Odds and Ends: February to May 2019

NinaIllingworth June 1, 2019November 17, 2022 blogger, Books, Can't You Read, Essays, Facebook, link dump, Media Madness, News, Nina Illingworth, Odds and Ends, Offsite Writing, Patreon, Patreon Blog, Rec Reads, recap, Recommended Reading, Site Updates, Six Things I Think, Tumblr

Editor’s note: as regular readers of my work have undoubtedly noticed, I went back to regular writing at the start of May after becoming overwhelmed and ending up with a long, forced sabbatical that started about halfway through February. As a result, our monthly Odds and Ends post in which I recap my offsite writing is a little longer and weirder than these type of posts would normally be.

Additionally, this month I happened to write a lot of shorter posts because I’m trying to catch up to an objectively absurd news cycle after my long absence. At the moment, I’m really not sure if I’m going to keep going on with the shorter, more regular posting or work my way back to densely-sourced, four, five and six thousand word pieces; right now, I’m sort of in between those two poles in that I’m producing shorter work, but some of it is still densely-sourced and written in a vaguely formal style. If we have another month with this many off-site links to share, I might start doing the Odds and Ends updates bi-weekly but I don’t particularly want to clutter up the main site with a bunch of recap posts either. It’s a bit of an internal struggle for me so far and I’m not sure which answer is right.

Finally, as always readers are reminded that you can find my work here at ninaillingworth.com, and at Can’t You Read, Media Madness as well as my Patreon Blog. I also post updates for all of my writing on Twitter and Facebook shortly after each piece is finished. You can follow my writing on those sites, or just wait for the Odds and Ends updates here and click through the images and links bellow. Finally, please be reminded that you can sign up for email updates from this site using the toolbar on the right labeled “Get Email Updates.”

—

On My Writing Progress Last Month:

Although it was certainly an epic struggle and it took a couple weeks for me to get into a groove, producing the quality of work I’m comfortable with, overall any comeback month that ends just shy (about a hundred words) of thirty-two thousand words has to at least be decent. Additionally, I did a much better job of spreading my work out across multiple sites in a logical, consistent manner. Obviously I’m not saying everything went perfect and at least four thousand of those words were garbage updates I was obligated to write (as you’ll see below) in the final analysis, I don’t think I could have hoped for much better output my first month back. Here’s to hoping we end up with something similar for the second month on the comeback trail.

On Correspondence, Comments and Site Updates:

In terms of replying to comments on the various mediums I write at, I think I had an excellent thirty days. The downside is that my email box made me twitchy all month so I didn’t even log in, let alone reply to any correspondence; everyone sucks at something I guess. In terms of page updates I’ve upgraded some of the back end settings through the site’s web provider so hopefully the whole darn thing is running smoother and faster on your machine – and also more securely, for whatever that’s worth on a website that takes no credit card information because I’m not selling merchandise or anything. I’m still struggling with a hanging update function when trying to edit the top menu, but at some point you should be able to navigate to all three off-site blogs I write at entirely from the top navigation bar on this site. For now you can just click on the images below and it’ll take you to the front page of each site.

February – May 2019 Offsite Writing:

Note: everything is in top-down chronological order by site and as a general rule, essays go above the — mark and general sh*tposting goes below; although the update posts mess with that organization system a little bit, but hopefully we won’t have to write any more of them after this month because I’m back writing full time again.