cops or food

COPS OR FOOD

For eleven years now doing various blogs ( Bison blog 2006 to 2012,  James M Dakin blog the next two years, current blog 2014 to until I die because there were convoluted but ultimately unnecessary reasons to change blogs ) I have always had to fight the issue of article ideas.  Whether five, six or seven days a week, eleven years of blogs is a lot of friggin articles to come up.  At a minimum, five days a week and at most a once a month idea repeat and let’s be generous and call it several articles being two or three part-ers, you have at least fifteen new subjects to cover a month.  We are going on two thousand unique ideas by now.  Now, obviously, there are probably not that many sub-genres in the survivalism or preparedness field, but there are probably many more than that of minute details that can be covered.  But even so, 2k different subjects is an exhausting accomplishment.  I don’t think I’ve ever NOT written every advertised day.  Guest articles have been, if not every single time than 99%, extra articles rather than replacing the daily scheduled article.   I don’t get other people to write my stuff, which to me is a far greater accomplishment than saying my blog has posted every day since forever like some do.

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I’ve tried many different ways of trying to alleviate this bottleneck, from reducing the word count so as to explore ideas you can’t stretch out so far, to cutting the days of the week I post to, or, currently, making almost every article a multiple day posting ( five part articles are too long, I grant you, and will be henceforth kept as BBB books.  But two to three part’ers with a very rare four part series will stay standard ).  But now we have a new problem.  No, not that Amazon commissions are now cut by a third.  Or that I have way too much time to write now ( I exhausted myself pre-posting a months worth of articles in anticipation of writing a novel.  Given I can easily write four times as much in a week now as I was doing while working a real job, I could have spat one out a month and still had time left over.  Alas, my brain completely refused, even with a solid outline.  I’m too wired for non-fiction, and if I don’t enjoy what I’m writing, I won’t do it.  My passion is why I’m as good as I am ).

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No, the problem is that now I’m not stressed enough.  Without stress, I’m crap for incubating new ideas to write on.  I was burning at a red hot passion of hate and discontent and now I’m, well, relaxed and at peace.  I can write all day long until my tendon snaps off from one finger hunt and peck typing ( albeit a very fast pace after all this practice-when the ideas flow and mesh I can produce a thousand words finished draft in as little as fifty minutes.  With one finger typing ), but as usual my idea generator is problematic.  This is nothing new, as I’ve just explained.  But I do seem to be at a longer period between idea spurts.  A lot longer.  And I think it is because of my adrenaline flow subsiding.  I’ve been rather high strung for the last twenty-five years on a daily basis.  Initially I was stressed not getting laid but I was also drinking to blunt that and the workplace stress.  Then the Baby Momma came around in my mid to late twenties and we had kids and my stress levels went through the roof.

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Not because of the kids, that was a good stress.  The four hours sleep a night followed by nine hour work shift and ten or eleven hour babysitting shift ( we worked opposite shifts to eliminate daycare.  It was the only affordable way and was priceless as it was my only intensive child bonding before the divorce took them away 80-90% of the time ) was nobodies idea of a good time but it wasn’t a health wrecking stress.  It was a “sense of great accomplishment” stress.  Anyone with kids that partakes in their care understands what I’m talking about.  Your memories might not be all that sharp by now but you remember the feeling if not the details getting it.  Of course, join in that good stress with the bad stress of a job and the worse stress of a relationship gone bad even prior to kids and your life takes on a rather dismal daily grind which is fine at first but after decades starts wearing you down.  I went from mildly stressed all the time to hyper-stressed every day without letup.  If the job didn’t suck as much the relationship with the current wife got worse.   If the current wife was wonderful ( the current NOL ), the job sucked worse and worse.  It was always some damn thing keeping me high strung.

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And then two months ago, after wearing down health-wise far too much ( even if I‘m fit and healthy for my age, I‘m still falling apart to a degree ), I had finally just had enough and said “hump it”.  Time to derail this life choice.  The job will disappear before I retire.  I might as well jump off the ship while it is still in port.  And now, my stress levels are back to pre-children levels ( but post-military and post-living at home ).  I don’t expect them to stay that way, as my life never seems to be stress free, or even stress-resistant ( I’m just too high strung ).  But for now, I’ve lost that burning red hot fire that helped so much in motivating my years long screeds and lambasting tirades.  I’m still motivated to write for fear of starving, and I still hate enough just on general principles that I won’t become soft or accommodating, but the edge I’ve had since I started in 1991 is somewhat blunted right now.  So my newest solution coming up with article ideas is to go back and mine my old blogs.

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I won’t be re-posting.  The articles will be all new writing.  The idea will just be the same.  Exactly the same, with the only modifications being if the elapsed time changed any particulars.  I’m not real fond of this tactic as I’ve strived all along to keep things fresh, or as fresh as possible, but the show must go on and if I need remakes, like Hollywood, so be it.  I’m hoping this won’t be a daily thing, just an emergency stand-in, but you must remember that I’m now writing seven days a week blogging, AND monthly books.  I’m needing twice the ideas as previously ( and curiously, I’m not gaining any from article comments like I used to.  I went from 500 readers to 750-I had gotten to 1200 after Ol’ Remus posted links to me but those frittered away back down to a steady 700 plus-yet I’m getting less comments than ever.  I hope that doesn’t mean everyone hates the new articles ).  So, the first “re-make”, food control to substitute for the police state lacking enough agents to control events.  Continued.

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