You read that correctly. The long awaited illustrated children’s book is finally for sale on Amazon. Buy it by clicking here. Or here. Or here. You can also click here.
I plan on giving it to Glenn of Glenn Hates Books at the end of next week. Please don’t let his review (as awesome as it will be) be the first/only one posted.
Yes. Three posts in one day. And it’s not even my day off. Crazy. Like a friend said, word volcano.
It’s probably odd that I’m only a few months into my current job and already writing about dreams for another job. No matter. I’m happy at my current job and don’t plan on leaving anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t dream of an even better job.
So what’s this better job? Right now I’m dreaming about becoming a preacher. Or maybe a priest. Or a monk. I don’t know the specifics, but I know that I want to be a “man of the cloth” as they say. I want to be a part of a profession of men whose goods are solace and listening. I want people to seek me out. I want people, everyday people from all walks of life to come to my door or invite me to come to theirs. And I want to hear what is going on with them and their life. I want people to share the state of their soul with me. I want that opportunity. I want to do it over food too. Breakfasts, coffees, lunches, dinners, desserts. That’s the ideal job to me. I want to hear from people who don’t necessarily understand the depth of their courage for sharing the most intimate aspects of their eternal struggle on this journey called life. But more than that (yes, there’s more. I dream big when I dream.) More than that, I want to be able to hug these people. Or maybe just hold their hand. And more than any physical comfort, I want to be able to look them in the eye and with the most sincerity and conviction I am able to muster, I want to tell them, “Everything is going to be okay.”
Because everything is going to be okay. Right?
Are you doing what they tell you? Or are you doing what you want?
That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the takeaway. That’s Miller’s point. That’s the lesson learned.
In a word, “Don’t do what they tell you.”
Why not? Because if you’re doing what they tell you before the world goes mad, then you will definitely do what they tell you after the world goes mad. Make no mistake, though, the world will go mad. And we won’t all get to be Max or Furiosa.
So in Mad Max: Fury Road there’s an enormous skull thing carved out of a rock face. We’re shown this shrine in the first few minutes of the film. As awesome as the rest of the movie was, and it was awesome, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the megalomaniacs in charge of the barbarian hordes convinced anyone to create that sculpture. I mean the world’s gone to shit already. Why keep up the symbols? Who would even possess the skill and dexterity to create such a large piece of pseudo-art?
But then I think of my time in the service and also in the oil fields. Men are capable of wondrous deeds. Moreover, people love when those in power direct their attention on them. Even I have fallen prey to basking in the limelight of a boss’s approval despite knowing it was unwarranted or wholly irrelevant. And in those moments I can see Mr. Bossman saying, “I want a skull thing,” and men answering, “Where?”
No more, I say.
The more I write, the more conversations I have with close friends and family about things that were previously hidden. Maybe it’s just my family and friends, but if this blog’s content and conversations have taught me any overarching lesson that I would take to the streets Malcolm X-style, it’s that there is no reason–not-a-one–to work a crummy job. If you’re in debt, get your finances in order, stay until you can quit, then quit. If you’re not in debt, quit today. Forty hours a week–wait, who we kiddin’?–fifty hours a week is too many hours each week to spend doing anything other than what you want to do.
Or you can carve the skull thing.
In the end, Mad Max: Fury Road is great fun for adults. Watch it and don’t forget to enjoy yourself.
I wanted to be really edgy with this review of Keaton’s Best Picture-winning Birdman and use “circle-jerk” in the opening sentence. Then something told me that I might not be the first wannabe movie critic to use this adolescently pejorative gimmick to describe this film. Googling “birdman circle-jerk”, I confirmed my suspicions. Oh well. As another similarly themed saying goes, if you wait, you masturbate.
My new co-workers are one of the least movie-watching crowds I’ve ever labored alongside. There are moments, you can imagine, when this circumstance causes me to question my love of movies. I’ll ask myself, “Have I been wasting my time?” and “Is there more to life?” However, as time goes on, the moments shorten and the doubts disappear.
After watching Birdman, though, ironically my questioning clamored to deafening levels.
Forget that a movie about a movie star won best picture. The only question that ran through my head for the duration was whether or not an expertly made film depicting the ups and downs experienced by the people behind the stage and screen has any inherent metaphorical value for me. Put another way, “Are celebrity’s problems really the same as my problems, only amplified by fame and fortune?” Or yet another, “Does every human being live on a ledge from which they jump, sometimes falling, sometimes flying?” To all these questions I answer, “No.” I say, just like with the quickly-fading-from-view 50 Shades phenomenon, the difficulty with this movie is remembering that I don’t have to let these people frame the discussion. Despite every effort on all our parts to turn celebrities into gods, they are not gods. But remembering this is admittedly challenging because they are rich. And that means they must know something I don’t, right?
****
Prelude to this review’s conclusion: Today I can’t recall what BDSM stands for. And while right now I feel like I may be able to identify with the major motif of Birdman, even admiring all of its on-point updates to the reigning annal of contemporary social history Forrest Gump, I know that tomorrow I will look forward to the new Mad Max.
Conclusion: As always Hollywood, less talk, more work.
“Good will overcome. Trust in that.”
Lord Locksley is right yet again.
I hated Liam Neeson’s blockbuster Taken. Hated it. I hated it despite finding myself in a pool of people who loved it, people who adored it, people who worshiped it. It came out while I was still serving and both the men and women serving beside me couldn’t get enough of it. They also couldn’t keep their enthusiasm to themselves. A happy soul would volunteer they watched it on a long flight, and at least one listener would perk up with, “You saw Taken? What’d you think of it? Awesome, right? I loved it.”
I instinctively hated Taken because it is too easy. Is there any thing Neeson can’t do? No. He’s the most highly skilled and trained operative the world has ever seen. And he’s a dad. Then his virgin daughter gets kidnapped. Yes, I said virgin. His daughter is a virgin, and the whole movie rests on this one simple fact. Like a Fifty Shades of Grey for men, Taken is nothing more than fantasy of the basest kind. What wouldn’t a father with Neeson’s skills do to get his virgin daughter back? American macho men itch for a predicament like this, for a hero to cheer on, for a scenario that they can dream about happening to them. Wouldn’t it be nice if perfect, beautiful, innocent girls were being harmed? Then we could go torture and kill some people without losing sleep at night. Give me a break. Don’t believe my little theory? Ask yourself if you would’ve enjoyed the movie if the daughter had a reputation of being sexually active? Ask yourself how you would’ve felt if when given the horse for her birthday, the daughter had responded, “Aww, you shouldn’t have. I appreciate the effort, but I wanted something ‘hung like a horse’, not an actual horse.”
Yeah, yeah. I get it. I’m alone in my criticism. What else is new? I’m alone, but never without hope. For a long time I’ve waited for someone–anyone–to tell a good father-daughter story. You can imagine my excitement when, yesterday, I stumbled upon Arnold’s newest flick Maggie.
The premise? Zombies. The location? Rural Kansas. The conflict? Arnold’s late teenage daughter is infected with the dealio that turns people into zombies. But Arnold promised her mom, before she died (the mom, not the daughter) that he’d keep her (the daughter) safe.
That’s a remarkable story. The kiddo is going to become a flesh-eating zombie, and you have to kill it or it will kill you. What do you do? What will audiences cheer for? Who wins? Is it believable?
In this simple story, Arnold, the man who single-handedly inspired me and countless millions of others to exercise, essentially standing chest kicks Liam and his Taken nonsense 300-style into the pit. In effect, Arnold says, “You think traipsing around the globe killing people over your virgin daughter is love? Ha. You don’t know what love is, buddy.”
Kansans know what love is though. And I’d like to take a moment to personally thank Arnold for demonstrating this. “Thank you.”
Even before Maggie, Man of Steel did Kansans right with an amazing, old t-shirted (seriously, how do they make a t-shirt look so perfectly old?) Kevin Costner and his confident-yet-never-certain wisdom that goes against seemingly common sense which molded Clark into, well, Superman. Yahoo for Kansas.
You know that I grew up in Kansas. Kansas, which is beside Missouri–the Show Me state–must be the place then where I picked up my anti-authority, anti-utilitarianism attitude. The same attitude that Arnold and the other Kansans have in Maggie. The attitude that says, “So what if the government has mandated that infected folks have to be quarantined until they’re killed, so what if I might not be able to do what needs to be done before it’s too late and consequently the larger group is put at even more risk. So what? Who are you to tell me what to do? I only have one daughter, and I made a promise to her dead mother. There is more going on here than you and your rules.”
In the end, of course, Arnold kicks Liam’s ass. The movie is fantastic. There is actually another father-daughter sub-plot that takes the cake, but you have to see it to believe it. No spoilers here. If you secretly or overtly laughed at Taken, watch Maggie.
“What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?”
“No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”
Seemingly new, fresh, sleek, palatable, and a ton of fun, The Matrix might be the second most pivotal movie in my movie-watching career. (Easy, TC, I said second most.) Two and Three aren’t bad either if you can get over yourself. It’s difficult to comprehend that the same two minds that created that trilogy unleashed Jupiter Ascending on us.
So groundbreaking were those three films that it’s troublesome to attempt to recall what popular opinion held regarding Keanu Reeves before Neo. He was laughable in an unforgettable kind of way in Bill and Ted’s. Eighteen movies later takes us to The Devil’s Advocate, (his last role before Neo) which is very watchable. I guess where I’m going is I heard once that Forrest Gump was cast as the lead astronaut in Apollo 13 precisely because the team behind that film knew that they needed an actor whom, once stranded in space, moviegoers would unanimously desire to bring back to Earth.
My question to the Wachowskis is, “What the heck?” Channing Tatum? Is there any moviegoer who wants to credit a victory on any level, much less the cosmic level, to Magic Mike?
I matter. Think of me. I, just for myself, purchased at least eight theater tickets for the Matrix films. I owned the VHS of the first one and then still went ahead and later bought the collector’s edition DVDs of the entire trilogy in the neat holographic packaging. I have also raved about V for Vendetta countless times. Are you telling me that you think I ever want to see Channing Tatum in a movie? Let some lesser filmmakers get him to blossom. You two are too good to be guessing.
Lastly, I feel like I was lied to. And that makes me sad. We all know that movie trailers are supposed to entice us to see a movie by telling us a compelling story that isn’t what the actual movie is really about. But nowhere, NOWHERE, in the trailers did your team indicate that Mila Kunis’ character was an immigrant housemaid before she got caught up in the whole “your majesty” bit. What are we doing here? Teaching impoverished little girls that aren’t in the theater with me to never stop dreaming? The reason I feel lied to is that you spent all that effort on the film and yet left the one reason no adult man would pay to see the movie out of the preview. Tisk Tisk.
Neo, awesome. Trinity, even awesomer. V and Evie, amazing. Jupiter? Trust is broken. But don’t worry. I’m easy. You can make it up to me next time. Just please, make it up to me.
“That’s it. That’s my dream,” Ryan concluded. “What do you think it means?”
“So before your walk-off, World Series winning, grand slam home run landed on the other side of the wall, the baseball hit a naked Scarlett Johansson in the vagina?”
“Yep.”
“I think it’s pretty clear that you want to have sex with Scarlett Johansson.”
Ryan chuckled and sheepishly added, “You’re probably right.”
“Here’s one for you. This dream is the most vivid dream I’ve ever dreamt. To me, that makes it the most important as well.”
“I’m all ears.”
“The setting was right out of the latest Rambo movie–the one in Burma. Do you remember it?”
“Not really.”
“Well there was a part where the bad guys were torturing the civilians. They made them walk across this ankle-deep rice paddy pool of muddy water in the jungle. Picture a square pond thingy. The bad guys had thrown in a bunch of landmines and then were forcing the folks to cross it at gunpoint. It was kind of a variation of Russian roulette. The bad guys were all betting in the background.”
“I think I’m with ya.”
“Okay. So in my dream, the water was deeper, but only like thigh-deep, and roped off in lanes like a lap pool would be. There were no good guys or bad guys, just people. And there were bleachers on the sides, where everyone sat waiting for their turn. It was some sort of military training thing-”
“Wait. Did you have this dream while you were still in?”
“-No. This was after I got out. But not too much after.”
“Okay.”
“Back to the pool. In my dream, there were no landmines. Instead, there were anacondas or boa constrictors or something. Whatever their name, they were huge snakes that wrap around their prey to kill it. What the people who were running the training wanted us to do was feel what it was like to be wrapped up by the snakes. But obviously they didn’t want us dead, so they would kill the snake before the snake killed us.”
“No thank you.”
“Right? Anyhow, what was supposed to happen was we would climb into a lane and start wading across to the other side. Then the snake attacks, and then, not a moment too soon, the staff jumps in to cut us free.”
“Crazy.”
“Well, here’s the kicker. A buddy from work was in the dream. He was also a veteran. He was sitting beside me on the bleacher, towel-drying off. He had already done it. I was waffling back and forth unable to decide whether I wanted to or not. I knew it would be probably the coolest man-card hole-punch ever to be able to say that I was wrapped up by a thirty foot long killer snake, but I’m not terribly fond of snakes as it is, nor did I really want to trust my life to the hope that other men would time their rescue just right. So I was trying to tell him that I didn’t want to do it. He began to kid me about being afraid and I got angry and serious and began to tell him how I was done with all this “prove myself” nonsense. But then, right as I was sure I was leaving, I began to think about the glory and nearly decided to just do it.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I don’t know. I woke up before I had made up my mind.”
“You have to sell your soul at some point if you want to make money,” he says to me. He being my brother, Sam. The reason he said it to me was because I was explaining to him how I was increasing traffic to my (this) blog. Though, to be perfectly clear, the real–the root–reason he said it to me was because we grew up in the bible belt. Anyhow, let’s get to the good stuff–how I gained 1400 followers in 6 weeks’ time.
As a reminder, this all happened last December. December 2014 I was unemployed and living on some savings. I had oodles of time and two books inside me that I needed to get out. Obviously I wanted them to become best sellers and therein give me the means to discover first-hand whether or not the life of leisure was actually for me. Since beginning to blog daily, like a broken record I constantly told my friends and family, “I know the way to get more followers is to be more active in the blogosphere. I can tell that if I just take the time to read more blogs and comment and “follow”, then I’ll get more followers. I just don’t want to spend the time and energy.” I knew this because, like you, I had seen a “like” email and followed the link to the associated blog and often enough liked/commented a post or two and soon made a momentary friend as our two blogs gained a follower.
So while taking a break from writing my first not-best seller, I opened up the WordPress Reader. I was writing a contemporary realism tale of divorce (of course not based on mine, that’d just be silly) so I figured that’s where I’d start. Typing in “divorce” on the left side of the screen, I ended up with a page full of divorce posts. Suffice it to say that after reading a couple of them, I realized this was way too time consuming. How does anyone possibly read a lot of blogs, I asked myself? I think I then decided to just skim the blog posts. But I’m too lazy to skim, so that didn’t work either. Then, I noticed something that I never had before. Right there on the Reader, you can click “like” and “follow”. As in you and I, any WP bloggers, can “like” and “follow” blogs that we haven’t even visited. Understand me? Not just not read, but not visited.
All of a sudden it became clear why I had been getting the like/follow double emails. Knuckleheads were seeing my blog post in their Reader for whatever reason and, like a one-two combination punch, clicking “like” and “follow” from there. Good to know. Next thing I know, I’m mindlessly clicking “like” and “follow” on every blog on the Reader. When I got to the bottom, it’d take a second to load more posts and then I’d continue. But then something hit me. I remembered that I hated getting a pair of like/follow emails. They always felt dirty to me. But what I did like receiving was just a “like” email notification. Hoping to discover you and I were not as unique as we might want to believe, I switched tactics. I just clicked “like” on the Reader on post after post after post.
Here’s where it got interesting. I remember thinking to myself before I hit the limit, “Surely there is a limit to this. I can’t believe their IT guys would let a blogger sit here for hours on end liking posts in an attempt to steer traffic his/her way.” (Please keep in mind I was not working, so I had plenty of time. What’s that saying about the devil and idle hands?) Anyhow, I kept “liking” and scrolling until something goofy happened. The “like” wouldn’t stay orange. It kept bouncing back to blue. Not to be deterred, I actually visited the blog whose post I was attempting to “like”. When I clicked “like” on the actual blog page, it seemed to stick. My icon was added to the group of likers (or often was the first one). But when I refreshed the blog, it hadn’t worked. I had hit some limit WordPress had set after all.
Next, I figured that this was surely a temporary “like” lockout. I do remember panicking a bit. “What?! I can’t like another post? What if I actually do like a post? What have I done!?” I walked away from the laptop for a while. Upon my return, I discovered I could “like” again. So now I figured, “Fuck it. Let’s put them to test.” Long story short, I discovered that I could like 100 posts and then WordPress would lock me out for one hour. As in literally 60 minutes after the 100th “like” I could again “like” another 100 posts.
During all of this, something else began to happen. My own blog stats were going through the roof. On average days before this day, I had 30 views. My all-time high was ninety-three. (I must’ve posted something about sex that day.) With my liking a few hundred posts in a day, I was getting nearly as many views in return. 30 became 300. It felt amazing.
But everything I’ve told you so far is just foreplay. Stick with me.
I then found myself manually “liking” 100 posts (takes about 5-10 minutes to click “like” 100 times, depending on whether any headlines/intros are distracting in a good way) and then putzing around for an hour and then doing it again. And again. And again. All day. Can you imagine this? Living life 60 minutes at a time. “Whoops. I’ll call you back. Gotta get back to it.” Then one day my friend George was over. George is a sharp cookie. He is also a programmer by trade. He is also an extremist in nearly every way and so while he was fixing some paleo-bullshyat meal for himself in the kitchen, I told him I needed a few minutes to do my thing. He sees what I’m doing and says, “Hey. Let me have the laptop for a second.” He said this with a look that excited me and I’m sure I looked silly trying to keep a poker face as I answered, “Sure. Okay. Cool.”
You need to be in your web browser for this next part (not your mobile device). Ready everyone? Follow my next instruction very precisely. I know a lot of you aren’t techy, that’s cool, but I don’t want you to take your computer in because of something you can fix yourself. What I’m going to have you do is the same as pressing Caps Lock. Press it once to turn it on, press it again and it turns off. Get it? Okay. Instead of Caps Lock, find and slowly (like give it a second to bring up a new Matrix-y mumbo-jumbo screen before you press it the second time to take that screen away) press the F12 key two times. With me? Okay. So that little half-screen thing is the way you–you know what? I don’t even get it, so I’m not going to try to explain it to you. Skipping ahead, George wrote a script for me to enter into the bottom field of that screen, the one with the “greater than” (>) sign, that would click “like” on all one hundred posts instantaneously, as long as I had already scrolled down enough to load my Reader with one hundred posts. Drum-roll please…
jQuery(‘a.like:lt(100)’).click()
Just highlight and contol-c that bad boy.
I’m not kidding. I now could wake up, fix the girl-child some breakfast, open the laptop, open the Reader, scroll scroll scroll, and then hit F12, cut-and-paste the script above, hit enter, and voila! 100 poor souls would see the Woodpecker image and swing by the ol’ Captain’s Log, discovering how awesome my writing was in the process. I’d then look at the clock and record the time on my white board. (There’s only so much ice for penguins in the old noggin’, as we used to say in the Air Force.) One hour later and I’d do it again.
As for the results? For 6 weeks I averaged 600 views a day (around 2/3rds of my “likes”. I usually had the stamina for 10 rounds of this or 1000 “likes” a day). I gained around 70 followers a day too. I also felt very, very guilty. Know what it’s like to read, “Thank you so much for stopping by my blog” when you didn’t stop by a blog? I do. It doesn’t feel good. But whatever. I knew my writing was not a waste of someone’s time and I was trying to sell my book. Of course, the book hasn’t sold, so please don’t miss the lesson here.
Anyhow, I know you’ve got other things to do today, but here’s a few more lessons learned. You might be sharp enough to ask, “Are there really 1000 new divorce blog posts an hour?” The answer is “no.” In fact, most categories that I tried did not have 1000 new posts a day. So I had to vary it. Poetry and Writing are the most used categories I found. And as you might imagine, they are also the most grateful. Batman, Movie Reviews, Philosophy, Erotica, Affairs–not so much.
You might also be asking, “What about WordPress? Surely they would notice his extraordinary ability to speed read?” They did. One day I discovered a thin red banner across my blog’s dashboard. I “clicked here” to begin to resolve the problem. Kevin, I think his name was Kevin, told me they noticed I was “liking” a lot of blog posts. He then asked how I determined what to “like”. Only mildly worried about losing all my own blog posts over this little stunt, I followed the age old moniker, “Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Immediate Counter-Accusation.” It worked. Though I’m still not sure Kevin is human.
While I didn’t think much of it at the time, these days I think I deserve an award for following this hourly schedule for six weeks.
In sum, I went from 400 followers (gained over a year and a half) to 1800 followers in 6 weeks. Since I’ve stopped my mass-liking (is there anything in life that doesn’t get old?), I am back to gaining the I-assume-you’ve-seen average of one new follower per published post.
Regarding “likes”: Before I ever mass-liked and with 400 followers, I had been getting 10 likes a day. Now I get between 20 and 50 “likes” a post, depending on type of content (keep in mind, this small increase is with 1800 followers).
Other lessons. Sex sells. So do father-daughter posts. My daily “views” when I publish are at about 60, up from 30. Though my recent divorce rant with the “c” word peaked at 194. I credit an early use of the “c” word for the extra attention.
Okay. That’s it. Like I said yesterday, I don’t know why anyone would want to use this information to attempt to better their station in life, but now you have it. I also feel like I understand WordPress as a business a little bit more. They provide a super-user friendly way to have a website and virtual community. But they’re the only ones getting rich quick. Oh well. No big thing.
As a final note, I couldn’t stop writing if I wanted to. And I don’t want to stop. I may not post as much as usual in the coming days/week, but that’s just because I am dealing with some other negative stuff in life and don’t want to keep ranting on here.
On a positive note, my illustrated (by a friend) children’s book proof is arriving next week. So that’ll be the next big thing. It’s great.
Actually, while you’re here, click here to buy my books. Seriously. Buy them! Do it now! That’s an order!
And never forget that the only way to get there is together.
PS – Here’s photographic evidence. The middle bar is the rant day. Yesterday’s views are because I wanted to make sure the script I gave you still worked. I was at 92 views yesterday at 3pm (six hours after publishing, most views come in much earlier than that) before I mass-liked 100 poetry posts. Looks like 157 will be it. Like I said, you can expect a return of 2/3rds the amount of “likes” you do.
Almost from the day I began this blog I had my suspicions about the integrity of the likes/follows my blog was getting, but last Thanksgiving was definitely the turning point. I’m sure that like many of you, I couldn’t help but notice that my posts often got a “like” plus “follow” by another blogger within moments of publishing my newest post. Blinded by the promise of fortune and fame, I would check out the culprit’s blog and see if I thought they were a discerning reader or a machine. More often than not, I allowed myself to believe they were a discerning reader and that their “like” meant that I had published something valuable.
Then came last Thanksgiving. I had been blogging fairly regularly for about one and a half years, and beginning in early 2014 it seemed that this blog was finally gaining some traction with “readers”. Letting myself succumb to the holiday spirit, I decided to write a post “thanking” all the “likers” that, in part, motivated me to keep writing. Of particular note was one particular blogger. She had tens of thousands of followers (30K+ as of today) and yet was liking my blog posts regularly. It felt so good to see that she was reading and liking my writing. I really wanted to throw some blog-love her way (and others) and so I began my thankful post with her name. Surely she would notice this, I thought. I named some thirteen other bloggers (see the post here) before moving to the names of real people that I knew were reading nearly every post–friends and family.
Guess what happened?
Not a single one of those bloggers “liked” the post.
I mentioned this to my sister and she said, “Maybe they don’t like being called out?” Maybe. But no. It soon became clear that the reason they didn’t like my post was it was Thanksgiving–a holiday. And unlike me, they didn’t get on their laptop that day. They didn’t go to their WordPress Reader and click “like” on some dude’s post in an effort to gain a follower.
Another example of this disingenuous tactic was a blogger that has since disappeared. He jumped from 1200 to 4000+ followers in no time. Yet he took the time to read (so I thought) and “like” my posts day after day after day. But I would never “follow” his blog. I’d “like” some of his posts, but it’s like I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of following his blog, so I didn’t. Finally he wore me down. So I clicked “follow”.
Guess what happened?
You got it. No more “likes” from him.
But it looked so cool that these blogs had thousands and thousands of followers. I wanted my blog to be that cool. It wasn’t. I had been writing for a year and a half. I had published about 300 well-written, engaging, strongly/uniquely-voiced posts and had around 400 followers heading into last December. Remember, I quit my job and was determined to write two books and keep blogging Monday-Friday at this point in time. I also decided while I wasn’t working that I would use the time to gain as many followers as I could by whatever methods were available. (“If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin'” as we said in the Air Force.) Being a doggedly determined guy who still held onto a fool’s hope that blog-followers would eventually become book-buyers, I gained 1400 followers between mid-December and late January (six weeks).
Tomorrow I will share how I did it so that you can too, not that you’ll want to. Tomorrow, I will also demonstrate unequivocally why you should learn to honestly stop caring about likes/follows. Tomorrow, I will unapologetically pull back the WordPress curtain.
Captain’s Log 
