Adverts…

Posted on February 1, 2014 by jdtharp

WordPress makes it mercifully easy to keep a mosty respectable blog up and running without forcing you to master all the behind the scenes nonsense. I’ve long since given up on ever wanting to be by own webmaster. It would just be one more thing that I don’t have time to do right and would result in doing a half-assed job that would, in turn, make me crazy.

There are a few things, that WordPress lets you tweak without forcing you into managing your own page. This morning, while I was renewing my lease on http://www.jeffreytharp.com and making sure it mapped over to WordPress, I picked up one of these extra options.

Starting today, you should be reading this and every other post completely ad free. If I’m going to spend time making sure you have daily updates, pour ridiculous amounts of time into other projects, and make a half-hearted effort at marketing it, the only ads I want you to see are the ones that put cash in my own pocket. I guess we’ll find out this time next year if the return on investment pays off. Even if it doesn’t in a purely dollars and cents terms, running ad free gives the place a much cleaner look. That by itself is probably worth eating a little extra cost.

The next time you see an advert featured here, you can buy with confidence that you are helping to subsidize my writing habit, rather than putting money in the cold hands of a faceless corporation. With that in mind, why don’t you go ahead and check out the Retail Partners list to the left of this post and find yourself something to read?

Two days off…

Posted on January 19, 2014 by jdtharp

Some of you may have noticed that I played hooky for two days this weeks, leaving the ivy covered halls of jeffreytharp.com without new posts on both Friday and Saturday. It wasn’t quite intentional, but I don’t exactly feel guilty about it either. Trust me when I say that posting seven days a week – through vacations, holidays, illness, and any number of other distractors – is a brutal pace. Don’t take that as a complaint, though. Given unlimited time and no requirement to feed myself, maintain an income-generating job, and keep up with the occasional outside interest, there’s not many things I would rather do than sit here tapping on the keys. So yeah, sometimes I’m just going to let it rest for a day or two

I think what’s happening is that I’m slowly trying to work my way into a new schedule – probably a slightly less intense six day a week kind of deal. Fridays are currently the front runner for my “day off.” That’s mostly because by the time I wade through a work week and make it to Friday, my brain has turned to some kind of viscous jell that can’t manage much in the way of coherent thought. I figure if one of the treatments for concussion is strict rest and minimizing activities that require extreme concentration, giving the old brain box a day off is probably a good idea. After all, five days in the office certainly feels like being beaten about the head and neck with a blunt object, so the treatment and recovery process should be more or less the same, no?

Feeling…

Posted on January 11, 2014 by jdtharp

One of the great problems of running a blog as a one man show is that sometimes, no matter what’s going on or how many topics are buzzing around in your head, you just don’t feel like writing. Sadly, there’s no one stepping up to stand in the breach so the best you can do is drag the laptop towards you and tap out a post about how much you don’t feel like writing. Yeah, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it too… but since there’s now a post where there wasn’t one before, I’m going to just consider the effort a success and move on. Hopefully tomorrow the muse will get off her duff and give me something in the same zip code as inspiration.

Jeffreytharp.com is pleased to announce…

Posted on December 30, 2013 by jdtharp

Jeffreytharp.com is pleased to announce the arrival of a a bouncing baby book. What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2013 in Review was published in the pre-dawn hours of December 30th and weighs in at 458 KB and approximately 79 pages long. It’s now available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords for the low, low price of $.99.

It’s said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. After two full years of writing WAJTW, I’m beginning to get an unsettled feeling that there’s nothing to be done against the rising tide of stupid people, awkward situations, and the the general sense that the whole world is going to hell in a handbag. It’s like global warming, except instead of new beach front property, all we get is rising blood pressure and an increased desire to run away and live in a shack in the Montana wilderness.

Still, when life hands you lemons, the only thing to do is try reselling them at a reasonable profit to those who don’t have any citrus of their own. With all new commentary, corrected for spelling and grammar, and jam packed with the snark and sarcasm that you’ve come to know and love, WAJTW: 2013 commiserates over the year that was and looks forward to the inevitable annoyances of the one to come.

On tap…

Posted on December 16, 2013 by jdtharp

I know a few weeks ago I promised a new fiction project was in the offing. I haven’t forgotten about that. It’s safe to say the preliminary research and reading have taking a touch longer than I anticipated, but it’s still there on the agenda. I’ll try to make a fresh start of it after the inevitable mayhem and chaos that surrounds the last days of December. I’m not even going to even try putting a date on when that little gem might be ready to see the light of day.

Lest you think I’ve spent the last month dithering about to no good purpose, I do have a touch of good news for what’s on tap in the coming weeks. What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2013 in Review is coming along nicely. With plenty of fresh, snarky commentary, I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking, correcting, and generally updating each post to make it the very best level of vaguely hostile I can manage.

Assuming I don’t fall down and hit my head on something hard or develop the same debilitating sickness that laid me low last Christmas, I expect to deliver up WAJTW:2013IR for your New Year’s Day reading pleasure (plus or minus a few days). My best guess is the final cut will weigh in around 23,000 words and with all of the spelling, grammar, and usage corrections I’ve been making, the whole thing should be downright readable… something that doesn’t matter all that much when you’re blogging, but that paying customers seem to put a premium on for some reason.

All that’s left to do is finish editing October and November, finish writing December, write the intro, design the cover, and then upload everything to the interwebs and hope it all looks good together electronically. Sigh. Maybe I should reconsider that first of the year date.

What to get for the guy who hates everything…

Posted on November 30, 2013 by jdtharp

If I may be so bold as to make a Christmas shopping recommendation for everyone, I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that books make excellent gifts… and I’m not just saying that because I want you to give my books to people. Although, if you choose to give the gift of Jeff, you can pick give the electronic or paperback edition of Nobody Told Me: A Cynics Guide for New Employees from Amazon. If you’ve gone all electronic or just want to stick it to Amazon, the ebook is also available from Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.

I know there are a few of you who are always looking for a deal, so in that spirit if you purchase your ebook from Smashwords, I’m offering a $1 discount from now until December 25th. Enter CW57P when you check out and you’ll receive the promotional price of $1.99.

Let’s face it, Nobody Told Me: A Cynics Guide for New Employees, is just about the perfect gift for the guy who hates everything.

The electronic age…

Posted on November 23, 2013 by jdtharp

Free time is for wimps…

Posted on November 4, 2013 by jdtharp

After kicking Nobody Told Me: The Cynics Guide for New Employees and What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2012 in Review out the door this summer, I took a break. Or at least I took a break from writing things I wanted published with my name on the masthead. I’ve still been tinkering with other projects, of course, because just sitting around with nothing on my plate makes me nervous and jerky. Still, it was nice to have some breathing room and to not be beating myself repeatedly over self-imposed deadlines.

As much as I’ve enjoyed not laboring under too many of those requirements these last few months, the gears have still been slowly grinding out a few new ideas. Now that the nights are long and the temperatures are getting downright cold, it feels like a good time to start tinkering and see if either of those notions have legs.

The first isn’t so much a fresh ideas as a continuation of the What Annoys Jeff this Week series. I’ve started doing some of the initial leg work to publish 2013 in Review as soon after the new year as possible. I’d love to promise it on January 1st, but creating commentary, editing, and formatting take time. More time than you might think if you’ve never given it the old college try. What that really means is that 2013 in Review is probably best described as “available in January” with a date to be determined. Sure, maybe it’s an exercise in pure ego, but who doesn’t want to start off the year with a blunt reminder of all the stupid shit that happened in the one that just passed? Anyone? Bueller?

In a departure from my usual ranting full of snark and discontent, I’m also gearing up for a first plunge into fiction in almost 20 years. I’m not so ambitious as to think I can take on a novel, but I have been kicking around an idea for a short story. I wish I could take credit for the original idea, but it was actually a passing comment from a friend at work that I haven’t been able to shake for the last few weeks (despite trying very hard to ignore it in hopes that it would go away). I’ve been doing my due diligence and some initial research. It’s still the barest fog of an idea, but I think it could make an interesting 10-20,000 word virgin effort. I won’t even hazard a guess about how long something like that might take me.

I like to think my chops have improved a bit since I wrote a few shorts back in high school, but I suppose we won’t know if that’s true until I sit down and start smacking the keys. Even if it never sees the light of say, I have the feeling it’s going to be a worthwhile mental exercise. So there are the two big bites I want to take off over the winter months. I’d say between those and a few other bits that are percolating, I can manage to keep myself gainfully occupied for the foreseeable future.

Apparently free time is for wimps.

A good month…

Posted on November 1, 2013 by jdtharp

With 1,233 visits, an average of 40 visits per day, and a one day record of 148 visits, October was a good month for jeffreytharp.com. The only sure thing I’ve learned from running a blog this long is that you can never expect success. It’s best to go into each post assuming that you’re writing to satisfy an audience of one: yourself. That’s why I’m savoring the high points when they come – especially since the last record setting month was back in May 2011. What that trend tells me is that apparently people like to see ranting about work (May 2011 I was in the final stages of escaping my previous employer) and raging about government ineptitude (This past October saw the latest government shutdown and endless incidents of political asshattery).

As tempting as it is to chase that trend, I don’t think that’s what I want to spend all my time writing about. The reason I’ve never settled into a topical niche is that I tend to be interested in whatever happens to go on around me on any given day. Maybe that’s a character flaw, but it does give me wide latitude when it comes to picking topics. I very much like having latitude.

So with that said, I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing around here for almost four years now. I’ll keep writing, you keep reading, and we’ll see if we can’t set a new record sooner rather than later. And because I don’t do it often enough, let me just say thanks to everyone who’s reading along at home, those who impart a snarky word from time to time, throw me a like, or even just shake your head in amazement that someone would bother to manage this much schlock on the internet. This is definitely the best non-paying job on the internet, but I still have a few surprises up my sleeve for the future so let’s go ahead and plan for the best being yet to come.

JEFFREYTHARP.COM

A voice of sanity in a world gone mad…

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