Some Knowledge

I hooked up to WordPress this morning to approve a comment.  Myspace is down this morning, so I am doing my morning blog entry here.  I really don’t have a subject, but this is as good a place as any to ramble on about nothing.

I have been going to the library every week now for the past eight months.  I check out movies and books and spend a lot of time reading these days.  I enjoy reading a lot.  I learn all kinds of things about different stuff, and it doesn’t cost me anything.  There are a lot of books at the library, and I can sit there and read magazines all day if I feel like it.

I played Morrowind for a few hours yesterday.  I am going around to all the dungeons in that game and getting all the loot from them.  I did some reading yesterday about how to add things to that game.  When I finish with the areas of the game that are decent, I might start making my own castles and stuff.  It will be good practice in doing game design.  Of course, this is off in the future somewhere.  Right now, I am just wandering around and seeing what kind of things I can find in this interesting world.

That’s all for today.  I have some places I have to go this morning and things I have to do.  I will probably go to the library this afternoon and check out some more stuff.  One of these days I will get back to working on my blogs.  Until then, this will have to do for a post.

I have not been writing so much in my blogs this year.  I have a new pastime.  I read books from the library.  Over the last six months I think I have read more books than I have in the last few years.  The local library does not have a huge collection, but they do have a lot of interesting books in the nonfiction section.  I have only scratched the surface of the business books, and I have read a few books from the money section as well.  Right now, I have a lot of books on writing as a business.  There is no end to the information you can get for free from the library.

I have had a bit of success with writing things on my blogs.  It is time for me to move on to more important projects.  I will keep writing posts here once in a while, but I have no more interest in writing an encyclopedia of strange random things on totally disconnected subjects.  I have saved thousands of dollars by checking stuff out of the library, and gotten information that is fairly specialized in the process.  The day is coming when all information will be available for free online, but that day is off somewhere in the future.  Right now, I think I am going to close down my computer and go back to reading books for a while.  Reading is the poor man’s university.  Perhaps one day this will pay off for me.

I have been thinking about working on this blog again.  I need to write some useful articles on things to get some practice.  The thing about writing useful stuff is that you have to do some research.  This should not be a problem.  I went to college and studied physics.  Research should be easy.

Right now I am just killing some time before I go back to reading about how to make money as a writer.  The thing about making money as a writer is that you have to get people to give you money for something you write.  This is the same thing involved in doing anything for money.  It helps if what you write is useful when you are looking to get paid.  Maybe I am just not useful enough.

I read about advertising for a while this morning.  I might go now and write an advertisement for another one of my paintings.  So far I have 11 advertisements up on Craigslist and only have a few spam replies trying to sell me make money products.  Still, it is an interesting experiment.  I have wondered if a person can sell stuff on Craigslist.  Well, you can, if anyone wants what you are selling.

This blog is huge.  I can hardly believe I have written so much in the last year.  It has given me something to do as far as developing my writing skills.  What I need to do now is find some kind of writing gig that pays.  I wrote for helium.com for a while before I started this project.  That never worked out so well.  Right now, I think I am going to go back to reading books for a while.  This blog can take care of itself for the time being.

I worked on my writing career today.  I did a Google search for freelance writing jobs.  I found a lot of sites that sell essays looking for writers.  What nonsense.  So, I went to the library.  I checked out five books on freelance writing.  This is my research material.  I am going to read these books.  I am going to find out how to make money writing.  It is not a secret.  Lots of people work as writers.  They even have a union.

I looked at the writing jobs on Craigslist.  Lots of junk there.  You got people offering five dollars or 25 dollars for an article.  This is not the going rate.  Then there are places looking to hire a tame writer.  The thing is, they don’t say anything about wages.  So, I quit looking there.  There are many wastes of time on the net.

I started reading one of the books on freelancing when I got back from the library.  The point of this book is that writing is a business.  This means it costs money to do this kind of thing.  You have to keep records.  You have to pay taxes.  I like this blog.  It costs me nothing.  I take some time now and then to add posts about things I am thinking about.  A hundred or so people a day find this blog and maybe read something I have written.  This is some publicity.  It’s a good way to start.

I have not been doing a lot of writing these past few months.  I write up a short entry for my personal blog on Myspace most days, but few people read that.  This is the second post I’ve written for here today.  One of these days I will get my act together and become successful.  I have done pretty well with this blog just posting things I have some interest in writing about.

I am off now to watch TV for a while this evening.  I have spent all day thinking about my career.  Right now, I am just some random person who writes stuff for his own blog.  I have a lot of reading to do this week, and this can not hurt.  At the least, I will be entertained and perhaps informed.

I have been doing a lot of reading this year.  There are so many books at the library that I will never run out of things to read.  I go to the library once or twice a week now and check out more books.  I just finished reading two books about starting a business.  If you want knowledge, go to the library.

I spent the last few minutes looking at things on the net about freelance writing.  What I found were a lot of sites that hire people to write essays.  Who would buy an essay?  Only students write essays.  Professionals write articles.  If you are selling essays, you are selling them to students who are cheating on their educations.  This is no respectable business for a writer.  There are so many of these sites on the net that it is ridiculous.  Where are the real freelance jobs?

I read a book a while ago about freelance writing.  The going rate is $75 an hour for this kind of work.  It takes a long time to get paid for these jobs.  I like my blogs.  I can write anything I want and if people want to read it, that’s fine.  If nobody reads what I write, I still have the experience of writing the pieces.  Of course, nobody pays me to write blog posts.  Perhaps I should look around for some jobs writing blog posts.  I found one on Craigslist a while ago.  It was for $5 an article.  Suppose I took an hour and wrote a really good blog post.  Suppose I wrote 1000 words.  Then I would get half a cent a word.  Only a fool would work for slave wages like that.

I may go back to the library this afternoon and look for more books.  They have one on how to do the freelance writing thing.  I think I need to look up some subjects for some articles.  I have not written any obvious articles on anything in a long time.  I don’t like saying something somebody else has already said in a piece.  It makes no sense to paraphrase news reports.  Essays where you state things that somebody else has already written about are pointless.  I am going to spend more time reading.  It takes a lot of time and effort to write anything, even if it is only some pointless blog post about stuff you are thinking about.

Look at school.  What do they teach you in school?  The first thing they teach you is how to read.  Why is this?  It’s because people write things down that are worth remembering.  I have read some books lately that were total wastes of time.  A lot of people write things they think other people will read just for the money.  Well, the book industry has not made a lot of cash off me this year.  It’s cheaper to borrow books from the library.  There are also millions of blogs to read, but what gets posted in blogs that’s worth reading?  I don’t care where you ate dinner last night.  I don’t care about your dumb dog.  Still, there is the potential for the blog to be interesting.  It is a free way to publish words that anyone can do.  Someday there will be blogs worth reading.

I have typed enough for today.  I have a book on Javascript that has to go back to the library.  I should scan through that before I take it back.  Unlike computer programming, all I have to do when I write something is try to make sense and be somewhat coherent.  Perhaps tomorrow I will be more organized and have some focus.  If I got a dollar a word for these posts I would be rich.  So far for this piece, I’m over 600 words already.  All I need to do is figure out some way to make rambling disconnected blog posts pay off and I will be set.  In any case, sorry for being so disconnected today.  It happens when you don’t have a very good subject.  Learning by reading.  Of course.  That’s why they invented writing.

I am reading all about how rich people think.  I got a bunch of books on the subject from the library.  Already I am saving money by checking out books instead of buying them.  I am learning all kinds of things.  I am reading about how to think about things so that I can supposedly get rich.

Of course, all the thinking in the world will get you nowhere unless you take action.  So, I am thinking about taking some kind of action.  I am thinking again about writing a book about something.  Right now, I have no idea what I would write about.  Maybe I will write a book about how to change the world.  Maybe I will write a mystery.

I have not been blogging a lot lately.  I check in on this blog every day just to see how many people read the stuff I have posted here.  There is no real return on blogging.  There is no profit in giving away words.  Over the years I have studied what kinds of books sell well.  People buy books that make them feel good.  That is what I should write, a book about how to be happy.

Right now, I am just killing some time online before Jeopardy comes on.  I checked my email, and got a couple letters from spammers from the ads I posted on Craigslist for my art.  My art blog has been getting a few more hits this week because of those ads and the links I put in them to my art blog.  That’s one way to get some web traffic.  Now, all I need are some buyers.

Instead of spending my time writing endlessly, I have been reading endlessly.  I enjoy reading.  I read non-fiction.  I like to learn about different things.  I have a whole room full of books.  One of these days I should try to sell the books I have already read.  I should do something to make money.  I have found something out over the last year.  You will not make money blogging.  There are just too many blogs out there.  Still, it is something I enjoy doing, writing stuff and leaving it on the net for people to read.

Anyway, that’s my post for here today.  Perhaps tomorrow I will get busy on my book about how to be happy.  What a stupid idea for a book.  I could probably get on Oprah with a book like that.  In any case, I hope whoever reads this has gotten something useful out of the effort of reading these words.  Of course, chances are nobody will read this, but that does not matter.  I had fun writing this, which was the whole point.

It’s not a very busy Sunday morning.  I am just waiting for a pot of coffee to brew.  This is my wonderful blog entry for today.  Not a lot to write about here.  I think I will spend the day reading about various things.  It is a beautiful summer day today.  I might take some time off and play some games on my computer.

I have not been adding posts to this blog lately.  It still gets some people stopping by to read stuff I wrote a long time ago.  I have been thinking about working on a real writing project.  It takes some coherent thought to write a book.  I don’t even know what I would write about.  There are so many things in the world to think about.  Right now, I just feel like learning as much as I can about things before I start on anything major.

The coffee should be done any time soon.  There goes the timer now.  It takes some confidence in yourself to do any kind of writing.  You have to have an idea you like enough to follow through on.  Perhaps I should open up the word processor and do some brainstorming.  This blog is a lot of words.  Working on something a bit every single day adds up to a lot after more than a year.  Now, on to something a bit different.  I think I actually am ready to start on something good.

Since I got a library card last winter I have been reading a lot of books.  Right now I am in the middle of Bill Gates’ book Business @ the Speed of Thought.  I am also reading a book called Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, as well as many others.  I enjoy reading.  There is so much information in the world that it doesn’t make sense not to be learning things every day.

I have not been doing a lot of writing lately.  I suppose I should get going on a project or something, but I just don’t know what to write about these days.  I could become a critic, I suppose.  I could write about things I read and give reviews of books.  On the other hand, I should be doing something original.  Maybe later I will fire up the word processor and get going on a project.  I have all this computer power to assist me in my work.  Maybe I should write a program to write books.  I hear somebody has already done this.  He wrote a program to snarf things off the web and compose the facts into books, which he sells on print on demand basis.  The guy already has something like one hundred thousand books in print.  What a plan.

Right now I think I am going to go read for a while.  I have checked on all my emails and blogs and think I would enjoy just reading about stuff for a while.  In any case, I have left a post here to keep things current on what I am doing.  Someday I will get back to endless blog posting, maybe.

I was just out in the garden planting some cucumbers and squash.  The sun is hot today, though it may rain later.  I think today I am going to start a new writing project.  I have gotten enough practice from all the blogging in the last year so that I think I can write clearly.  Like anything else, a writing project takes time, and you have to work on it every day.  So far on this blog I have almost 600 posts.  That’s a lot of typing.  I need to work on something I can sell.

Anyway, I just wanted to post something here to make sure everything is working well.  One of these days I will get back to writing useful little articles.  Right now, I think I need to do some thinking.  Perhaps I will go read a book or something.

I spend a lot of time these days reading books.  Since I got a library card in February, I have checked out dozens of books.  I enjoy reading about different things.  People put a lot of time and effort into writing books.  It costs a lot of money to print up a book.  I can check out any book in the library for free.  That’s a good deal.

I have a book I started reading yesterday that is about the history of money.  I find it very interesting.  There is a lot of stuff that most people don’t know about money.  There is a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about money.  That’s why I read, so I can learn stuff I didn’t know.  I also checked out a book about network science.  Networks are the thing these days.  The Internet is the world’s biggest network.  I think networks rule.  I am part of the network with this blog.

I am about to read a book online.  There are many books posted online.  Basically, if something is more than 75 years old and the author is dead, that book is public domain and can be published by anyone.  I bet Plato never imagined that one day his books would be available to anyone with a computer and a network connection.  Anyway, I like to read books, and I am off to find another one.  One of these days I am going to write a book about something.  I have more than a book on this blog right here.  So many words.  So little time.