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May 18, 2010

Potpourri (Part 4) - Motivation, blogging and great games!

More thoughts too short for big posts.

1) I'm really suffering a bit of a writing motivation crisis right now. My goal with this blog is to do an average of one post a day (i.e. by the end of May, there will be at least 31 May posts, 30 in June, etc). I'm a bit behind that goal for May right now, and some days it's really hard to decide what, if anything, to write.

I also owe Curled Up at least one book review, and I'm close to finishing another book so that will be too. I've got a stack of books I've received from Curled Up to read as well.

I just sit in front of the screen, with either the Word document open for a review or the Blog open, and nothing comes to me.

It's just frustrating sometimes. Maybe it's just feeling a bit overloaded at work along with everything else. And I'm over-tired, I think.

Whatever it is, I'll work through it. There are much worse things that could be wrong, aren't there?

2) I use Feedburner for this blog and it's a really handy way to propagate the RSS feed and get it out there. It also can give you a good idea of how many people are subscribing to and reading your blog through blog readers rather than coming to the site itself. That number you see in the box on the right side of this page is today's subscriber numbers.

But I'm still not entirely clear how it works. Is it a daily number, or is a daily *average*? Because it jumps around a lot. I've been averaging between 55 and 68 subscribers over the last couple of weeks (once even hitting 70!).

So it really hits hard when that number drops to 20 or 30 on a day, like it did today. That's happened twice now in the lasts couple weeks. Last time, the next day was back in the 60s, so I have no idea what happened. Part of me is afraid that some of the "subscribers" are automatic bots and that my readership truly is in the 20s.

Tomorrow it will probably pop back up again.

I hope.

3) One thing I am definitely loving, though, is the Xbox Live "Deal of the Week." This is where you can download an Xbox Live Arcade game, or some downloadable content (DLC) for a regular game, for 50% off.

This week's deal is The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, the old LucasArts adventure game that has been remastered for today's consoles. Ryan McCaffrey, from the Official Xbox Magazine, has been singing this series' praises on the OXM podcast, so to see this one for only 400 Microsoft Points (that's $5 for those of you who don't know), I had to pick it up. So far, it's quite enjoyable.

This "Deal of the Week" is also what inspired me to purchase Zombie Apocalypse as well as a bit of DLC for Borderlands. I'm anxiously awaiting next week's Deal, though I realize it is still costing me money.

But boy, is it worth it!

If you're an Xbox 360 gamer, you'll see these deals announced on your dashboard. A lot of the stuff is really worth picking up.

2 comments:

  1. 1. The best writing fodder is simply getting out, away from the computer, and inspire yourself with life. I run into these dry spells sometimes and on those days, I simply do not write.

    2. The readers jump around a lot. Mine goes down on the weekends because I don't post on weekends. I think it's safe to say that you really do have 70 readers, but on the days you don't post anything, feedburner can't recognize how many readers accessed your blog (because of readers)

    That's how it was explained to me anyway.

    Have a good day!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Think every blogger goes through that "blogger's block." It can be hard at times but I'm sure you'll get through it. I've wanted to do a daily blog for at least an entire month, but as you can tell, I haven't quite gotten around to it. Maybe I'll start in June, or July, or hey August sounds even better!

    ReplyDelete

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