Site News

Now Offering Professional Services (and Two Quick Updates)

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Hey all. This won’t exactly be a lengthy post. After all, I just had two posts of over 1,500 words go up last week on Monday and Friday (go check them out if you haven’t already), so I don’t have a ton to write about. Plus I was on vacation all last week, so there’s some posts lined up for coming weeks.

That said, I do have two small updates, as well as one slightly larger update I wanted to share with you all. The first small update is that you might have noticed a few short story posts from earlier this year came down. This is intentional, as I’m going to be making some changes to the way I post serialized short stories on this blog. The standalone short stories like last Friday’s will still go up as normal.

The second small update is in regards to a post you’ll see go up later this month. As most of you are aware, the podcast I was part of died off a few months ago, leaving me with this blog as my only major creative project. That said, I’ve been working with someone on a project that may be the next podcast project I’m part of. With that in mind, I’m hoping to get feedback from all of you on that project. More on that to come in the next few weeks though.

Finally, as for my major update, you may have noticed a new page pop up at the top of my blog today. As of today, I’ll be offering audio and print editing services in varying capacities for those interested. This is something I’ve been doing a good bit as part of my 9-to-5 job, as well as something I’ve done pro bono for various folks who have requested it. I feel like it’s time for me to start putting my time and skills to use via freelancing. If you have anyone in need of any of the services listed, I would encourage you to send them my way.

New Digs, Old Home, Same Site

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If you’ve been on That Tiny Website in the past 48 hours or so (and judging by the traffic crater caused by a technical glitch, I’m betting you haven’t), you may have noticed some changes to the site. Most noticeably, you have seen a pretty drastic theme change. While the colors are, for now, the same, most of the rest of the layout, including the superscript style notes, are gone.

This is all the result of me moving off of my old hosting platform and back onto WordPress.com. While I generally liked my old hosting provider, after two years with them I realized that the self-hosting process isn’t exactly what I expected it to be. In addition to a lot of unexpected costs and my rates rising from year one to year two, the customer service provided by said hosting company was not as comprehensive as I expected it to be. Add on the fact that it took them two weeks to even respond to my last support request — only for them to tell me how to do it myself — and I figured out quickly that I wasn’t going to be sticking with my hosting provider.

I did decide to hang onto my website domain for another year, however. Considering my domain made up less than 20% of my total costs from my hosting provider, the amount I’m spending per year to run my blog is now much more manageable. Plus, now that I’m back to hosting on WordPress.com, if I do decide to let my domain lapse, I already have the WordPress version of the domain claimed for myself.

There’s still some cleanup I need to do on my end to make things readable. While all of the external links should still work, I’m still testing links on old blog posts to make sure they go to the right places. On top of that, those superscript footnotes I mentioned in an earlier paragraph are going to take a long time to change formatting on. And believe me, there are A LOT of those footnotes to fix.

For the handful of you who are still around reading, thanks again for sticking around. I really do appreciate it. In the coming days, I’ll have some more book news (spoiler: Things aren’t going close to as well as they were initially…not even close), a new short story, and possibly an update on my vlog.

A Winner is Me

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In 2011, I took on NaNoWriMo for the first time. I was unemployed at the time, having been let go from my job at a university because enrollment numbers were plummeting((Making me the first of many there to suffer the same fate.)). I got let go the day before Halloweeen and I spent most of November and December applying for and interviewing for jobs, I needed something to keep me sane. This was the first time since I was 14 that I didn’t have a job for a span longer than 5 days and it was getting to me.

So I picked up my metaphorical pen and started writing. I wrote a mainstream fiction novel called Amaranthine. It was full of plot holes and (objectively) was a subpar story idea that was not well-written. I mean, for the writing experience I had at the time, it certainly wasn’t bad a piece. I was passionate for writing it too. I wrote just over 23,000 words on the first day and hit the 50,000 word mark on day 15. I finished the story in 20 days with just under 59,000 words and felt pretty accomplished along the way.

In 2012, I tried again. I had what I considered to be a much, much better idea than Amaranthine((Even looking back now, it’s still one of the better ideas I’ve had.)). I wrote just shy of 8,000 words on day 1…then nothing again until February. My new job had become somewhat time consuming and stressful and though I did enjoy my work, it seemed like too much time to devote to writing a full novel in a month and doing my job at the time.

Last month, I started to feel drained at work. Not just the tired, not wanting to work at home for one night levels of drained. It was more of the why am I even trying level of drained. I truly think that most people who have worked at a single employer for a relatively lengthy amount of time((I’m nearly at my 4 year mark.)) can say they’ve felt like that at least once during their time there. I needed something to do to try to clear my mind and make me sane again.

On November 1st, sometime around 11pm, I decided I was going to try writing a short, two to three chapter story. That story, Armed and Apathetic, was actually meant as a prequel for a larger project I started in July of this year, but then gave up on. Hell, Armed and Apathetic actually had nothing to do with the main storyline of that project, as the story that I began to discuss with the Armed and Apathetic chapter was mentioned for less than two paragraphs in the other project((And other than being historical setting for that story, would have had no bearing on that project)). But I wrote because I wanted to.

One chapter turned into the three chapters easily enough, but it wasn’t until a Saturday where I pumped out 5,500 words that I decided to make this a NaNoWriMo project that I called The Angel’s Reckoning. Unlike last time, I wasn’t way ahead on my work. I spent most of the time (days 4-7, and again days 12-27) working from behind. I mostly posted in 2-3 day sprints over weekends and Mondays, knocking out 7,000-12,000 words in those times. Yet, despite that, I was able to finish yesterday.

win

To those of you who have been reading and want to finish, let me know. Either way, thank you to everyone who supported me during this project. It was exciting to finish NaNoWriMo again, especially after a 4 year break from it.

NaNoWriMo Update

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Good afternoon, everyone. I just wanted to give an update regarding my NaNoWriMo story that was up here until earlier today. Due to the repeated site issues that my hosting service has been having over the past 24 hours, I’ve decided to take my NaNoWriMo story down from this site. I will still be posting the story online via a protected blog that has better hosting. If you’ve been reading along (or not) and would be interested in finishing reading the story — I’m about 37,000 words in out of 50,000 right now, though the story will likely go much longer than that…maybe — let me know.

Something Old, Something New

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Hi.

My name is Tim. I’m a lot of things. I’m a blogger, an aspiring author, and a teacher (not a trainer…I’ll get into the difference between the two in a later post). I’m a reader, a sports fan, and a problem solver. I’m a realist, an introvert, and creative mind.

Some of you may be coming here because you read one of my old blogs. Others may have ended up here by googling me. Still others are here because they enjoy padding my site’s traffic. It’s all great either way. Welcome.

I’ll be posting here on Mondays and Fridays. Initially, a significant portion of my content will be recycled older content from previous sites. As this site continues to grow and I continue to develop my vision of what I want this site to be about, not to mention as other projects I’m working on move closer to completion, you’ll see more new content.

Stop by and stay a while. Welcome to That Tiny Website.