Writing as a job

Allyson is a published author. I am a published author. She works at writing. I was told to write, I did, they published it.

When I decided to keep GunFreeZone.net alive, I tried to post multiple times per day. I quickly burned out. Today I have a schedule of once per day, with extras when it is important and not an echo.

In the course of a normal day, I will read around 400 pages of text. Some of it I skim, some of it I have to read carefully, and some of it is for fun. I will also write 3000 to 5000 words, some of that is code, most of it is in English.

To be blunt, I spend more time reading and writing than just about anything else in my life.

Writer’s block is an excuse for an amateur. If you are expected to write, you write, you don’t get to say, “I don’t feel it today.”

If you are getting “writer’s block”, you are writing as a hobby. Allyson talks about this in her writing blogs and groups.

The next part of writing is making sure you are writing for more than yourself. If you are writing for yourself, you should be writing for yourself six months from now.

Every evening, I sit down, and I write for the blog. Occasionally, it is easy. Usually, it is work. Then there are days when it is just plain difficult.

I want to babble about the cheap soldering station I just picked up. Claims to be good. Has a 4.5-star rating. I had to crank it to 800F before it would melt solder, and I’m not sure if I got good connections.

Boring.

I’m in the process of getting rid of Traefik, a “load balancer”. I would rather not have left Apache, I did. I went to nginx, I still don’t understand it as well as I do Apache, but it is my preferred web server. Nginx can work as a load balancer, but it isn’t really.

So I have: Traefik, Nginx, Apache, HaProxy, and whatever it is that pfSense used for “load balancing”.

It isn’t uncommon to have a path that hits firewall, HaProxy, Traefik, nginx or Apache. Boring.

There are dozens of court cases that are interesting to me.

If they are heard in a district court where they obey the rule of law and follow the instructions set for them, they will get yanked into the Circuit Court so fast your head won’t stop spinning. If the case is in the circuit court, then the argument will be a repeat of what has already been said.

Boring.

At this point, the only interesting cases are those that will be heard by the Supreme Court this year.

Current events? By the time my article is published I’m already 12 hours behind of the news cycle.

Still, I write about things. There is more than a little filler these days. There are articles where I go far too deep in technical babble.

So to all of you that read our blog, thank you for hanging with us.

If you have something you want to say, PLEASE submit it. It would give me a day off.