Blogkeeping Notes for Summer

Hello folks,

This is not a real post, it’s just my monthly blogkeeping post for organizing and telling you what I did when I wasn’t on Patheos.

This month’s won’t be  long, because I managed to do nothing except blog on Patheos, which is incredibly frustrating. I did do a collaboration with Skylight, and you should definitely read that and tell folks how much you like it in case they want to do a collaboration again, because I had a great time. But other than that I’ve not had much energy for writing projects. If you’ve been following me closely, you know I got sick very early in June. I stayed sick until I went to the emergency room the next week. I hope that the sickness I’ve been having for three weeks since, which is very gradually getting better, is just the result of the Augmentin messing up my gut biome and not a new chronic illness. Because I had a misdiagnosed chronic illness that left me very disabled for years and years prior to late 2020, it’s extremely triggering and scary to be sick for a long time, and being frightened isn’t good for my health either. Thank you all for your patience as I try to get back on the ball. I really enjoy being published at the newspaper so often and writing for Where Peter Is was really fun as well. So, hopefully there’ll be more of that very soon.

I am still planning to go on those field trips I was talking about a month or two ago, to write articles like this one about interesting historic sites and tourist traps in the Ohio Valley. Now that I have a better phone that can upload videos longer than sixty seconds, I’d like to even make video content if I can. I’m brand new to this, but I’m going to give it a shot. I know that people would like me to go to the Andy Warhol museum, which I’ve always wanted to see. I’m going to take a trip to the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center museum near Berlin, about two hours away, which will be fascinating, and I’ll try to hit other tourist sites near there on the way back. I want to re-visit the Harding Home which I haven’t seen in well over a decade, and I want to see the art museum up in Akron. I just haven’t started yet, because my car is even sicker than I am. Jimmy thinks it’s the fuel pump this time. I’ve been grounded for three weeks which is also incredibly frustrating.  I hope there’s an end in sight.  You can imagine how impossible it is to be sick for a month WHILE unable to drive anywhere and to have to try to walk.

While I’m grounded, and when I’m up and running again, be sure to follow me on my social media.

I am most active on X/twitter.  I’m still trying to get the hang of Bluesky and Threads, and the more engagement I get there the more it’ll be worth it to post. It is harder and harder every single month for non-monetized content to be seen on social media. The collapse of Twitter is havoc on my pageviews. So, the very best thing you can do is interact with me, tell people if you like me, and share my work yourself. Thank you all for your engagement!

Finally, you guessed it, the eternal tip jar. Believe it or not I hate talking about it and I hate talking about how dire things sometimes get around here. I do support my family with my writing. I don’t get a regular paycheck from any one thing but I get paid drip by drip in book royalties and payments for my articles and writing projects. Due to the autism and to having been sick for so much of my life, this is the only career path I’ve had, and I’m doing my best.  Some months are great and some are not; it just all depends on how much writing work I’ve had. I get a tiny paycheck from Patheos for clicks in the United States and nothing for clicks in most other countries, and that’s all I’m guaranteed to get paid for blogging. So, I am still very dependent on people who drop a few dollars in my tip jar now and then or subscribe to tip me every month like a Patreon.

This month is shaping up to be a disaster because we never paid off June bills due to my being too sick to work very much, we had to get help from a friend to make up all of rent, and we always have a gigantic electric bill for the air conditioners in July.  And now rent will be due again on the fifteenth and I’m looking at a very large bill with a shutoff notice in my inbox just now. If the electric goes off, with the car broken down I can’t just drive to the library and keep writing.

So, as always, I ask: if you like what you read, leave me a tip when you can!

I have a paypal donate page here; the button says “donate” but I report those payments to the IRS as income so they’re not anything like charitable donations; they’re just the same as leaving a few dollars for your waiter. It says you’re donating to “The Little Portion” because that’s the name of an Etsy craft shop I used to have and I never changed the Paypal name. It actually goes to me.

I also have a Venmo if you’d rather use that.

And now I’ll go back to writing worth your time!