Five Years Of Blogging

I received the notice from right here on WordPress that it is the fifth anniversary of this blog.

Five years is a long time.

And to be honest, in 2016, I just don’t feel like this blog is doing its job any more. It has been less entertaining. Less educational.

I just don’t see it working its purpose any longer. The feedback has dropped to basically zero.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve written less and less. But that shares no blame with anything. Other than I just haven’t done it.

With over 200,000 views in this short amount of time and knocking on the door of 1,000 total posts, I cannot say for sure what the future of this blog will be. I have left it up to you, the readers, to comment in the comment section below. But …. there’s nothing. With the exception of a butthurt photographer that I “used their photo” and they feel violated enough to threaten me.

And yet I have not made the final decision to take this blog out into the grass and shoot it in between the eyes. So it will still be here for now.

Five years is quite some time. And to think that I had only first decided to use the blog as a form of therapy for me, like a journal. Not really intended for the masses of public consumption. But that quickly changed. And that earned me probably everything that I have with this blog today.

I know this has a negative feeling to it. And you’re probably right. But do not get me wrong, I am still just as thankful for everyone as I was when I just got started.

I don’t know what the next five years will bring. But I’m willing and able to find out. As long as you are willing and able to find out along side me.

Thank you ALL for these five years!!!

 

Forward Progress

“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.”~ President Ronald Reagan

Recently I saw a post for Lone Star Metal magazine. They were looking for good writers. And although I really wanted to wave my hand in the air and say something, I had doubt in myself as to whether or not I was good ENOUGH for such and adventure.

Then today I received word from Lone Star Metal magazine asking if I wanted to be a review writer for them.

I still did not know if I was good enough and so I sent them the last CD review, which was for One-Eyed Doll “Witches” and after letting them decide, before I knew it….. I realized that I am now a contributing author to the website.

All I have to do is when I write a CD or an album review, is to send it to LSM, and they will have it published.

Wow!!! 

So yeah, I’m pretty excited about it all. I gave LSM all the “reviews” that I could find, and they already posted it on their website with a link back to here on this blog.

Apparently I AM good enough for this!! And other people believe in me too.

I’m looking forward to this next part of the journey. Although I feel as if I need to move it to another corner of the cyber world and allow for the reviews to have its own place. So if WordPress will allow, I will go for yet ANOTHER blog and it will remain strictly for album reviews.

Once I have it all set up and ready to go, I’ll mention it here. Those of you who wish to follow me there, are more than welcome. If you also know of a band or group that needs some exposure….. I’m your guy now. Let me know!!!

I’m excited. SOOOOO excited!!!!

Thank you dear readers.

Number 600

Here we are. The 600th blog post of DAMBREAKER.

And I sit here with a blank expression upon my face as fatigue begins to slowly put its strangle hold on me.

600 is a lot of times to write. Its been going on for a little longer than three years. And a handful of people have been watching,reading, and listening since near the beginning.

But since the last resounding landmark of this blog, the number of people who have made that commitment to follow has exploded.

So I have fresh faces and fresh eyes upon here who have been so kind and supportive. And I just will say thank you to them. And of course thank you to those people who have always been there and to those who have fallen upon the path along the way.

I apologize that I have nothing more resounding than this. But understand that there’s nothing bigger in my heart but the love that I have for you all who have decided to follow the blog, for those who leave feedback in the comment section, and for those who share my insanity with others so that many don’t have to feel so bad when they compare my life with their own.

I have no plans of slowing down. I’ve just been trying to trim down how much I use the blog to bitch and moan. It still is regarded as my own personal diary, but now I am sharing it with at least 110 people and many more who are silent and steady readers.

Thank you all for your readership and your support and constant determination to get through whatever bullshit I am spitting out on these pages. Well, not ALL of it is bullshit… but for those of you who know, you get the point.

And so thank you. One and all.

DAMBREAKER is proud to be of your service.

Don’t Know If I’ll Make It Until Then

“I love bringing roses to a woman when she least expects it.”~ Esai Morales

I’m sitting here, staring blank at the clock and I realize that in just a few minutes, it is about to be a new day.

I also realize that it will be one day closer to that ill-thought that is Valentine’s Day.

I thought that this year would be different for me. I no longer have that thought any more this very night. And with under a week to go….. the answer is unclear at this point.

I had asked someone to “be my Valentine” and in my past experiences, either I was lied to or my request was denied. And even if I had offered an evening full of PLATONIC surprises to a woman, having a date for that night would never ever happen. Not ever.

The closest thing that came to a Valentine’s Day celebration was with my last girlfriend. She didn’t want conventional gifts such as roses and chocolates. But she was able to chose what was to be had for dinner and I was the one that cooked it and had it ready to be placed on the table by the time she got home from work. There was no intimacy that evening either as she had been feeling bad days prior and all the excitement of the surprise was too much for her to handle. She went to bed long before I did that night.

So I’ve not been given the experience of chocolates, and roses, and diamonds, and kissing and making love. And yes that makes me VERY BITTER towards the holiday in general almost to the point of hating it.

But yes, I did ask someone to be my Valentine this year. And they said yes. Okay, great… now what? Now it was time to go into the pages of the books written by Jodi Ambrose and take a refresher course of the do’s and do not’s. Even though this woman ….. well, there’s nothing there. Just me being interested. 

I won’t get into detail to spare anyone from the public shaming session that would be inevitable to come by colleagues and close personal friends of mine, but so close to being able to do what I would like to do on a Valentine’s Day ….. only to find out that the woman has betrayed my senses and my trust. I know that I will be receiving personal messages about this. And I am ready for some of those messages to be along the lines of “I told you so!” but I will not fight them.  Being tricked and deceived by someone in this manner is not fun. I find it earth shattering and it doesn’t help anything going on with me upstairs.   

So again with just so many days left.. I’ve not done anything about it. I don’t know at this point if I will or if I will just let Valentine’s Day slide and let it join the rest of the lonely Valentine’s Days that I have a nearly a lifetime of.

Maybe one day I will get it right.

Maybe I won’t.

If you are still reading this: blog posts are probably going to be this “sad” for a while until I am able to stand back up again. And I know that day is coming!!

It is honestly not meant intentionally to the masses of people to be reading about my pain but this IS MY BLOG!! And I shall turn a few posts into a diary if I feel like it.

And even if I make the rest of this week through… I’m just not sure that I will make it to BJ & Steak Day.

 

Brushing Off And Keep Moving

“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.”~ Malcolm X

Now that this battle is over, I can actually talk about it.

In the past couple of years, I have been fighting for creative control over a writing project that I had been in 2009.

I had started writing a short story about a woman who was adopted as a child and faced a lifetime abuse, and finally as a woman on her own she snapped and pretty much turn the town upside, slaughtering her abusers and killing anyone who dared to harm her again.

But I had trouble writing this story as I really didn’t have a lot of knowledge of the subject matter. Plus with the ethical problems of whether or not I should write this story at all.

So I had put it away to think about.

In late 2008, I was talking to someone in my social circles about this story and about the problems I was having writing it, much less finishing it. And they became interested and pretended to be concerned. So I shared the unfinished draft with them by e-mailing the document to them.

Shortly afterwards, I lost contact with that person. And about a year later, I found them again on a website that was there for young and beginning authors to share their creative stories.

I found my own story already posted by that old colleague. Names were changed and what not, but it was still the same story.

I contacted them to remove it, and I kicked and screamed like a child feeling so much hurt from the betrayal. But then the other person decided to fight it.

They copyrighted the story and even had it published in a small book. The story that I wrote was mixed in with a bunch of other compositions that they had written.

I fought back. Stating that it was MY story that was being used and plagiarized.

But today came the end of this battle. I lost. I only had a document file of a story that was similar to theirs, and I was unable to prove that I had written it first or had been the original author.

It sucks but I am looking on the bright side.

The ethical problems that I had with writing it in the first place, I can let go of. Neither am I responsible in any way to have to pay the other author anything over this matter.

It sucks knowing that the idea that I came up with was stolen in such a manner of deceit. Pretending that they wanted to see it, to see if they could help come up with something that I could get through it and finish the story and then their pledge that they would assist in getting in published somewhere because they liked what they read. Only to have them take original character names and places and replace those with their own and have it published.

I haven’t shared anything that wasn’t completed since then. Nor will I.

I have other projects that I can work on that I believe would actually make a good book, screenplay, or even film.

So I’m brushing off being knocked on my butt and moving on with other things.

WordPress 2012 In Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 57,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 13 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Lacking In Literary Genius

 

“Just because someone hands you a S’more, does not mean that they’ve made it out of chocolate.”

In the stillness of this night, it feels as if my brain had caught fire. Perhaps it is just the after burn of all of today’s activities, perhaps its a fever. Either way, until this burning sensation leaves my head I know that I will not be able to sleep.

But to be honest, I know what the problem is. Self-criticism. And they’ve always said since the Dawn of Man that you are your own worst critic.

Over the past three days, I went back to my most recent writing project and attempted to connect the dots so to speak of what I have written already. I had taken a different approach when I began writing and now all that I have, is collection of pieces that need to be connected to this giant puzzle I have created.

I think that it does work in my favor that when I get burned out with writing that I put it aside for a while and then pick it back up again. And that’s what I have been doing. Yet I put it away many hours ago, after writing down certain parts of the story that I had come up with in my head from the very beginning. Some of the pieces now are starting to fit but I have a very long way to go. I know that one day, it will be complete and I will have something to be proud of.

These kind of writing projects are not as scatterbrained as… let’s say… this blog. I’m well known by now to throw randomness all over the place here. But with these projects, I’m a little more uniformed.

Or so I thought.

Especially over today and yesterday, I had built up on one of my main characters. At some point I describe just how rotten and terrible the character is. I spent many hours on describing how devious and deplorable the character is and even wrote in a scene of him doing what he does best which is being evil, uncaring, and unfeeling.

I felt that this action from the character needed to be portrayed to the reader to show just how nasty the sonofabitch really is. And to me, it seemed like it took forever to write it all down. And it was only one specific way in which to explain to the reader just how bad of a person the character is. It was honestly the only contribution I made towards the project yesterday.

I felt fine with it. I knew that it was a bit long and that I would have to edit and tweak it a little so I don’t bore the reader but as it was, I was okay with it. Knowing that I would go back eventually to help clean it up.

I even went as far as to pause for a while and look up helpful writing tips on how to work these situations out. A lot of what I found was extremely helpful. So it was all good.

This morning and this afternoon I worked on the story’s biggest dilemma. The pinnacle point in which everything comes to light and the characters must deal with the sudden and abrupt change and somehow overcome it, one way or another.

I did not finish that particular part of the story. I was distracted by other things and I didn’t have the time (or energy) to fully commit to what I was doing. And so I put it aside.

Now I just wanna throw it all out.

The whole thing about writing what the character was doing to be evil and show the true side to the reader is long, and now just seems unnecessary.

I am aware that authors and other writers often go through many edits. But I wonder how they handle the frustrations from time to time when everything seems like a brilliant idea in their minds but once they get it written down suddenly turns into crap? 

What has often boggled me is that my muse usually strikes when I am not able to sit down and write. Commonly when I am away from home or laying in bed. It’s always something like that. I suppose that what I have been told is true. I need to keep a notebook with me at all times. I was even told once to keep a notebook next to my bed so that I could write these things down when they come to me in the middle of the night.

I actually tried that. But I found myself writing in the notebook all night long and never getting any sleep. And when I finally got to sleep, I would wake up and NOT want to transfer the notes into the project.

I’m notorious like that when it comes to poetry writing.

As much as I have the inner desire to go back and just delete pages upon pages of the stuff that I wrote- knowing that “my time has been wasted”- I know that deep down, I do not have the desire to give up on the writing project entirely. I’ve kinda opened my mouth about it with too many people to do that. I’ve received a lot of “I can’t wait to read it” kind of responses. So in a sense, I do have something of an audience who is patiently waiting for me to finish.

I won’t say how long that will be. I never do. I still have OTHER writing projects that I haven’t touched in many years. And those were ideas that I was certain that I wanted to work on getting published. So who can say when this current one that I am working on will reach that point that I can share it with people so that they can read it.

 

 

The Literary Horse

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”~ Ernest Hemingway

I’ve recently got back on the literary horse. It is something that I have been wanting to do for a very long time now. And only this past week, I began the new adventure of writing short stories again. I am a little bit excited about it.

It’s been going well so far. I noticed that when I finally stopped to begin the project that I kept going for almost six hours and written 19 pages using Microsoft Word Document.

The first day though, I kept writing until my hands were practically numb from typing away on the keyboard.

I’ve written other short stories before, and I have been told by people that I should publish them. But I lost them in the move when I left my ex-girlfriend as they were stored on an old computer. But I doubt that even she could get to them as the mother board had died before I moved away.

I probably had enough short stories to publish a small book that would have been a collection of stories. But oh well. Time for something fresh!

Since then, I have had a few ideas of what I wanted to write about and what kinds of stories that I wanted to come up with. But this time, I’m composing the story in a different way than I have done before in the past.

As certain ideas or scenes come to mind, I am writing them. And then I intend on surrounding those parts with the rest of the story. I really wanted to concentrate on getting the raunchy sex scenes out of the way first before I write the other parts to it. I need to make sure that it doesn’t sound like just a fetish story.

I was surprised with myself though the first day. I normally have tons of problems trying to figure out just how to start writing with the first paragraph. For this project, I had no troubles at all. I pulled up a new document and went to work. I finished the opening section of the story and got done a few of the amorous parts.

I’m proud of myself for being able to do that.

I wrote more today and (according to the Word Document) I have started on the 29th page, and have over 13,000 words to it written. And I have yet to fill in the other parts to the story.

But I’ve learned my lesson. I will no longer go for a long stretch of hours. I will take more breaks in between and learn to stop once in a while. My hands and arms hurt after that first day of writing. Perhaps only write so many words a day and then stop would work better for me.

I’m hoping that this goes well. Wish me luck!!!

 

A Year And Beyond

Well, it’s been a year now since this blog got started. A little more than that by now, but ehh… it’s been a full year.

I would have to say that I am really happy with what has happened in this blog and I most certainly do intend on continuing on with my blog post writings.

Over 200 posts and 8,000 views- its something that I never thought would have been possible. But here we are.

I hope that this blog has been at least helpful, or in the VERY least, entertaining. I would say that it has been quite successful.

I can’t believe the year snuck up on me like that though.

For those of you who have been following, I thank you. And for those of you who have been with me most of this journey, your support actually is encouraging.

So now with a year behind me, there will be more to come in the near future. All I can really say is thank you from the bottom of my heart, and STAY TUNED.

Writing Thoughts

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”~ Isaac Asimov

 

Yesterday, I received a message that was in reference to this blog. The person had mentioned that they thought that I should write a book because of all the topics and subjects that I have already shared in this blog. Their thinking was that I could still do what I do, but instead of just allowing it to be shared on a website, that I should write it all in a book, and make some money in the process.

 

The thought had never crossed my mind to do that. Yet the feedback was overwhelming and positive. Something that is always enjoyable to read.

 

Writers/bloggers live off of feedback. Whether they tell you that or not. They are always encouraging for their readers for feedback, even if it is nasty and rude. The fact of the matter is that when they receive that kind of feedback then they can decide whether or not they are on the right track and know as well that what they are writing about is actually fulfilling the readers. And not to mention that they will know that they are not wasting their own time and efforts, and fulfilling themselves by writing.

 

Feedback and subscribers are the two main things that a blogger would want. It is something that helps the blogger more than the average person, or reader, would think.

 

Quite honestly, I’ve been receiving dozens of comments to my blog in the past few days. Others have been bold and brave enough to e-mail me to tell me what they think. And for each and every one of them, I am totally filled with gratitude.

 

But the idea of writing a book is rather intriguing. Many people have told me that I should. It is always nice to have that kind of support.

 

I know that I would have the capability to write a book. But I do not know about how to do that. I could write all day long and finish the composition and revisions. After that, I have no clue how it would work.

 

So I guess that since the idea actually is fascinating me at the moment, that I could look into it. I could ask my writer friends who have published books in the past and find out just how they did it.

 

Needless to say that I enjoy writing in my blog. And I am always excited to get feedback from it, especially if someone is telling me that they’ve either learned from it or it had helped them in some way. I think that for me, is the most rewarding part of it.

 

My only concern about my blog is within these scores of blog comments, I tend to wonder if they are simply spam. I’ve caught several of them saying the exact same message over and over again that were left on random blog posts. They are written exactly the same, verbatum.

 

So how do I know what is real and what is garbage? And would this person’s message to me be the same thing? Even though it was received in my e-mail which would kind of assume that it was a genuine comment. It has not been e-mailed to me again the same way though.

 

Also, with writing a book- who would read it? Who would buy my book because they are interested in the content of the book and who would be the ones that would buy it because they know who I am and what I have done in the past with my blog?

 

Generally, my thought was to take some of the more important blog posts, or more popular blog posts based on how many views they received, and put them in a book. But also include plenty more topics and subjects in the book that I have yet to write about in this blog.

 

Writing a book has endless possibilities. But I would not want it to take away from me writing in this blog. Even though as I’ve said that the idea of making a little more money off of writing a book sounds thrilling. I would be able to take those important posts and reach more people, maybe… I don’t know.

 

So I’ve got something to think about, I suppose. With the few subscribers that I have right now, is still amazing to me. This blog really did something that was positive for me, and I enjoy that. Therefore I continue to write, and write, and write. And hope that each and every one of you who reads it, is actually either enjoying it or learning from it.

 

What do you think???