So after almost a year away, I return to find that Medium has created this Shortform nonsense. It’s like a tweet, but longer. I could fit an entire run-on sentence…

Albeit a small profit, but an income of double what I paid to be in the partner program is fair, given I’ve not even been reading articles for the whole of 2020 so far.

I came out of the shadows twice this year and published two articles. Both are god-awful and only written to blow off some steam and make myself *feel* productive. Spoiler: I wasn’t.

Neither one of those stories as received more than 20 views total. I’m not upset, they’re terrible and I’ll be deleting them when I remember to do so.

No, it was all the articles…

It’s that time of year again! Pumpkin spice lattes are out, and gingerbread lattes are in.

My stupid ‘Writer at Work’ stickers in my Redbubble shop that I made 7 years ago are selling like hotcakes.

Cafes are full of people pecking away on their computers and as I look out among them I can only wonder how many are working on their NaNoWriMo manuscripts, and I hope a lot of them are.

My social feeds are full of people encouraging one another to push harder and more sharing their word counts and story plots and ‘should my character do…

2020 has been an insane year. You’ve heard it said a million and one times by a million and two different people.

What could possibly happen next?

I’m American, but I’ve been living overseas since 2013.

I was still living in Melbourne at the start of 2020. I was there, sitting next to my Iranian friends watching the news as tensions were rising between Iran and America, and we just sat there wondering if we were going to witness the next world war.

After that, I had to wear a mask because of the smoke of the Australian bushfires. Every…

You read that right. I just launched my first Kickstarter with a goal of $1000, and it not only hit that goal in 2 hours, it then doubled before 24 hours was up.

Let me set the scene for you, walk with me. Pretend you’re me, a struggling artist and writer, living paycheck to paycheck, grinding it out in casual and part-time jobs while trying to land that one full-time dream job. …

There are a lot of stories about mailing lists and how to grow them and how valuable they are. I’ve read most of them and they’re still bookmarked, but I actually gave up because I kept getting nowhere fast.

I have 2 mailing lists. One for my writing and one for my 3D art.

Now, I’ve followed all of the mailing list rules. I have a free download for my subscribers, I don’t spam them with anything other than wholesome, useful content, I put a signup form for my writing list at the end of every article I write and…

Yesterday was a good day. I finished sculpting the next 3d model in my Kickstarter that is launching next month and then I chilled out and tried to play some video games as a reward. That part was hard, I was so blasted after a day of computer work that I could hardly form sentences to talk to my friend when he came over. I also sorted out a mess with my accountants, got a refund from them and then planned some future products of my Etsy shop.

Productive.

I went to bed planning for today to be a day…

So around this time last year, I was launching my company. Now, it wasn’t strictly my company, I started it with a partner who put forward the capital while I put forward the design work and ideas. (I got ripped for going on social media and saying “Hey, my company is having a sale,” yeah, you probably see where this story is going already.)

We got down to business and started a vegan beauty company. I’m not a vegan, but my partner was and I support that market and am against testing on animals wholeheartedly.

Well, two years later, that…