concerned that G.A. Harrison, the blogger in question, has been critical in the past of County Council members.
As it turned out, her motion to strike Harrison from the list barely got a second from at-large member Matt Holloway and was outvoted 4-3. (I seem to recall District 2′s Stevie Prettyman was the other vote to oust Harrison, but my memory could be incorrect. Suffice to say that it was a 4-3 vote.) As previously amended, the Redistricting Committee appointments passed on a 6-1 vote with Sample-Hughes objecting.
Given the situation, I thought it was prudent to put my two cents in.
In all honesty, the only difference between a person who writes a blog and a person who doesn’t is that one has a public forum which attracts the occasional reader and one does not. There are people out there who don’t write as an avocation who are prone to spilling the beans on whatever happens to someone who then disseminates the information – hence we get such people as “unnamed sources.” It really wouldn’t matter if the person had a website or not.
This sort of situation has come up before. Back in November, the Republican Central Committee had a meeting to interview and select four applicants for the County Council seat which became available with Bob Caldwell’s passing. G.A. Harrison was at that meeting – which was open to the public – and we cautioned him to not reveal the results before each of the six applicants was selected the next day; true to his word, he did not. As you can read, I did, but the post was set for noon the following day as agreed.
But the events of last night bring up another question. Obviously readers know I have this gig, but my writing skills have also led me to be entrusted with a post as Secretary of two different organizations: the Wicomico County Republican Central Committee and the Wicomico County Republican Club. And as regular readers are aware, each month I do a summary of the WCRC meeting. That was not without objection in the beginning, but once I was made aware of some of the concerns I tailored my reporting to be informative without getting into certain business, like the financials.
On the other hand, I don’t do reporting for most of the Central Committee meetings, with the main reason being we don’t often have guest speakers. The Central Committee summary given at the WCRC meeting normally covers the newsworthy items anyway; people don’t really have to know that (for example) we debated at our last meeting whether to allow surrogates for the various Senatorial campaigns to speak at our Lincoln Day Dinner in lieu of candidates who couldn’t attend. (By the way, our Lincoln Day Dinner is Saturday, February 25, and all ten Republican U.S. Senate candidates from Maryland have been invited to speak. As to the question, we will play it by ear.)
Needless to say, I have to constantly use my judgement on what to write about party affairs but over the years I’ve done this I’ve figured out where to push and where to hold off. I think G.A. Harrison can do the same with the Redistricting Committee.
And while I realize that Harrison has been a critic of several members of County Council in the past, I don’t think that acrimony is grounds to take him off a committee. That seems like petty politics to me, and I don’t think being a blogger should preclude one from serving the community in other capacities as well. Instead, G.A. should be commended for stepping up to the plate just as his other six cohorts and those others who may have expressed an interest but did not make the cut did.
Odds and ends number 42
As you likely know, this is the post where I pick out a few items worth a paragraph or three but not a full post. So here goes.
Polling is in the news these days – sometimes as a real reflection of the political scene, and sometimes just to make news and push a particular agenda. There are two recent polls which I believe reflect the latter.
I’m usually not too trusting of polls in which I can’t find a political or geographical breakdown, and a recent Washington Post poll fits this bill. Taken simply as a sample of 1,064 adults in Maryland, the Post poll gives Martin O’Malley a 55% approval vs. 36% disapproval – compare that to the 53-40 split in the recent Gonzales Poll, which I can easily ascertain subgroups and methodology in. Other disagreements: a 50-44 split in favor of gay marriage on the Post poll vs. a 49-47 split in favor on Gonzales and the “key issue” question: the economy was the top choice of 49% in Gonzales but only 32% on the Post poll.
Without seeing the methodology besides the sample size, my guess is that the local Washington D.C. area was oversampled by the Post. Obviously the economy is better there than in some other portions of the state, and since the area is more liberal than the rest of the state (hard to believe, but true) the other numbers seem to point in that direction as well.
Movin’ on out
As I’ve said from time to time on this forum and others, Maryland is the first place (besides, to a limited extent, my college alma mater) where I lived by choice. And the main reasons I moved here, as opposed to other prospective places where I could have worked like Jacksonville, Las Vegas, or Phoenix, were the somewhat rural setting and the idea that this area had plenty of room for growth. Needless to say, when compared to those urban areas, Salisbury was by far the smallest location I considered.
There are serious economic handicaps about living here which have always existed more or less, but at the time of my arrival they were held somewhat in check by the state government in place in the fall of 2004. Sure, Bob Ehrlich was no doctrinaire conservative but most of his ideas for revenue enhancement were limited to increasing user fees, and Maryland participated fully in the national economic boom which was taking place during the Ehrlich era here. Unemployment for the state was just 4.4% when Ehrlich took office and 3.6% when he left – the rate never exceeded 4.6% during his tenure. Obviously things are different now, and Maryland reflects the national situation in that respect. Oddly enough, though, the other three places I was considering were among the hardest hit by the recession, so while Salisbury never quite reached that exhilarating height this fact made the low point easier to handle.
Who will fund the resistance? (updated)
As I mentioned last night, I added a few new websites to my sidebar links. One interesting add was a site called Zilla of the Resistance, which I had originally run across via a link from The Other McCain. But what sparked my interest again was a link to her from another Maryland-based site called The Vail Spot, which I also link to. Both Vail and Zilla have something in common which I’m sure they aren’t proud of, but has been an issue: the writers have had recent financial hardships, for various reasons, and both were assisted by the generosity of their reader base.
I’m certainly not going to be the first to bring up this point, but who knows? Maybe I can be the last.
Odds and ends number 41
Not that I necessarily keep track of these things, but this is my first look in 2012 at those items which are worth a paragraph or three, but not a full post. It helps me clean out my e-mail inbox.
I couldn’t figure out how to embed this “Made in America” video, but I found it interesting when I watched it. I’m generally in favor of free trade and against strict protectionism, but if the difference is as small as they claim then buying American is worth it. Perhaps the claim of using 5% more American products would create 220,000 jobs is a bit dubious, but I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt.
Our nation needs to take steps in regaining its onetime prominence as a leading manufacturer. But it’s interesting to note several of the companies prominently mentioned have at least one plant in a right-to-work state. I can’t ascertain whether these are all non-union shops, but chances are fairly good – given that only about 1/10 of the private-sector workforce is unionized – that these good, honest American jobs don’t come with the union label.
Not that Maryland is making any quick moves to join the ranks of Virginia and other right-to-work states – this year, HB91 hasn’t progressed beyond first reading. But the group New Day Maryland pointed out to me a couple other bills of interest in the General Assembly this term to keep an eye on, and I thought I’d pass along the word.
House Bill 23, the Dedicated State Funds Protection Act, would prohibit the fund-raiding Governor O’Malley is almost as well known for as his constant zeal to raise taxes. And House Bill 43 would allow appropriations bills to be subjected to the same referendum process as those bills not dealing with appropriations. (The last remaining legal straw opponents of the in-state tuition for illegal aliens referendum are grasping for is that the bill is an appropriations bill, although it’s not.)
Both these bills have a hearing scheduled for 2 p.m. on January 31. I presume written testimony is acceptable, too.
No SOPA for you!
My website could be an endangered species because of something I choose to do for the entertainment of my readership.
Last year two bills were introduced, one in the House and one in the Senate, that could radically damage the internet as we know it. In the Senate, the version is known as the Protect IP Act, while its House cousin is called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. Backers of the bills claim they are necessary to prevent the theft of intellectual property, but to find out what these bills really are about one can just follow the money – the national Chamber of Commerce, which favors the bill, claims that Hollywood studios, record labels, and publishing houses collectively lose $135 billion a year from piracy.
So how would this affect me? Well, you know that neat little feature I do called Friday Night Videos? In theory, putting up a video of a song originally recorded by some other artist – whether I recorded it or not – wouldn’t leave just little old me liable; oh no. This bill also drags my service provider and search engines into the equation as well, making it an enforcement nightmare and perhaps, over time, the perfect vehicle for ridding the internet of websites someone doesn’t like. Those who back the bill claim it’s only about foreign websites which pirate the best Hollywood has to offer, but that’s just a starting point. All because I’m doing my part to promote local music.
In fact, the initial push against these two acts used teen sensation Justin Bieber as an example, for he became an internet sensation by covering R&B songs as a youngster. Because he was singing copyrighted works, Justin would be violating this law. My counter to this argument, though, is that re-exposing these old songs may recreate interest in the originals so the pie isn’t sliced into more pieces but instead becomes bigger.
On the other hand, I have original content on this website which is copyrighted (just scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see indeed I claim the copyright.) Granted, I don’t monetize my content or put it behind some sort of paywall like several newspapers have done, but I do get a little pissed off when people steal my stuff without acknowledgement. I can understand the frustration some feel when this piracy happens, but there are already copyright laws on the books to cover this. (Actually, all I ask of those who wish to use my content is giving me the credit for writing it and providing a backlink to the appropriate portion of my site.)
So I fall into the camp of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There’s no doubt that $135 billion is a lot of money, but as I pointed out earlier there’s a dynamic effect as well. Someone is making a lot of money from selling Justin Bieber’s records, and that money may not have been spent if not for him. And we’ve heard this same story before – the VCR is going to ruin Hollywood, song sharing is going to destroy the recording industry, and so on and so forth. Hollywood is just trying to get the government to protect their profits – there’s nothing wrong with the system as it stands, and the possibility of having hordes of high-profile lawyers checking content will have a chilling effect on discourse, much like the Fairness Doctrine did for radio.
But internet providers aren’t taking this lying down. Today (since this post went up at 12:01 a.m.) a significant part of the internet will “go black” to protest the possible adoption of these new laws. Included in the protest are some of the internet’s heaviest hitters – Google, Mozilla, and Wikipedia are just a few. (WordPress.org, the front site for the company which wrote the software enabling me to bring this and all my other posts to you, is also a participant.)
And the pressure is working. I normally don’t have a lot of good things to say about our state’s junior Senator, but Ben Cardin was a sponsor of Protect IP who now won’t vote for it as currently constituted. It’s a small step in the right direction, anyway.
Another complaint registered by some is that many of the groups who are leading the fight against Protect IP and SOPA are far-left groups. That is true, but groups like the Heritage Foundation, TEA Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks have allied with them to create a bipartisan coalition against the cause. I don’t mind having people on the other side with me when they’re in the right.
The internet doesn’t need a gatekeeper, and as we’ve seen too many times the best intentions of government go astray rather quickly once the camel’s nose gets under the tent. But rather than put my website down for the day and go black, I’m going to leave this post up and encourage you to contact your representatives and Senators to tell them SOPA and Protect IP are bad ideas.
But you might want to have a phone book handy to look up the numbers. Use that as a reminder of what the post-SOPA internet might be like.
And the winner is…
Someone finally uncrowned Ridgely Griffith and afterthegoldrush.
Until late Sunday afternoon it looked like the music-based website would cruise to its third straight title in my Best Local Blog contest. But supporters of Delmarva Progressive dropped well over a half-thousand votes on the poll and enabled that site to snatch away the victory.
With a record 1,001 votes cast, the results came in as follows:
- Delmarva Progressive, 788 votes (78.7%)
- afterthegoldrush, 205 votes (20.5%)
- Chesapeake Journal, 8 votes (0.8%)
Chalk it up as a rare liberal victory about these parts. In fact, the 1,001 votes ended up as a figure just a few tallies higher than the total of all nine preceding rounds (six first-round battles and three semifinals.) It’s a definite surprise given the fact Delmarva Progressive only picked up 10 votes in its semifinal – but it is what it is.
So congratulations to the crew over there for winning the contest, and moreso thanks to all who voted.
Drawing the curtain on this year’s contest does allow me to share a couple other thoughts, though.
First of all, the other day I was speaking to a blogging friend of mine from another part of the state who commented on the lack of websites in her area, particularly in comparison to the number of websites in this region. Obviously many of us deal with politics here but there are a number of other interests represented as well – just look at the contenders I had as evidence. If I were to classify the eighteen websites I selected this year, seven deal mainly with local news, three cover politics, and three could be described as personal journals. There were also blogs which covered sports, local history, music, food, and a fairly miscellaneous site as well. And I’m sure I don’t link to every single local website – there may be another couple hundred out there I don’t know about or just don’t get updated frequently enough for me to link to.
As for the contest itself, I based the original concept on the Mobbies, which is a similar popularity contest among Maryland-based blogs conducted by the Baltimore Sun. For the first two years of the contest’s now-three year run this site was among those nominated in the political category. (The political category disappeared in 2011, swallowed up into the formerly-separated news category.) For a site based on the Eastern Shore, I thought I placed rather respectively when I competed.
In my opinion we have a thriving local blogosphere, but one where civility and useful information is on the endangered list. Maybe a local media outlet needs to step up to the plate and have a contest similar to the Mobbies but concentrating on the Delmarva area. It would be a way to reward worthy websites and encourage the general public to visit them, and perhaps it would be an incentive for others to clean up their act.
Like it or not, the blogosphere is here to stay, and it’s up to all of us to determine its direction. Needless to say, I had my own personal favorites among the eighteen I featured but I left it up to the voters to decide who moved on. There’s a logical next step which should be taken, though, and it should feature those sites Delmarva can be proud of.
Blog poll finals set (and other good news)
Yes, this isn’t a serious, weighty topic, but those of you who are interested will be lapping this up.
For the third year in a row I’ve done a ‘best local blog’ competition for fun and as a way to get a few additional readers during a generally slow news period. Sometimes I get a lot of votes and sometimes just a few make the decision.
Anyway, the winners of my three semi-finals have been determined and will advance to the finals with a winner to be announced on Monday – obviously if you follow the final poll it will be self-evident. But here’s how the three semi-finals went.
My first one was somewhat of a surprise, but not really:
- afterthegoldrush (#5 seed) – 53 votes (71.6%)
- Delmarva Shorebirds Blog (#9 seed) – 20 votes (27.0%)
- Delmar DustPan (#1 seed) – 1 vote (1.4%)
It was a surprise that my #1 seed – which had 367 votes in the first round – only got one vote in the semi-final. But I think I know why it did, because it had a particular website as its opposition. I figured afterthegoldrush would do well, though, since it’s won the first two editions of my contest in 2010 and 2011. And Delmarva Shorebirds Blog was only a #9 seed because it was a wild card – in reality it had the fourth-highest vote total in the first round.
Semifinal #2 was fairly disappointing with the lack of participation. I think it’s because that was conducted over last weekend, when a lot of people were not paying attention because the NFL playoffs were on and the weather was nice:
- Chesapeake Journal (#7 seed) – 7 votes (63.6%)
- Right Coast Conservative (#2 seed) – 4 votes (36.4%)
- Random Thoughts of a Citymouse (#6 seed) – no votes
Honestly, I thought Right Coast Conservative would mop up the competition because it had a first-round vote total far higher than the others. Instead the St. Michael’s-based website moves on to the finals.
The last semifinal was, at least, a little interesting. And it featured yet another (mild) upset:
- Delmarva Progressive (#4 seed) – 10 votes (58.8%)
- The Other Salisbury News (#8 seed) – 4 votes (23.5%)
- Sussex County Angel (#3 seed) – 3 votes (17.7%)
It’s intriguing to me that a left-wing blog won on my right-leaning website, but stranger things have happened.
So on we go to the finals, which will be put up shortly and, because I’ve found weekend polls don’t work so well, will get a few extra days for more opportunities to vote.
Now, the other good news: monoblogue has yet another local sponsor. I’d like to thank local attorney Charles Jannace for jumping on board, and encourage more to do the same. As my readership grows, you may find blog advertising to be an affordable yet effective tool in bringing in business. And only a few spots are left because I’m limiting the number of ads sold here. (Less clutter that way.)
So patronize all my local sponsors and tell others they can help too. As you can see, my rates are very affordable.
Pruning and polling
It’s spring cleaning a couple months early. Actually, we got outside to enjoy the nice weather and took down the tree and Christmas decorations.
You might notice I’ve taken down a few links. I have a (somewhat flexible) policy of linking to sites which are regularly updated, but after they go about three months without a post I delete the link. I figure it doesn’t do either of us good to link to what is essentially a dead site. But if you have a site you think I should link to, let me know and I’ll review it to see which category it will fit into. Who knows, maybe I’ll make up a few new ones while I’m at it.
The other update I wanted to add this afternoon was that I’ll begin the semifinal rounds of my Best Local Blog poll sometime this evening. I actually had a tie in one round so I decided to add two wildcards; those two were the highest second-place finishers. So the seeding for the semifinals is set:
- Delmar DustPan (367 votes, won round 4)
- Right Coast Conservative (143 votes, won round 1)
- Sussex County Angel (23 votes, won round 3)
- Delmarva Progressive (20 votes, won round 6)
- afterthegoldrush (15 votes, won round 2)
- A Chesapeake Journal (4 votes, tied for win in round 5)
- Random Thoughts of a Citymouse (4 votes, tied for win in round 5)
- The Other Salisbury News (162 votes, second in round 4)
- Delmarva Shorebirds Blog (66 votes, second in round 1)
So I have the matchups set to be as evenly seeded as possible; as I said they’ll commence later tonight or tomorrow. As it lays out one of these battles will feature a rematch of the opening round with a new opponent tossed in.
And this time it will be win or go home, as each of the three winners advances. So bloggers better round up their troops and make sure to enlist their support!
Catching up
In case you missed it the last few days, my best local blog contest continues in a relatively subdued fashion after the wild first matchup.
In the second first-round contest between three local sites, defending champion afterthegoldrush advanced with an overwhelming 71.4% of the vote, besting Lower Eastern Shore News (19.1%) and Atomic Donkey Brewing, which garnered 9.5 percent. It’s the only poll where all three competitors received votes.
The third opening round affair concluded last night with an upset: Sussex County Angel pounded its competition with 82.1% of the vote, with Delmarva Observer getting the other 17.9 percent. Salisbury News was shut out this time around.
So the blogs advancing to the semifinals so far are Right Coast Conservative, afterthegoldrush, and Sussex County Angel. The fourth draw is quite interesting to me, so I’ll be excited to see how it comes out when the poll ends.
Seedings for the semifinalists will be determined once polling is complete for the first round. I’ll take a holiday break from polling after my six opening rounds are complete, so the contest will then return after Christmas.
Best local blog: the return
This will be the third year that I provide the opportunity to secure bragging rights as the best local blog around, as determined by my readers. For the last two years, the music-based blog afterthegoldrush has come away victorious thanks to Ridgely Griffith’s loyal following, and he’ll get the chance to defend his title this time around as well.
But things will be a little different this year. Last year I had 24 contenders, but it seems that a number of them have fallen by the wayside over the last 12 months. There are 13 which didn’t return because they stopped posting on a regular basis, and I probably could have eliminated another few which are getting updated rather infrequently – but then I would have been back down to a dozen as I was two years ago. Still, I cobbled together a list of 18 contenders – but if you want to nominate another that’s not on the list feel free to comment and I’ll check it out. But there are some guidelines: the blog must be updated regularly (ideally at least once a week), it must be locally based (essentially within the lower Delmarva area), and it can’t be a personality-based website. Those I have so far are all sites I link to, so there are likely others I’m unaware of.
Given those parameters, here are the 18 which will be contending. An asterisk (*) means they are new this year.
- afterthegoldrush
- Atomic Donkey Brewing*
- Chesapeake Journal*
- Crisfield News
- Delmar DustPan
- Delmarva Observer (formerly Delmarva Dealings)
- Delmarva Progressive*
- Delmarva Shorebirds Blog
- Lower Eastern Shore News (formerly The Salisbury Grinch)
- Random Thoughts of a Citymouse
- Reflections on Delmarva’s Past*
- Right Coast Conservative (formerly Right Coast Girl or just Right Coast)
- Salisbury News
- Salisbury Soapbox
- Sussex County Angel*
- The Other Salisbury News*
- The Pocomoke Public Eye
- Twirling, Twirling, Twirling Towards Freedom
If others are included, I’ll work these into the schedule somehow in order to maintain groupings of three, with wildcards added as necessary.
The first poll will be Monday, so blog owners need to let their supporters know this holiday tradition is back!
monoblogue turns six
Another year, another dollar. Actually, $95.40 to be exact because that’s my server fee for the year.
As I embark on another year of monoblogue and celebrate the achievements of the last, I’m reminded of something I wrote five years ago this very day:
On my previous blog site, my best week readership-wise was 197 readers (according to my Site Meter) but generally I would get between 30 and 50 readers a week. I was hoping for 100-200 a week from monoblogue…
Sheesh, did I have low goals or what? Since that point, I have had over 250,000 readers – and that’s the ones my Site Meter and other tracking systems caught. If you add in the places where I’ve had my works reprinted and republished I daresay I’m well into seven figures. Judging by the decline of my Alexa numbers (lower is good, and I reached my all-time low today of 333,458 for world rank and sit at a near-record 57,457 for U.S. rank) I figure someone has to be reading this space.
Getting an audience isn’t that difficult, though – the trick is keeping them. Once I had over 5,000 readers in a day (my Rushalanche) but most of them have drifted away. Not for lack of trying to keep them, though.
I normally don’t share a lot of readership information (although my Site Meter has been open for most of the time I’ve had it) but when I checked the other night my analytics showed that just under 56% of my readers were “new” while the other 44% or so were “returning” visitors. Presumably, if I had 1,000 visitors in a given time period, 440 of them had visited previously.
However, I also checked the trailing three months and found the percentage of return visitors had increased from 42% to 44% – not huge, but encouraging. Obviously I don’t want 100% return visitors because that would mean my audience had reached a saturation point but I think something in the 50-60 percent range would be healthy. So that’s my first goal for the next year. I don’t doubt readership will jump – I have a mostly political site and it’s an election year – but I want them to be a base for even bigger things in the years to come. So they have to be regular readers and a foundation to build around.
The second goal for 2012 is to fill out my advertiser base.
Unlike some other sites, I really don’t want ads to line both sidebars all the way down the page because, frankly, it looks terrible for the site layout and it’s not fair to the advertisers at the bottom who may never be seen if I write a truncated post. But I would like to first of all maintain my loyal advertisers – thanks goes to John Robinson and the Robinson Family of Businesses, Marty Pusey at The Perfect Dress, and Muir Boda of Sby4Rent.Com – and add three to seven more. I think 6 to 10 advertisers is a reachable goal, and given the fact my readership extends well beyond the local area it may be a good opportunity for national or regional clients. I don’t charge a ton for space, and perhaps it means I don’t monetize this site like I should, selling myself short. But I’d rather have plenty of business charging a little than no business charging a lot.
Oh, by the way, I’m also an Amazon.com affiliate so if you have Christmas shopping to do, by all means do it through monoblogue.
My third goal is going to be the most difficult to achieve. You see, for most of the last three years I wasn’t working outside the home, although that was certainly not by design or choice. When the local building industry went away, so did that fulltime job. And though I have accomplished a small amount of success as a freelance writer for various outlets, it’s not an easy market to break through in because millions of other people around the world fancy themselves as pundits, too.
So now I have a good job but it’s one which frequently necessitates I work for most of my day outside the home, therefore it’s not as easy for me to create plentiful content. Still, in looking at my monthly posting numbers I’ve found that I’ve put up nearly 500 posts over the last year so I get at least one in per day. Surprisingly, I’ve never cracked 60 posts a month or 600 in a calendar year so my pace isn’t that bad right now, and more importantly it’s manageable with my schedule. Granted, there will be times I’m a little behind on the news but my bread and butter is commentary anyway so if you can put up with 450 to 500 posts a year we’ll be just fine. That may violate the idea some bloggers have of writing no fewer than 2,500 words per day but I’d rather write 600 good words than 2,500 words of fluff. (Some take the easy way out and copy and paste to get to a certain number of words or posts, but I don’t – hence the phrase up top “mostly original content.”)
My last goal, though, is probably the most important for my goals in the long run. You see, everything I have built here comes because I have taken the high road, stuck to the facts and reasoned opinions, and stayed away from making this a personality-based site. Unfortunately, from time to time I get caught up in the various personality battles which occur in this small town, no matter how much I try to stay away. I am getting better at this, though, and perhaps it’s a sign of maturity on the part of all the local blogging participants that the “blog wars” are more or less behind us. By no means do all the local website owners like each other, and as a group we ain’t going to be singing “Kumbaya” by the campfire anytime soon, but the differences of opinion seem to be a little more civil.
Admittedly, I don’t think I’m ever going to be everyone’s cup of tea – certainly some readers probably can’t figure out why I do Shorebird of the Week or Weekend of local rock on a political site, but that’s what keeps me from getting burned out.
And Lord knows I don’t often pull my punches when I write, but I don’t lose sleep over my content and that’s what’s important. For a website, respect is the toughest thing to build and the easiest thing to lose.
With that, I start anew on another year of this website. As always, I’m hoping to make it a better year than the last one and there’s a lot of writing I want to get to before the next year closes on monoblogue, including wrapping up a manuscript I’ve been working with off and on over the last three years. It may be ready by year’s end, so if you know something about publishing I’m all ears.
In closing, I want to give thanks to my readers and my supporters. I’m not always on the winning side of the fights I pick and choose, but (as it were) I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees. There’s plenty of fight left in me and battles everywhere I turn, so there’s no use waiting on me to give up this ship or not having fun in the process.
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