💌Hanlon’s Reader #4: November Newsletter
"If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from." ☀🏜
📅 Monthly Update: November 2023
Hey y’all,
2024 is around the corner and it will be here before we know it. Voting isn’t everything, but it’s the largest impact for the smallest investment. Take a minute to make sure you’re registered and bookmark ⭐Ballotpedia to research candidates.
🦅 Check vote.org to see if you’re registered for 2024 🦅
🗳 Use Ballotpedia to research candidates and check your sample ballot 🗳
🔃 In Progress:
One 💚 for each Subscriber! Love to see this climb ever so slowly. Apparently the secret to success around here is consistency, so I just have to keep writing and grow a nicely crafted garden of words. 🌱 👨🌾 🌱
Okay, so the keen-eyed among you may notice something: 4 writing months, 14 writing weeks? Well, a combination of things happened:
My original goal was writing 5 pages (1,250 words) per week of new content
My stories are running way over 1,250 words every week!
I didn’t write a couple of weeks back in September when work got busy
I didn’t factor writing the newsletter into my wordcount, just new content
Overall though, I’m still pretty much on track because on a lot of weeks I wrote well over 1,250 words to cover the difference (1,420 weekly average).
🎯 TARGET:
16 weeks x 1,250 words = 20,000 words
20,000 words / 250 words per page = 80 pages
📝 WORDCOUNT:
14 weeks x 1,420 words = 19,880 words
19,880 words / 250 words per page = 79.5 pages
❗❗ Upcoming:
So yeah!!! After tomorrow’s post finishing up Larval Haze I’ll have not one but TWO short stories, a book, and about 1/3 of a second book done. Soon you’ll be hearing about my upcoming… marketing efforts 🤢
There’s very little overlap between good writers and good marketers. (I just made that up, but it feels true.) Personally, I don’t like talking up my work… but I also like doing things myself. So I’m going to give it a shot!
Soon I’ll be putting my real life work dollars into advertising, and I’ll also be launching paid subscriptions. I’m still not ready for that yet, but SOON!
🎁 Bonus Content:
Something you should know about me: I hate advertising.
But I love the internet! Except now it runs entirely on ads. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and again, I really just despise ads, so I use:
Installing Firefox + these 2 extensions takes care of pretty much everything.
Most people don’t bother with any of this, because most people don’t care that much or don’t realize they can just easily download any of this stuff with a few clicks to stop ads from intruding on their daily thoughts.
Except recently, YouTube went and did this:
Anyway here’s a YouTube video about it:
So now it’s this constant back-and-forth between YouTube trying to enforce this and the adblocking companies just… figuring out better ways to get around their adblocker-blocker.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—but pretty much every time it doesn’t work, all you have to do is open up a private tab and paste the link in there to watch without ads.
I just hate ‘em! 😡
Be well,
James Hanlon
11/29/23
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