Personal stuff – Page 4

Wishes for a Merry Christmas 2019

On previous Christmas Eves I have quoted Scripture for this occasion, most recently Luke 2:8-20. But this year I think we need a thought at large.

I know there is a small fraction of my readership that recently celebrated Impeachmas, while most others rue the day our nation became so divided. As has often been the case, today (Christmas Eve) I did the shopping for my wife and Kassie, although this year was easy because they wanted a new smart TV. (Too bad most of what it shows is dumb, but that’s a subject for another post.)

But as I milled among the crowds at a local big-box electronic retailer I noticed most people were focused on the task at hand, which would be completing that shopping list. You may not know it if you were too glued to social media, but there are a world of people out there who interact with others, saying “Merry Christmas” and generally spreading holiday cheer.

Since evening has fallen as I write this message, many of you are in church for a Christmas Eve service. Others will see this once they arrive at their destination to spend the holiday with family, or maybe they are already there opening presents. (Once we got past the little kid and Santa stage, that was our family tradition. In our case this year, because Kim’s daughter works early Christmas morning we did our presents this afternoon.)

But I wonder how many hardy people are out re-enacting the true reason for the season, portraying the various Biblical characters in a live Nativity scene. Here in Delaware Nativity scenes have created a little bit of controversy from people who just don’t get it, and spurred the (I guess) equal but opposite reaction. But as divided as they were, everyone seems to have gotten along. Bad news for Satan, good on the rest of us.

So nearly two solid months of Christmas hype (maybe closer to four in the retail world, but two in Hallmark time) is finally coming to a climax tomorrow – unless you do the Orthodox Christmas which is twelve days. (In Michael time, Christmas starts about the time our church cantata ends a couple Sundays before Christmas.) In any case, come early January all the decorations get put away for another winter. Let’s just pray the good tidings and memories stick around well beyond then.

Merry Christmas to all of my readers!

Telling me what to do again

It’s been far too long since I’ve done one of these posts, but at a relatively slow time for serious news it’s a good time to break stuff like this out. Somehow it seems appropriate for Friday the 13th.

In my e-mail box I keep a stack of messages from various entities which often write me with an assumed name and tell me how to run my website. One of my favorite pitches is the one which tells me how lacking my SEO is – I love the effort to sound hip with the jargon on this one:

Dear monoblogue,
My experts were analyzing your website and found that your website is not handling recent updates from search engines.
Also your traffic flow is poor from last couple of months due to some of the reasons. You might know about recent Google UPDATES like Phantom 3.0, Panda 4.2, and Penguin 4.0.
Google has completely dropped all authorship functionality from the search results and web master tools. So be careful on it and take the help of a SEO company to fix it.
Obnoxious e-mail from “Alex Morgan”, whose e-mail address had a completely different name

Or maybe I just need “immediate improvement.”

(And yes, this is verbatim too.)

Hi Monoblogue.Us,
I have a complete analysis report ready with me which shows your website needs immediate improvement. Your business need to have a concrete SEO strategy in place if you want to succeed in online marketing.
We can deliver you the exact solution you are looking for your website.
We will be targeting search engine and Social networks to get you maximum visibility. Our experts will maintain good impression through our online reputation management services. Also you will get Regular updates on website to make it look fresh and error free.
Give consent, my technical team will prepare a comprehensive call to action plan to reach your target audience.
We will be looking forward to your response.
One of my annoying e-mails, from “Steve Morgan”

Here’s my response: I really love ESL pitches. The only immediate improvement I need is to have a little more time for blogging, but aside from that I would stack my body of work up against anyone’s.

And since I don’t lose any sleep over what I write, I don’t see a need for “online reputation management.” So there you go.

Speaking of ESL, try this one:

Dear monoblogue Owner,
Hope you are doing well!
We came to know that you are concerned with bringing new customers from your target market and beat your competitors to boost your business. If you are interested, we can help you to identify the gray areas and best possible solutions.
I’m confident enough to get your website on #1 Page of Google with all round improvement in your brand value and sales.
Please revert back to know more about our services.
I look forward to hearing from you.
An e-mail from “David Wilson.” Yeah, right.

Perhaps it’s from a very British-influenced nation, but carrying on…

I also get a lot of people who are interested in advertising on my site, but not in the way I would prefer. It’s often a pitch of,”Can you please write to us if you can publish an article with a link to our website or any other form to link our website and how much it will cost.”

Or, if I was so inclined, I could have someone else write it. “One of our clients has shown interest in being featured on (your site) in a guest post. We have a great team of writers and we can provide the article, or if you prefer, you can also write it and feature our client.”

How about if I just write what I like instead of selling my blog’s soul? I’m sorry to disappoint the struggling writer in some craphole country who’s not getting the quarter for the thousand-word post which would otherwise be placed in this space, but this is my modest, humble little home and I like knowing I built it.

Finally, here’s the key question:

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how long have you been blogging for?
Sophie Naylor, Team Leader and Biscuit Consumer, bloggersconnected.com

Yes, she asked. Does my site not say it’s been around since 2005? At least her site looks somewhat legit, although I’m not one who would like to be paid in euros.

Once upon a time I thought I could make a living at this, but I’ve found there are many more people who would like to relieve me of my meager subsistence through get-rich-quick schemes for the gullible than people who would legitimately enjoy what I write and rattle my tip jar. (It still happens once in a great while, though.) But there’s still hope writing may supplement my retirement, and it did occur to me the other day that the paying job I’ve held longest in my life is that of writing for The Patriot Post.

So I suppose I’m doing something right, despite the naysayers. At least their e-mails give me a smile and inspiration.

A stone of years: monoblogue turns 14

Izzy Stradlin of Guns n’ Roses once sang, “You don’t get back 14 years in just one day,” and that’s probably true for a blog post, too. (Good song on a pretty good record, “Use Your Illusion II” – although I liked Illusion I a little better. Can you believe that double album will be 30 years old in 2021?)

But as I contemplate what a long, strange trip it’s been, it’s also apparent that so much has changed: not just the presentation as arranged by the blog theme (which is still the Twenty Sixteen theme I adopted about a year ago) but what’s placed on the site. I just used to put up SO much political stuff like press releases and analysis of races, but now I do more lengthy and meaty diatribes about the world as it is and how it should be.

So I have come pretty much full circle: now monoblogue is actually more like how it was when I first started, before I got a little too proud and before I bought into the theory that the only way to build an audience was by posting ultra-frequently. I thought I could be somebody just based on building the popularity of this website, but that task was something I tried and failed to do since it was a singular effort put together by a guy who rarely had two nickels to rub together let alone a promotions budget. So my content creation had to suffer, and eventually I just got sick of curating that crap.

Unfortunately, as I sit here I still get the feeling that I placed myself into a couple too many boxes. However, I remain a believer in the philosophy that politics should be the part-time profession of caring Americans, so on this blog you’ll always find the political somewhere: 2019 wasn’t an election year except at a local level but it has featured the runup to the 2020 balloting. It’s something I’ve had my take on every so often as it develops.

I’ve also retained my passion about the Shorebirds, and one thing I really loved doing the research on was my fantasy baseball team. With 2020 coming up, I can have the fun of working on that with a few new players and a slimmed-down roster (you’ll see what I mean.) Come spring I may be forced to revamp a little bit about Shorebird of the Month because of the changes at Perdue Stadium making it tougher to get my photos, but I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

But this website will soon undergo one somewhat significant change. Just as writing something every day began to become a chore I almost dreaded doing, the same goes for monoblogue music. Since the end of September I’ve had one review in my queue to do but I just don’t feel like it. For awhile I was living with the excuse that I had bad internet service (moving out into the country comes with that disadvantage to be sure) but I’ve since rectified that and don’t have to live off my phone’s hotspot. Sometime in December I will finally put up that review – my first since July – and select one final top 5 before I put monoblogue music mostly to bed except maybe for some follow-up reviews on previous top 5 bands (and I make no promises on that.) The reviews had a pretty good five-plus year run but like a lot of series in the past I just got tired of the concept. (I’m not tired of Weekend of Local Rock, either, but then again I never put my photos from Casting Crowns up. I think six weeks is past its expiration date.)

To be perfectly honest, I’d also like to get rid of some of the previous notions about my website. One transition I’m planning to make in the coming weeks is changing my Rise and Fall site to an author-based site for promotion of all my works, past, present, and future. And since this website is one of those works, has spawned 5,000-plus posts, was the germ of inspiration for my first book (So We May Breathe Free, 2012), and led to several other of my writing jobs, it’s an important piece going forward that demands the best content. These music reviews weren’t making the cut.

And in order to put a better foot forward, I’m also working slowly on something I promised last year – it’s made a lot easier thanks to a trove of photo disks I found over the summer. I’ve done about ten posts so far and once I work on Shorebird of the Week posts (which generally only needed one photo) the backlog of about 200 posts where photos were lost will quickly begin to dwindle. That is a good thing and it’s brought back a lot of memories.

So I’m not getting back 14 years in just one day, but I don’t have to: the good memories are already right here. Now I’m ready to start year number 15.

Happy Thanksgiving 2019

It’s that time of year again. Unlike most of the rest of the world these days, I keep the holidays in order and don’t think about Christmas until Thanksgiving is over. So today I’m going to count my blessings.

First and foremost is being married to my wife. Even though this didn’t happen until comparatively late in life, everything occurs in the Lord’s time. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to meet her when we were both far younger – perhaps it would have saved us both a lot of heartache. But then again we may not have been attracted to each other for whatever reason, so – as I said – things occur in the Lord’s time, not mine. And since it was a package deal I got to watch her daughter grow up and become a pretty good adult.

The second big blessing is a home of our own, one which placed us in the First State for the first time. It’s not brand new and it’s not fancy, but it’s the first time I’ve lived in a house that wasn’t standing when Jimmy Carter was president. (I suppose the apartment I lived in for two years wasn’t either, but that was an apartment.)

Another blessing that’s come over the last year or so is the extended family of our church small group. My family is spread out from Ohio to Missouri to Florida, so I don’t often see them. These folks are the surrogates who keep me grounded.

I have also had the blessing of finishing and marketing my book, The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. Now I’m not going to lie to you and claim it’s been a best seller (although there’s still time) but I have received the opportunity to speak to audiences in 13 different states, not counting podcasts and the like. Tomorrow I wrap up the radio tour with an internet radio show, which I suppose covers the other 37 states, right?

So when we gather around the table this evening (generally Kim’s family eats around supper time as opposed to my growing up with dinner during the Lions game) and say the blessing, I have a lot for which to be thankful. Hopefully you can say the same.

Oh, and one more thing to be thankful about: having those of you who still care enough to stop by my little corner of the internet. It’s not the largest number ever but each one is one more than I would have had without the website. On Sunday I’ll do that navel-gazing since it will be 14 years of monoblogue.

Have a happy and blessed Thanksgiving.

Picks and pans from a Shorebird fan, 2019 edition

After long years of waiting, we finally got our concourse. Of all the picks, I have to say that is the best! It gives fans a new perspective and kids who want to shag home run balls a place to go.

Now that it’s here, the time has come to increase its potential. How about a couple mobile food carts or even just specialty vendors who walk that part of the stadium on large crowd nights? Maybe someday they can expand it in the left-field corner enough for a seating area and/or (even better) a mini-stage to bring back Thursday postgame concerts.

But while the new concourse is nice, I think most of the significant increase in attendance – the Shorebirds drew 218,704 (3,265 per game), which is over 17,000 more in just two more dates compared to 2018 and their best number since 2012 – comes from having a winning team. We can’t do much about that from a fan standpoint, although next year’s Shorebirds will inherit from a fairly talented pool below them in the organization, but we can suggest some areas for improvement and praise that which is good.

The good picks begins at the top, with the league’s executive of the year being Shorebird GM Chris Bitters. Give the man a raise! Fan-friendly but hesitant to take the spotlight, Chris has shepherded the franchise through a lengthy series of physical plant improvements which need to extend to one more aspect of the facilities: the back-of-the-house functions like restrooms, offices, and food service. All of those could use a little bit of freshening up and now is a good time to make that investment. This would give them the opportunity for CCTV in the restrooms so fans don’t miss the action.

There are also a couple other things which need to be freshened up, though. After two seasons the frog shuffle and video racing are getting a bit long in the tooth, so it might be time for the sponsors to consider some new stuff. More importantly, though, it may be time to freshen up the food offerings. I thought I heard this was the last year of their contract so maybe we can bring in someone else who’s better. I’m not expecting fine dining here, but I think we can do better than what we’ve had over the last few seasons.

The one big pan I would have is the new netting, simply because it eliminates one feature I enjoy about games, taking player pictures. It’s either that or moving way down the left field line, which sort of defeats the purpose unless I spend a few hundred dollars on a serious telephoto lens. I’m not that serious about it.

The other problem with this is that it allows fans to pay less attention to the game than they already do – which is how some number of people got hurt before the netting was extended. My seat isn’t the most risky, but over fifteen seasons I have been buzzed by a line drive (and snatched one out of the air with a nice grab), hit by an errant bunt and gotten a nice welt on the elbow from a flying bat, so even though I pay pretty close attention I still get the safety aspect. I ended up securing three foul balls that bounced or rolled to me this season, which is a high for me. But that seemed like too much of a tradeoff.

I went over a lot of stuff at the end of last season which still holds true, but thank goodness they found a better site for the new Sheriff’s office.

So I want to spend a little time going over a different sort of pick. Remember back in March when I predicted the Shorebirds’ opening day roster? This is how I did on those picks.

On starting pitchers, of the six I predicted all six spent time with the Shorebirds this year. However, Matthew Hammonds was primarily a reliever and Blaine Knight was here a very brief time before his promotion. And they didn’t piggyback Grayson Rodriguez as much as I thought they would. (6 of 6)

As for the relief corps, five of the seven made it here although none stayed all season. We saw just a little bit of Ryan Conroy (two appearances) but more of Nick Gruener (retired at mid-season), Tyler Joyner and Zach Matson (both promoted to Frederick), and Ryan Wilson (who came up and stayed a starter.) Kevin Magee spent his second season in Aberdeen and Victor Romero barely pitched due to injury – just a handful of GCL rehab appearances from Frederick’s roster. (11 of 13)

Both my catchers missed significant time – Alfredo Gonzalez spent the whole season on Frederick’s IL (or perhaps was placed there as coaching prep) while Cody Roberts missed half the season with a legitimate injury suffered in the very first game of the campaign but salvaged some games with Delmarva. (12 of 15)

Out of six infielders, three spent most of the season with Delmarva – Seamus Curran at first, Adam Hall at shortstop, and Alexis Torres at second. However, I underestimated both J.C. Escarra and Willy Yahn, who both began the season with Frederick – Yahn eventually ended it with the Bowie Baysox. On the flip side, Zach McLeod went the other way: back from Aberdeen to the GCL and perhaps out of a job as he was pedestrian there. He was probably my biggest miss. (15 of 21)

Finally, my four outfielders, all of whom spent time here. Nick Horvath was the only full-season player, though, as the other three (Jaylen Ferguson, Robert Neustrom, and Robbie Thorburn) played a combined total of 118 games here – just five more than Horvath on his own.

So I got 19 of 25. Can’t say that’s half bad for minor league baseball.

Beginning from my little corner

There are some who will likely appreciate the symbolism in this post.

I’m standing in Maryland but pretty much everything you see in the photo beyond the fence is Delaware.

On Friday I took a little side trip on my way home. I’ve passed by this place a few times over the years, but since I’ve moved to the First State I drive by this monument every day on my way to work. But until the other day I’d never stopped to look at it despite its historical significance.

The plaque explains the significance of the monument.

On my way into work one day it dawned on me that the monument is the perfect symbol of a new beginning, a staking out of a starting point and a redirection for this site. For many years I’ve been known as a Maryland-centric political blogger, but since I left the political game as a participant I had ceded the field to others who have done their level best to monetize their work and proclaim themselves as some sort of kingmaker in a Republican governor’s office. And that’s fine, more power to them – they live closer to the seat of power and apparently have to time to invest in those activities.

While I don’t have the utmost in time, in scanning the situation here in the First State I’ve found that there aren’t any active conservative blogs here. (If there are, they are pretty well hidden.) Truth be told, there aren’t a whole lot of liberal ones either but they do exist and I can’t abide that sort of situation. It’s something which needed to be addressed, so I will make up the hedge for the time being – assistance is encouraged!

So here I begin, almost literally from square one because I don’t yet know the players aside from studying the voting records for the Delaware General Assembly for the last couple years. (More on that in a bit.) The way I look at it is that I have staked out this corner as a beginning spot. Yes, it’s symbolic but in actuality I don’t live all that far from this point. (I think as the crow flies it’s about 5 1/2 miles, but I live less than two from the northerly extension of this line.) If you took in the territory between our home and this point, there are probably only a few hundred people living there in scattered homes and one development. And right now that’s probably about all I have to go to war with in this state – a state that is rapidly changing, and not necessarily for the better.

I wonder how they divvy up all this coin. By blind chance, 3/4 of it would fall in Maryland.

I suppose, then, that step one of this process is to announce the 2019 edition of the monoblogue Accountability Project for Delaware, which I finally got to wrap up this weekend. I’ll formally announce it tomorrow morning although the soft opening will be this evening once I create the PDF and add the link. (And no, I did not do a Maryland one this year, nor will I. That can be someone else’s baby, maybe some red-colored site.)

I think it’s a start to rally the liberty-lovers in this state, who I’ve found to be really, really, really poorly served by the Delaware GOP. I have more thoughts in mind on a number of First State issues, but this will be the first in what should be a few significant changes regarding this website. Stay tuned.

A subtle but important change

I don’t know how many of you have ever noticed my tagline that’s been up pretty much since this website came online back in 2005, but it’s the part that said some variant of “news and views from Maryland’s Eastern Shore.” Well, today’s post is one of the last from the Eastern Shore as my wife and I have finally bought a home in the First State. (So I’ve changed it.)

With the change comes a change in emphasis. I’ve always had kind of a state-based focus, but after a little bit of study and being in office it became apparent that the Eastern Shore is indeed the shithouse of Maryland politics. For the most part, our needs are ignored by the state of Maryland simply because there’s not enough voters on the Shore to make a big difference. We on the Shore lay some claim to 12 out of 141 members of the Maryland General Assembly and 4 of 47 Senators in the Maryland Senate, which means that our desires are pretty much subordinated by any one of a half-dozen or so individual counties on the other side of the Bay.

And even when we have a governor who belongs to the same political party as the plurality of the Eastern Shore – where five of the nine counties lean Republican and the other four have registration numbers within striking distance – the desires of this region rarely pass muster. At best, they are watered down; at worst, things we oppose become law without Larry Hogan’s signature or a veto – even when a veto assures current law remains in force for another eight to nine months before the next year’s session and the inevitable override. It’s shameful that longheld local GOP priorities often get short shrift in Annapolis, and it’s doubtful that any change back to the Democrats will help. (For example, don’t be fooled by the moderate facade Peter Franchot’s assuming for his nascent gubernatorial run; he told me all I needed to know with his statement about Alabama.)

On the other hand, while Sussex County is but about 1/4 of Delaware’s population, it’s the fastest-growing county of the three in Delaware. And if I really had the desire to get down in the weeds of local and state politics moreso than my monoblogue Accountability Project and the occasional foray into interesting issues such as the right-to-work battle that ended early last year, I have an election coming up where all 41 members of the Delaware General Assembly, half their 21-member Senate, and Governor John Carney are all on the ballot for election.

It’s also worth remembering why I began the Delaware edition of my Accountability Project – since I was working for a decent-sized homebuilder at the time and I noticed that well over half its clientele was coming from other nearby states (including Maryland) I realized that keeping Delaware attractive was good for business and affected my paycheck. Of course, now the situation is reversed somewhat since I work here in Maryland, but that business sinks or swims more on other factors where ineffective government doesn’t affect it quite as much. And, frankly, I need a new horizon anyway. (Even more frankly, from what I’ve seen about the Delaware Republican Party it makes Maryland’s look professional – and that’s a very low bar to set. I think I’ll register with the Constitution Party.)

So I’m departing the Maryland political scene for the most part, a move begun by my resignation from the Central Committee three years ago and hastened by our house search. It’s time for someone else to take the reins, or those reins can lay on the ground and be trampled into the mud. I guess that depends on just who cares.

Presale begins April 15!

The long road is about over. I am in the Amazon queue to begin presale, with the official kickoff for the e-book set for this coming Monday, April 15 – the tenth anniversary of the Tax Day TEA Parties which occurred around the country.

I’m shooting to have the print version ready for presale as well.

The key item in making this book a success is for those who initially buy it to give it good reviews (you really should, anyway, because I thought it was a good book – and so did my beta readers.)

But if you’re wondering where I have disappeared to lately, that’s the answer to your question – getting these last-minute details ironed out. Hopefully over the next couple weeks I will begin catching up on some of those things I’ve been meaning to write on, perhaps as a couple odds and ends posts. I also have a Shorebird post to write as well, plus a record review in my writing queue.

It will be strange not writing about the TEA Party, that’s for sure.

P5k

I wrote this back on November 5, 2014:

Those who know me and have some idea of what makes me tick realize pretty quickly I am a numbers guy, and there is just something about round numbers that I like. So every time I turn the odometer of 1,000 posts it’s a big deal to me, and hitting the 4,000 mark is no different than hitting 1,000, 2,000, 2,500, or 3,000. (For the record, the last 1,000 posts took 853 days to compile.)
“P4k”, November 5, 2014.

You can tell I’ve done this awhile: why dig up all the links when they’re readily available? But by my public school math, that previous pace would have gotten me to this 5,000 post mark on March 7, 2017. So what happened to push things back to March 24, 2019?

Well, back in 2016 I reconsidered a number of life decisions. One was to leave the Wicomico County Republican Central Committee after a ten-year run, but shortly before that I simply decided I couldn’t do justice to this site and my other obligations by posting every day, almost like clockwork. It was getting to be a real chore to make all my self-imposed deadlines so I decided to get rid of some of them – hence, the posting schedule is now about 1 to 3 a week. I also began on my book, which I’m working to finally finish next month after toiling on it for 2 1/2 years off and on, mostly on.

So this website, which used to be of primary importance to me, has fallen through the cracks a little bit. To be quite frank, there have been times where I just didn’t feel like posting here because I had something more important to work on. Book number two has been a joy to write, and it’s given me an idea of a topic for book number three – however, if book two is as successful as I think it may be, book number 2 1/2 will be a rework of book one, revising and extending those remarks.

At one time I had a decent-sized audience of readers, but since I stepped away from what was basically a sizable part-time job that made me very little income, that number – which was already down because the previous year was not an election year – was cut in half the first year and 1/3 of that the next. It’s somewhat depressing, but I often remind myself that the number of readers I have now was something I got genuinely excited about during the first year I had this site. That gentle reminder puts things in perspective.

Not only that, I have always suspected I attract a certain quality of readers. Once upon a time, I was put down as being “wordy and verbose,” and I’ll be the first to admit: guilty as charged. So instead of a thousand would-be political hacks taking in whatever I cooked up in the middle of the night I now have maybe a few dozen diehard readers, ones who care more about me as a person than me as a political pundit.

Because I do like working in numbers, the other day as I realized I was closing in on this milestone I got to thinking about just how many words I have put down for this website. If you figure the average as a thousand words a post, that’s five million words. (Just hope I don’t have a finite lifetime supply, right?) Considering my upcoming book should run right about 100,000 words and 300 pages, on this website I have written 50 books and 15,000 pages in 13 years and change. That’s kind of scary.

And it’s kind of sad, too. As our church is working through the Book of Ecclesiastes, it brought to my mind a passage from its second chapter:

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.
And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly: for what can the man do that cometh after the king? even that which hath been already done.
Ecclesiastes 2:11-12, KJV.

After 5,000 posts I’ve come to realize that maybe this website isn’t going to move the political needle – but then again that’s really not for me to determine. However, it still has a purpose: it’s the journal of my thoughts, experiences, and opinions, and if it moves one reader in the right direction that’s an accomplishment I probably couldn’t perform otherwise.

The other day as I was writing to my small group, which has a potter by trade, it occurred to me that, just as clay creates his vessel, words create mine. No one ever said that I was always going to be successful making my points, but these are the talents the Good Lord gave me and who would I be to hide my light under a bushel?

So whether the “odometer” has another thousand posts in it or not (let’s hope it does) I can still say I enjoy writing here and wish to continue as long as the Good Lord allows it.

Observations on an avocation

Because people have actually paid me for doing this stuff for over a decade now, I consider freelance writing to be my side hustle. But with a steadier full-time job, I really hadn’t taken the craft seriously enough until I got closer and closer to finishing The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party – in part because I didn’t wish to repeat the mistakes I made with my first book seven years ago. (As part of taking it seriously, Lord knows the tempo of posting here has slowed to an agonizing crawl, right?)

So this year I had a door opened as I found out the Eastern Shore Writers Association was hosting a self-publishing track as part of their annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference. I hadn’t previously been a member but now I am among their ranks, and it’s an interesting group – as I found out last Saturday.

One feature of their conference is a bookstore of their authors’ products, and I learned that, for the most part, my peers in the group work in fiction and poetry. It’s not something that I have an issue with at all; in fact, I salute their creativity and imagination in pursuing their craft. However, it should be said that I am probably the outlier when it comes to both genre and viewpoint – I tell people I’m “barely left of militia” but my observation was that most of these folks are likely left of center – and a few barely this side of Stalin.

But I think all of us share a goal of getting out our story, whether it be a fictional figment of wild imagination or a historical and political documentation like Rise and Fall. I know it may not have the audience of a Tom Clancy thriller nor the reach of someone who’s a known figure and can negotiate a $65 million advance. (Heck, I would have done cartwheels for a $6,500 advance – or maybe even $65.) Still, I was a bit disappointed that no one really wanted to take a chance on being an agent for the book, but I shouldn’t have been surprised given the hundreds of thousands of titles produced annually, many by already-established authors.

Fortunately, I have an available outlet in self-publishing and over the six hour-long seminars I attended I learned a lot about the ins and outs of selling that way. One author made her series of romance novels a hit by studying the trends of well-selling similar books and adding those elements into her stories, which are set on the Eastern Shore. Another shared her insights on producing a good finished product, still a third talked about the art of face-to-face hand-selling of hard copies, and so on. I have pages of notes and several handouts to guide me. Now I have a strategy in mind for marketing, incorporating some of the elements I already have in place such as my book website.

So now I’m doing the final edits to Rise and Fall, among other things taking care of one maddening aspect that I found to be an easy enough fix. But I suppose I can let it slip that Rise and Fall won’t be the last book I do, and hopefully in about 18 months there will be a companion to it on fine bookshelves and e-readers everywhere. At this point that’s all I will reveal.

All in all, the Bay to Ocean event was good for me, and hopefully you’ll soon agree that it made me a better writer and marketer. I have definitely found more appreciation of craft after the event.

Remembering the rant

For the first time, I’m cross-posting to my book website.

On a humdrum Thursday morning, there were probably a few dozen thousand who were watching the CNBC show “Squawk Box” and a lot of them probably weren’t paying full attention when one man’s statements were the spark that lit the fuse of pent-up political frustration. It was a fire that raged out of control for several years before being contained by a political party more interested in power and winning elections than in its stated principles.

I half-jokingly wrote that night that I thought Rick Santelli would be the next guy on the unemployment line, but instead he’s become something of a cult hero for those things he said a decade ago. Yet in looking up his whereabouts it appears he’s doing pretty much the same thing as he did a decade ago. In that respect, he’s a lot like most participants in the TEA Party who did what they did out of love for the country, not fame, fortune, or political power. I’m sure his name has come up a lot today, though.

But in just eight days after Santelli made his remarks, tens of thousands of people got together in over thirty cities around the nation and began a phenomenon that people still talk about today. And because there are a number of useful lessons that came from the TEA Party, I wrote a book detailing its history: Good Lord willing, I’ll have it ready in time to commemorate the tenth anniversary of one of the most massive and widespread grassroots uprisings in recent American history, the Tax Day TEA Party of 2009 on April 15. I was at the one here in Salisbury, and five months later I was at the unforgettable 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington. (I posted on that event in two parts the next two days, and the posts reminded me I had even more photos on my then-relatively nascent Facebook page. Revisiting this with the new WordPress block setup allowed me to add the captions I wrote originally, too.) As they say, the rest was history.

And to think: how many people just thought February 19, 2009 was just going to be another humdrum winter’s day?

More oh-so-expert advice on how to run a blog.

After doing this for almost 14 years, you would think people would figure out I have a way of doing things and a comfort zone I’m not apt to stray from. But they keep trying and as I described last night this comes from the lighthearted stack of stuff.

These are two recent appeals that I’m going to write verbatim. I decided not to use blockquote for this one, so trust me that I didn’t make these up. But I am going to print my ongoing responses in italics.

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Hope you are doing good.

I think I do a lot of good every time I write. To borrow a phrase from Walter E. Williams, I try to push back the frontiers of ignorance.

I checked your website monoblogue.us and wanted to shoot you a quick note. If you want we can make few changes to make your site convert more visitors into leads and to place it higher in the organic search for some selected terms.

Leads to what? I don’t sell anything here except maybe my first book and overall philosophy, the latter of which I give freely as a mission of sorts.

If you are not on Google’s first page, your website is a waste. If you want to know the major issues of your website, I am sending few points below.

Telling me my website is a waste? Yeah, that’s a good way to drum up sales.

Due to poor and unauthorized link sites.
Relevant keyword phrases are not visible on first page listing.
Your website is not search engine friendly.
Website content quality is not high standard.
Website is having on-page and on-site issues.

On point one, I link to those things I think are useful to the story. Since a lot of them are news, does that mean the media is poor and unauthorized?

Points two and three are irrelevant to me since I don’t write content for SEO, but to tell me my content quality is not high standard – well, up yours, buddy. And talk to my server about point number five, since they are the ones who generally cause the issues. For some reason, WordPress seems to want to add a point six on this, too.

Area of Improvement:

Get quality content and theme based back links.
We will give you 1st page ranking on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Improve your organic traffic and sales.
Secure your website from Google penguin updates 4.0
Target your local market to increase business.

The fact that I don’t know what the heck this guy is talking about for the most part tells me his quality is not high standard – although maybe you figured it out from the grammar before this point.

Note*: We give guarantee to improve your keyword ranking from the first month itself, if we fail to achieve then we will refund your money.

Is that before or after you sell my e-mail address and skim my credit card?

Our main objective is to increase your website’s online visibility which results in improvement in traffic, link popularity, goal conversion and ROI.

Then you are a poor business. Your main objective should be to make money legitimately. My online visibility is just fine.

For more details please reply. We have your WEBSITE ANALYSIS REPORT ready with us.

Let me guess – it’s the same report as the other 600 website owners you sent this e-mail blast to would get. But I figure it must be enough that if only a couple fools take up their offer, then ROI is positive.

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So that was batch number one of supremely helpful advice. (Update: going through my spam folder I found another but with a different “sender.” You know it’s fake when it’s a name followed by a number on Gmail.) By the way, that went to my old e-mail address I really don’t use anymore, as did the second one a day or two later.

You know, everyone thinks they can give me good content. But there’s a reason I call it monoblogue, and this leads me to e-mail number two, which came all the way from Germany. It was like pulling teeth to read this – imagine each line double-spaced.

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My name is Rik, I have two clients that want to publish content on your website.

Congratulations! Is it really that hard to start a blog in Germany, though? I’d rather do the work myself, thanks.

Do you allow paid content on your website?

Actually, I do. Most (but not all) of my record reviews are paid content, but the writing is mine. I would love to have a sponsor for Shorebird of the Month, though.

If yes how much does is it cost to publish an article on your website?

You know, I’m half-tempted to write back and tell him (in my best Dr. Evil voice) “one meeeellion dollars.” He’s from Germany, think he would understand?

Our budget is not limited. The better the websites metrics are the more we are willing to pay. An upfront payment is not a problem!

So where’s my check? I figured it would come in the mail if you’re this confident.

We would prefer to write the article ourselves but you can write the content also.

If it’s some boring subject where I have to insert fourteen keywords in the first 200 words I’ll take a pass. I like my own subjects and words, thanks.

We as an agency are looking for a long term cooperation since we have many different clients.

Clients as in people who are paying you to advertise or clients like the best of ESL writers from India who can subsist on a quarter-penny per word? Or maybe you suckered them into doing it for the “exposure” like I was once upon a time when I was young and naive.

Can you tell I’m a bit jaded? Does it show?

Ps. I take my job really serious please check out below my social profiles and read more about my clients testimonials.

Actually I did. I think he had two testimonials and I’ll bet he made them up.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

This is as close as you will get.

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As I said, each line was double-spaced when these sentences could have been combined. If that’s the writing I get then I think it’s worth what I would probably make off the deal.

Maybe someday people will get the hint that I like my sandbox the way it is and there are few invited guests for a reason. Of course, then how would I write my occasional snarky replies?

Have I told you writing is just a struggle? I know it was a struggle to keep a straight face with these two. Tomorrow you get some of my paid content as I wrote a record review last night.