Musings & Thoughts for Friday, September 22, 2023, or: There Shall Be No Weekend for This Writer

Midday/Early Afternoon, Friday, September 22, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, all.

So, here we are again at the end of another workweek and on the brink of another weekend. For me, Fridays aren’t as full of promise as they used to be regarding restfulness or weekend fun. If I have a reasonably productive writing week (which I define as 4-5 days when I either write without “blocks” or see “spikes” in sales of Reunion: A Story), then I feel like saying, “TGIF! I can take time off from writing!”)

But if I have what I consider to be a lackluster workweek – one marked by 2-3 days when I don’t write enough “new words” or I have an extremely difficult time constructing a scene (such as the fourth scene in Reunion: Coda’s Chapter 11) that involves fleshing out a plot point from the existing Reunion novella and is important to Jim Garraty’s narrative arc – then Friday is merely a prelude to what I call a “working weekend.”

As you can probably guess, I did not have a particularly productive workweek, so I’m going to have to work on the novel tomorrow and perhaps even Sunday as well. I want to publish Reunion: Coda in time for the December holiday season, which is less than three months away, and if I don’t work this weekend, I might even miss that (admittedly self-imposed) deadline.

Oh, well. At least no one can say I don’t have a strong work ethic or that I lack ambition.

On the Good News Side of Things

I did get an email earlier this week from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing that my royalties payment for August (which was a rare “good” month for sales of Reunion: A Story) was being processed, so that’s a bit of positive writing-related news.

Another positive development: It seems that Meta has lifted its unfair block of my original Blogger version of A Certain Point of View, which was banned in late March 2020 from Facebook after one – just one – Trump supporter kept on reporting my posts as “spam.”

I have already written a detailed account of that sorry incident, which is why I had to create this blog on WordPress three and a half years ago, so I won’t delve into the backstory of the “banned on Facebook blog.” The only things you need to know are:

• I couldn’t share posts from A Certain Point of View (Blogger) on Facebook for 3.5 years, which adversely affected my blog’s traffic and my ad revenue stream
• Without notifying me via email or Facebook Messenger, Meta quietly lifted its ban sometime in September. I don’t know when, exactly, because I stopped trying to share posts from A Certain Point of View on Facebook after my last appeals in April of 2020 failed to sway the bots or mods or both

I only found this out yesterday when I felt a sudden impulse to try and share a post from Blogger to my Facebook profile. I fully expected to fail – I mean, I had tested this a few times between 2020 and yesterday and I always received the “you can’t share this post on Facebook” message. I had no expectations that one day I’d be able to post from A Certain Point of View anywhere in the Metaverse….and yet…for some reason, my posts from Blogger are now allowed.

Other than mentioning that I can now sing “All the Things You Are” reasonably well and without screwing up the lyrics, I don’t have anything noteworthy to report, so I’ll close this post here. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.