Is Nathan Trying to Brainwash Me?

by Chris McGinty

I’m just being a little bit fun here. I don’t think that Nathan really has any sort of devious plans for me. I don’t think we’ll be in a meeting where he’ll go to itch his nose and I’ll end up itching my nose too. I don’t think I’ll find myself trying to assassinate and network executive from the 1970s who died back in the 1990s anyway. I think he would like it if I would chill out on my little streak habit though. I think he’s a little bit more anxious about it than I am. Let’s look at the evidence.

His most recent blog post is about search tags on the blog. It’s possible that this is because since I’ve been doing these blog posts the way I’ve been doing them I haven’t been adding tags to them at a time when I think he’s interested in search engine optimization of our website. Two blog posts before that he was primarily writing about our days playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, and by the way, I do think that might be a fun thing to write about; but he started it out basically telling me that I should take my daily writings which have equaled two postings a day and schedule them out one every other day.

And finally, there are the text messages that he sent me. Don’t worry I won’t get into anything that is private and personal. Well, we don’t seem to have had any private and personal text messages for me to print here this year. How disappointing. Either way, he has sent me one set of text messages having to do with having a lot of internal links in the blog posts, which is something that I used to do quite a bit when I wrote fewer blog posts but spent a lot more time on them. I was usually trying to create a read where if people followed every link and watched every video that they might be entertained for 30 minutes to an hour. The thought was that maybe subconsciously they would associate our blogs as very content rich in spite of the fact that it was usually somewhere between 800 and 2,000 words a post. This might have been Nathan’s way of saying why aren’t you doing that anymore. He also asked me about placing most recent blog posts as an add-on to the front page of our website. Finally, he said something about can you go back and edit your blogs to add keywords and a featured picture. I would say that the evidence adds up that Nathan is interested in trying to promote our blog in some way.

Then here I come along and my plan for the blog for this year seems to be more like write a whole bunch of stuff and don’t worry about whether or not it’s very search engine optimized or not. I’ve been trying to drop my own hints into the stuff that I’m writing that this is partially just to get myself into a better writing habit on a daily basis, but that the growing pains have been just a little bit tough to get through. My plan is to start scheduling out a little bit in advance and to make sure that I have some time to actually worry about things like search tags and the like, but the first thing that I’ve got to do is build up my tolerance for working on one assignment at a time. The problem I have is that if I do write six pages, as I try to do daily with different levels of success, my writing will be all over the place. I have problems with completing one article or short story because I wrote six pages and worked on seven or eight of them. That’s the habit I’m trying to build in 2024, completion of the different things I start working on.

Whether or not that puts Nathan at ease about the future quality of the blog I don’t know; but to be fair, it could actually be that my work is going to suffer anyway. I don’t think we have much of a readership right now anyway, so I’m not quite as worried about experimentation causing a dip in my quality of writing. Maybe with some of the more recent blog posts it’s a good thing that they won’t be search engine optimized.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who actually did do some real writing today. Somehow, it just didn’t seem to be on short story and blog post work. Maybe he didn’t do real work after all.