Odds and Ends: June 2019

NinaIllingworth July 1, 2019January 16, 2021 Books, Can't You Read, Essays, Facebook, June Summary, Media Madness, News, Nina Illingworth, Odds and Ends, Offsite Writing, Patreon Blog, Quote of the Week, Site Updates, update, writing

Editor’s note: as I’ve explained in the recent past, I’m now breaking up my writing across multiple websites as a method of reducing corporate censorship and to give myself extra incentive to write more often, even if less formally. So far the jury is on both accounts, but as long as I’m writing across multiple sites, I have to do a monthly post like this so people can find all the offsite essays they didn’t see here on ninaillingworth.com; and thus, here we are.

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On My Writing Progress Last Month

As you’ll discovered if you click on the various Facebook update posts below, this has been a bit of a trying month for me for a number of reasons I’m not going to bother to repeat again here.

The plus side is that I mostly managed to write through the storm and that simply hasn’t always been the case recently. Furthermore, June 2019 was the month were I got back to writing longer, more academically worthy pieces about subjects I personally consider the most important part of my work; the kind of dense, heavily sourced material I’ve become known for with regular readers. In terms of quality alone, I’m actually really proud of my work this past thirty days.

The unfortunate downside is that getting off to a bad start and writing longer pieces that require more intense research made it largely impossible for me to have a very good month in terms of writing volume. It’s one thing to have fewer, longer articles in a month like we did this time, but the tale of the tape doesn’t lie – I published about 20,000 words in June, 2019 after hitting what I suspect was a personal high of 32,000 words last month. After talking it over on Facebook with a number of readers whose opinions about my writing I take quite seriously, I’ve decided not to beat myself up about it too much. July is a fresh month and with any luck we’ll get closer to splitting the difference this time with somewhere between 26-28K words worth of articles, which is around about where I like to be in a given thirty day period.

On Correspondence, Comments & Site Updates

In light of the mid-month Twitter debacle, I’m not really sure I have much to add to this section this month that you haven’t already read on this site. As far as a general progress report goes, I guess it’s fair to say I’m still using Twitter too much, my presence on Mastodon is a bit sporadic and I haven’t looked at my official work email box in two months, but I have gotten a lot better at answering comments and questions here on the main site and on Facebook; baby steps I guess.

Sadly, having to close down my original main Twitter account (@EIWBM_Cat) did impact the number of people who saw my articles this month a little bit; although not as much as it would have if I hadn’t already made the effort to diversify my online presence, I’m sure. In light of this, I’ve re-opened the @EIWBM_Cat account but I haven’t tweeted anything from it since Twitter suspended me for a week; the fact is that said handle is likely still being monitored for reporting by twitchy right wing nutjobs, so just going back because I have more followers there isn’t exactly an option. For now I’m probably just going to use it as a backup and perhaps to share links to my work; this may change – I’ll keep you informed on Facebook.

There were no major site changes this month, although I am considering creating a 2020 Dem Primary splash page at some point, likely in the next couple of weeks.

June 2019 Offsite Writing

Note: everything is in top-down chronological order by site and as a general rule, essays go above the hash line and general sh*tposting or weekly features go below it.