Total Eclipse of My Heart

“Did you want to come with me to see the eclipse?”, my brother asked.

“No, not really,” I replied.

“Oh, you’ve got to go,” he said, “It really is spectacular.”

“You’re taking your daughter out of school for the Eclipse, aren’t you?” my mother questioned.

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Oh, you really should, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

There was more berating from my family, but you get the picture. I thought I had seen an eclipse before. I remember there being one when I was a kid. Well, what I remember is looking through one of those cardboard box things at it and being none too impressed. Me and my cousins decided that if we wore six pairs of sunglasses we could take a peek at it and be okay.

Still, I wasn’t all that impressed.

But I gave in to the berating. There was much discussion of where to go to see it. We weren’t in the totality zone, but there were places in southern Oklahoma and Arkansas that were in the path and that weren’t too far away.

Everyone kept an eye on the weather as well. It would stink to drive several hours to see the eclipse and then it be too overcast to actually see it.

The day finally came and my parents decided to drive to Russellville, Arkansas. Mom has family there and they were throwing a party. My brother wanted to go a little further, and a little more south to Mena, Arkansas, where the totality was supposed to last a little longer. We decided to head that way, mostly because it involved backroad and non-Interstate driving and I’d heard bad things about Interstate cloggage after an eclipse.

I thought it was a three-hour drive, but it turned out to be closer to four. We made a pitstop and the roads were pretty twisty, and there was traffic. Not too bad traffic, but traffic just the same.

We made it about an hour before the eclipse started, and it would be about 45 minutes after that before the totality. Had this been better planned we would have gone up into the mountains of this part of Arkansas and gotten a prettier view, but instead we wound up in the parking lot of some strip mall.

There was a pretty good crowd there, but it wasn’t overly full. There was an excitement in the air. People were wandering around greeting each other. We talked about where we were from and if we’d seen one before.

There was much excitement around a couple of trees. When it gets close to a full eclipse the shadows turn to crescent moons. We all kept putting on our glasses and staring at the sun.

“It’s getting real close” someone would say and we’d all agree.

Then finally, it did come.

It was awesome. The sky turns dark, not full dark especially in that parking lot with lights all around, but weirdly dark for the middle of an otherwise sunny day. Through our glasses, we could see the sci-fi image of a dark ball around the sun, with light peaking out from the edges.

I tried to get a photo, but again being unprepared I wasn’t able to snap much. What you see above was with my phone through those eclipse glasses. Still, it’s kind of cool I think. But no photo will do it justice.

Getting home was an even longer drive. Coming to an eclipse everybody leaves at a different time. People drove in yesterday and the day before. But once it is over, everybody leaves. We chose backroads again and the traffic was heavy but steadily moving. My parents weren’t so lucky. They are still stuck in traffic on I-40.

So, it was about 8 hours of driving for an event that lasted about ten minutes.

Worth every ounce of it. If you didn’t get a chance I highly recommend the next one. If you did I’d love to hear your experience and see some photos.

The Forever Begging

Click HERE to donate to The Midnight Cafe.

I started this blog on May 29, 2004, which means I’m approaching twenty years as a blogger. I think most of you know the basics of my blogging history – started out as a journal for my year in France, turned into a pop culture site, which then morphed into solely a live music station, and for the last year I’ve added back in some pop cultural musings.

I’ve made something like 10,666 posts. I’ve shared some 8,000 shows, written about movies over 500 times. I’ve talked about music and books, and I’ve shared videos and interesting links. I’ve shared personal pictures and talked a lot about my life. I’ve traveled all over the world and shared my adventures.

I don’t know how much this means to anybody but myself. I like to think I’ve made something of my little corner in cyberspace. I know most of you come for the music, but I hope at least a few of you enjoy the other stuff.

On a few occasions now I’ve asked for donations to help cover the cost of the Cloud Drives. You all have given generously to that cause, and I thank you sincerely. In previous donation requests, I’ve capped the donations to the actual cost of the Cloud Drives. In my last begging session, I noted that since I was providing more content than just music downloads I thought I’d leave the Paypal link up so that you could donate at will.

This is a continuation of that. I’m going to pin this to the top of the page so it is easily viewable by everyone. I may periodically post reminders or what you might call mini-begging posts, kind of like they do on Substack and similar operations.

The Midnight Cafe is a labor of love. I do this because I enjoy it. I’ve put a lot more time and money into it than I’ll ever get out of it. But if you think it is worth a little of your money I would greatly appreciate any donation you’d like to give. If you are unable to give, that’s okay too. This site will always be free.

You may send donations to my PayPal account.

The Begging, Part Five

Well, my friends, the time has come once again for me to beg strangers on the internet for money.

A quick summation of The Midnight Cafe’s years of begging.

I’ve been posting music on this blog for some 15 years. Originally I used a variety of free hosting services – Megaupload, Mediafire, Rapidshare, etc. They each had their pros and cons but every single one of them would periodically delete my files.

Desiring a more permanent solution I searched for something that would meet my needs and landed on Amazon Drive. They were great except that they got really expensive when you started storing multiple terabytes of data. Eventually, I realized I could no longer afford it on my own and thus began the first begging.

That was June of 2017. I have begged three times since then. You all have always generously given when asked.

I’m an old-school trader and so it is distasteful to me to make money off of this music and so I’ve only used it to pay for my storage (and occasionally to pay for the upkeep on the site). I’ve always shut my PayPal links down once I’ve received enough money to reup the cloud storage. 

The last time I begged I actually went to bed before I had reached my goal. When I awoke you all had given me way more than needed. I have kept that money in my PayPal account and only used it for the site.

I am amount to reach my 2TB limit on my current Google Drive plan. Google is a little weird with their plans so they jump from 2TBs up to 5TBs with nothing in between. The 5TB plan costs $249.99 per year. I’ve had the 2 TB plan since January of this year.

So, at my current rate of uploading the 5TB plan should last me until I need to renew my yearly contract at the beginning of 2025 (I should have enough left on the 2TB plan to make it to the end of the year). And then somewhere in the middle of 2025, I’ll need to upgrade to more storage.

Google bumps up from 5TB all the way to 10TB and at that point, you have to pay by the month – at $50 per month. I’m not sure what I’ll do then. I may have to beg on a monthly basis.

As I said, I am an old-school trader, I don’t believe in making money off of this music. However, this site has become something more than just me sharing music. I now write a lot of movie reviews, I often have theme months, and I share links and videos, etc.

None of this is amazing, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to charge for my silly scribblings, but it isn’t nothing. Maybe it is worth something to you. I’m thinking I may just leave the PayPal link open instead of shutting it down when I’ve received enough to renew Google Drive. Maybe I’ll put a link over in my sidebar. Or something.

I’m obviously pretty tentative about all of this and I have no delusions of getting rich or even making a living. But people pretty regularly ask me if they can donate and I usually say no (except when I’m begging, of course) but now maybe I’ll say yes.

For now I need money to upgrade my Google Drive. I currently have $93.34 in my PayPal account, so I need another $156.65 to renew it. Anything above that will be gravy.

Me being me even if I get a bunch of money above that I won’t be going out to buy a new pair of fancy sneakers. But maybe I’ll start collecting physical releases of Crystal Cat bootlegs, or maybe I’ll get myself a new hard drive. Probably I’ll just leave it in the PayPal account and wait until I need to renew the drive again.

I do apologize for hitting you up at Christmastime. I know a lot of you have already spent plenty of gifts for friends and family. They are much more deserving than me. But if you have an extra dollar or two I surely would appreciate it.

And now I’ll shut up and post the PayPal link.

Click here if you would like to donate to The Midnight Cafe.

Welcome New Visitors

Recently, the excellent Bob Dylan site Expecting Rain linked to a couple of my posts (Fifteen Years of Bootlegs and my review of Pledging My Time). That brought a lot of new traffic to The Midnight Cafe which, in turn, brought in several new followers. I thought I’d take a moment to both say “Welcome” and to give the new folks a breakdown of what to expect.

Most days I provide a handful of links to downloads of unofficial and unreleased recordings of concerts. Those links come in two forms – links to the individual posts I previously did of each show, and for new shows, a direct link to Google Drive where you can download them. For many years I did individual posts for each show where I’d provide basic info about the show – location, date, setlists, source info, etc – and then provide a link. For various reasons, I recently stopped doing that. For new shows, I just provide a Google Drive link.

For years I used Amazon Drive to host these shows, but they recently dropped that service and I started using Google Drive. That left a whole lot of old shows with bad links and I’m slowly trying to reupload them to Google Drive. When I do so I provide a link to the original post, to let everyone know there are fresh download links. If you dig through those old posts and find something with a dead link that you are interested in, please leave a comment in the original post.

You will also find, on these pages, movie reviews, book reviews, and various pop cultural ramblings. I started this blog in 2004 as a way to journal the ten months me and my wife spent living in France. Eventually, I started writing about pop culture and that eventually led to me writing about concert recordings which led to me providing download links. At first, these download links were blended in with all my other writings, and then they took them over completely.

When Amazon crapped out I rekindled my love of writing about pop culture and here we are.

For reasons I won’t get into, all those old ramblings were put into a private mode so that nobody could read them. Now, I’ve decided to take them out. I’m slowly working my way through the old posts, doing some light editing, and then making them public again. When I do this you will get an email showing you those old posts.

This is a little confusing as you will get a new e-mail with things I wrote over ten years ago.

I try to pace all of this so that you aren’t getting a deluge of e-mails each day, but sometimes I get going and that will happen. I hope you enjoy everything I write, but I totally understand if you have no interest in stories about my life from years ago, or my thoughts on a horror movie from the 1960s. But that’s the way things go around here. If it gets to be too much you can always unsubscribe and just come in every day for the music links.

Anyway, welcome.

Life in France, And Other Things

I started this blog on May 29, 2004. That’s almost 19 years ago. When I started it I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I certainly would have never guessed I’d still be blogging all these years later.

My wife and I moved to Strasbourg, France in September of 2004 and stayed until June of 2005. This blog was started as a way of journaling my experiences there. I knew I’d want to keep a record of our adventures and blogs were just really becoming a thing back then so it seemed like the perfect way to take notes. I wasn’t even sure if I’d make the blog public, or rather, if I would send anybody the links to what I was writing.

Eventually, I did, then I got to where I wanted more and more people to visit. At first, all I did was journal our time in France. In time I started writing reviews. Then it became a full-fledged pop culture site. Soon enough I was talking bout bootlegs, then sharing them, and then they overtook the site altogether. And here we are.

As most of you know a few years ago I started getting nasty letters from lawyers claiming violations of one thing or another. That got me scared and I turned the blog private. Actually, I made every single post on the site private and then I turned the entire site private. Eventually, I started inviting people to my private site, but even then most of the old posts were hidden from everybody but me.

For a long while the only posts I allowed anyone to see were bootleg related. Now the site is public again but those old private posts have remained hidden. I’ve slowly been making them visible again, but I’ve been very selective about it. That is about to change. I’m ready to start working my way through the site, from the oldest posts to the newest and making everything public.

I’m going to be slow about it. I want to read each post, make some light edits, and then make them public. Before I do that thought I want to explain France a little bit.

Back in 2004, my wife was a graduate student at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was studying French Linguistics. I was a working schlub. Her department had an exchange program with a university in Strasbourg. Basically, Indiana students would go to France and teach English and some French student would come to Indiana and teach French. She signed up and we lived in Strasbourg for roughly ten months.

It was an amazing time. It was a long time ago. I read some of those old posts and I hardly recognize myself. I spread a little caution here to note that as you read those posts, recognize some of them are almost two decades old. The man that I was is not the man that I am. I’ve changed. I’ve grown. My beliefs have changed and grown too. Also recognize that in the beginning, I was writing to a small audience. Mostly my family, my wife’s family, and a few close friends. I had no idea I’d eventually open this up to the world or that music nerds would be reading my thoughts many years later.

I grew up in the Church of Christ. That’s a very conservative, evangelical-esque Christian church. I was still very much a member when we lived in France (like I said I was a different man back then). Before we left we made contact with a Church of Christ missionary from Belgium who was working in Strasbourg. He and his amazing wife picked us up from the airport and allowed us to stay with them for a couple of weeks while we got ourselves sorted. We attended his church the entire time we lived in France.

I say church but really we gathered in his house and some of the other member’s apartments. The Church of Christ is not very big in France. France has an odd relationship with any church that isn’t Catholic. While we were there a group of college kids from America, who were part of a missionary in-training program called Adventures in Missions, also attended the little church. They were young, nice, and very naive. My wife and I became friends with them.

I mention all of this because as I’m making all of my journal entries from France you will hear me talk about church and those AIM students quite a lot. I don’t talk about politics or religion much on my blog anymore (intentionally so as I want the blog to be about music and movies and art – things that gather us together not divide) so I expect it may be a little jolting to hear me talk about it so often in those old posts.

Like I keep saying I was a different man back then, but that is who I was, for better and for worse. I’m making it sound like I’m writing sermons in those old blogs and that isn’t the case at all. Mostly it is my experiences in a foreign land. We also often hung out with my wife’s British coworkers and drank ourselves silly. You won’t read so much about that as, well my mother was reading and she would have had a fit.

My plan is to make several of these old posts public every day. Some days there will be more than others. So prepare yourself for random e-mails from my blog. Also please notice the dates these posts were originally published. It may be rather confusing to get an e-mail about me adventuring in Europe when in reality I am stuck here in dreary Oklahoma.

I do hope you enjoy ready about my life all those years ago. My apologies if you do not.

Down to Bob

I finished going through my Van Morrison files today on the Amazon Drive so now it is just Bob Dylan I have to sort through. There is a lot of Bob on the Drive so it will take me a week or so to get through it and then I’l cancel my subscription. Hopefully, I’ll get a little refund which I can put to better use.

I’ve pretty much decided to go ahead and use Google Drive and drop File Factory. I’d still appreciate any comments on my post about making that decision. I’ll probably start tomorrow uploading shows to it and I figure I’ll do a daily post where I link over to the Drive showing you what’s new.

That may change a bit over time. I still love my artist’s pages and I like the idea of keeping them updated. Maybe I’ll just add dates to those posts with a link to the appropriate section of Google Drive. I’ll eventually go back and change the links in my old posts, too. I’ll drop the Amazon links and add in Google. But those are big projects and I’m in no hurry.

I still plan to write movie reviews and talk about pop culture and tell stories. The links to Google with music files will just be on part of the blog from now on.

Thanks for staying with me on this weird little journey.

Should I Just Use Google Drive?

I’m a strange, silly man. I tell myself that I won’t be uploading anything or sharing anything until I have all my files sorted and organized. Then I spend far too many hours searching for the perfect cloud storage system so that when I am ready to start sharing shows again I’ll be able to. I land on Google Drive, it seems to have most of what I need and should work well for you all. But it gets pretty expensive once you get over 5TBs. I tell myself that my new plan is to not share shows every day. That I’m going to share fun things like entire tours or a cool run of shows, etc, and I’ll only do that once a week, or maybe 2-3 times a month. That will limit my storage needs so Google should still be ok.

Then I think that I also really want to have an online storage system for all my files. I like the idea of a cloud backup. But again that is really expensive. Except for File Factory. File Factory is cheap and has lots of storage. But File Factory isn’t all that great for non-pro downloaders

So I’ll use Google Drive for my sharing and File Factory for my backup. It’s the perfect plan I think. I start uploading a little to File Factory. Hey, I say to myself, why not share these shows on File Factory. Maybe they aren’t great for everyone to download, but I bet some folks will like them. So I do that. Then I decide to share stuff on File Factory every week. And I upload even more.

Here’s the question. If I’m uploading everything to File Factory and sharing those links should I still use Google Drive? Or, since File Factory doesn’t work all that well for non-pro accounts, should I just switch everything to Google Drive.

Google is much more expensive than File Factory. I could keep those costs down if I just use Google for my “official” shares. I’d still probably beg for money, but probably less frequently. If I just use Google then I’ll be uploading shows every night and that will add up fairly quickly. On average I’d say I’ll upload one TB every six months.

The price breakdown for Google is this:

2TB: $99/year
5TB: $249/year
10TB: $44.99/month ($599.88/year)
20TB: $99.99/month ($1,199.88/year)
30TB: $149.99/month ($1,799.88/year)

That’s all the plans they have (well, technically they have a 100gig and a 200 gig plan but I’d burn through that super fast). For some reason they don’t have in between plans, but jump up by 5 & 10 TBs. Once you get past 5TBs they only bill monthly as well.

I currently have enough money in my Paypal account to buy a 2TB plan. That wold last me probably about 1 year at which point I’d have to renew anyway, and I’m guessing I’d need to bump it to the 5TB plan. Then in another 1 1/2 years or so I’d need to bump it to the 10 TB and renew that for a few years until I’d have to bump it to 20TB. Probably. I currently have just under 10TBs worth of shows, but presumably in a few years I’ll have more than that.

That’s a lot of money. When I decided to use File Factory as my backup storage plan it was mainly because I didn’t want to beg for that much money from you all. I hate begging in the first place, and that seems like an excessive amount. Especially since my whole plan for the blog has changed and I won’t be doing daily posts for individual shows. I also worry that at some point you guys will get tired of giving and then I will, once again, lose all the shows I’ve uploaded to a cloud storage.

But screw it, I’m asking anyway. You all have been very generous in the past and I thank you for it. If you want to help pay for Google Drive in the future please let me know. At this point I still don’t plan on doing posts for individual shows. I’ll probably do a daily post where I just link to what I’ve uploaded to Google Drive that night. Unlike File Factory you will be able to read the text files inside of Google Drive and make better decisions on what you want to download. But you won’t be seeing that info in a post on my blog.

Or if you’d rather opt out let me know that info too. Or if you are happy with File Factory. It really doesn’t matter that much to me but I know some of you all hate File Factory and Google Drive will definitely be easier all around. But I’d like to hear some feedback.

The Christmas Monkey

My brother-in-law, Matt, always buys my daughter a stuffed monkey for Christmas. This year he outdid himself. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts we are big Doctor Who fans in my house and this one is perfectly dressed up as David Tennant’s version of The Doctor.

I’ve already commandeered it for my office 🙂

Blog Type Announcements

Originally posted on August 15, 2006.  Almost everything I talk about in this post no longer exists – Blogcritics is a shell of its former self, The Mondo Project only lasted a few months, I deleted Bootleg Nation, and all of my old writing buddies no longer write or have a blog.  For a brief time, I also did some gossipy news-type writing about celebrities misbehaving.  I mention that here, but I couldn’t stomach that work for very long and I’ve decided to never make it public again – Mat

The few of you who regularly read Brewster’s Millions (This blog used to be called Brewster’s Millions – I can’t remember when I changed it to The Midnight Cafe). have probably noticed a few changes. I’ll now explain why.

Some Bblogcritic writing buddies of mine and I have created a brand new super-cool blog, The Mondo Project. We were all lamenting the fact that our own personal blogs get very little in the way of hits, and that a big part of this is our inability to create regular content.

This has always been my number one problem with my own blog. I think I do a very good job of writing interesting pieces, but I am only able to once or twice a week – a very small amount for your average blog. Blog readers are used to daily updates, with brand-spanking new information all the time. Time constraints have always kept me from being able to do this.

So me and the boys, plus one gurl, decided that with the eight of us, we should be able to do regular updates if we pulled our resources. Thus we created the Mondo Project.

A little history on the name. My good friend, and writer extraordinaire, The Duke de Mondo created a little Yahoo group ages ago. This was a place designed for him to be able to let his fans know when he had published a new piece. It was also a cool place to hang out and talk pop culture.

The group, like the Dukes site, was called “Mondo Irlando” having something to do with the pseudo-documentary style gore flicks of the seventies and the Dukes homestead in Northern Ireland.

I joined about a year and a half ago and have immensely enjoyed hanging out with a diverse group of folks able to discuss everything under the sun. We dubbed ourselves the Mondo Gentlemen’s Club, that is until a girl was introduced into our midst, one Mary K. Williams.

The group has changed over the last many months, with only me, the Duke, his UK compatriot and NME writer Greg Smith, and Sir Eric Berlin lasting through it all. To balance out the UK side of things the Duke invited his friend, Aaron Fleming to the game.

Keeping up with the Americas, our long lost lover, Bennett Dawson invited Mark Saleski who in turn brought with him fellow music lover DJRadiohead. Together we brought total coolness and a mutual cultural extravaganza called The Hot Topic.

Amongst our many discussions was this concept of creating a single site where we could both write extraordinarily awesome essays on pop culture, but also banter about whatever crosses our mind. See, the cool thing about Blogcritics is that we can fine-tune our excellent writing and get a big stinking audience. But at the Yahoo group we often had a conversational thing going about on all sorts of gnarly subjects, but ones that wouldn’t quite fit into your typical professional blog type deallie. Thus with the Mondo Project, we have created a place where we can both display the most professional of pieces and righteous convos and what pleases us most.

The Mondo Project is now my place to hang out, write, and wax poetic. It is also an opportunity to write a little more personal stuff, like my recent escapades with the iPod.

Not to be outdone, I have also started a new blog called Bootleg Nation. In my research, I have come to realize that to have a successful blog you need a pretty narrow niche. Being diverse is actually a sure way to drive people away unless you are super prolific. So I started a niche blog all about my obsessions of live music. It has just started going, but it should be a very cool place for bootleggers to hang out.

Also, with my recent unemployment (Oh I haven’t mentioned here that I was recently laid off) I realize I now have more writing time on my hands. One of the producers of Blogcritics has asked that I write some fresh news stories with a fun bloggy bent. I’ve started writing a few (as you can see from my recent postings here) and am finding it a fun thing to do, and it brings a lot of traffic to Blogcritics. It’s the least I can do for a site that has helped me so much.

All of these things are now also converging here at Brewster’s Millions. I’ve decided to make this blog kind of a melting pot of all the things I write. That will make it a little mismatched, but you’ll learn to love it.

Past, Present and Future

A Brief History of Brewster’s Millions (Editors Note: The Midnight Cafe was originally called Brewster’s Millions, I don’t remember when I changed it)

First I had 30 million dollars to spend in 30 days….no wait, that’s another Brewster’s Millions.

Just before we went to France, say around June 2004, I began to think I wanted to keep a journal of all my adventures while in Europe. Being me, and having kept an online journal before, and blogs being the rave of the day, I decided I would keep said journal in blog form. As is my tendency I gave the title of my blog about two seconds worth of thought. Brewster’s Millions seemed to contain some humor and a not so sly reference to myself and my thoughts are, of course, worth millions. Aptly titled I thought then, though now I might spend a little more time coming up with something a bit more original.

Pre-France the thought of visiting another country seemed magical and mysterious. I was sure there would be many wonderful adventures to document. In fact, truth be told, my thoughts about this new blog journal were that it would be filled with innumerable adventures throughout the old continent. It didn’t quite dawn on me that I would spend most of my time in one city, living an average life.

Really, truly, and deep down inside I had no idea what I was going to write and who I would let read it. So I started the first few posts jotting down some of the preplanning I had done and my own emotional thoughts about what our travels would come to.

Settling into France brought many a thing to be written. What with the long plane rides, living with a missionary family, finding new digs, being surrounded by familiar and yet somehow completely different people, and hearing such a strange tongue being whispered, hollered, and thrown about there wasn’t enough time to snatch from the internet to write it all down.

Soon it seemed foolish to keep all my thoughts to myself, plus I’m a long way away from keeping a secretive, highly emotional journal these past years. I invited a few pals to take a look at my scribbling and kindly, they gave strong, passionate feedback.

Thus time went on for a while. Me writing about differences in culture, language, and monetary units, my readers saying such things as “Wow” and “Hmmm, that’s different.”

Yea, as time passed the days became more ordinary. No longer was it fascinating to hear the baker say “bonjour” before I ask for my baguette. The tramways held no more mystery as they whisked me away to the other side of the city. There were no more words to describe the majesty of seeing the cathedral soar above the sky, so I beheld it in quiet awe and allowed my readers to find my words written about it some days before.

Amy was now steadily working and I had ventured through most of the city I cared to venture through. With little to occupy the many hours of my time of freedom, I began writing movie reviews and then book reviews.

Reviewing My Life

The reviews were a great deal of fun. I’ve always written mental reviews of movies, books, and music whenever I consumed said objects of art. I’m always willing to discuss the merits of whatever with whoever will listen/debate the items with me. Writing reviews was a cool way to get my thoughts into a more tangible form, plus let all sorts of people read them.

Eventually, I found Blogcritics a site dedicated to reviews of all kinds and essays on every conceivable thing including politics and culture, whatever that means. The owner of the site, Eric Olsen, was kind enough to let me be a writer

I quickly submitted the reviews I had written over the last few months and began co-posting every review I was writing for my blog onto Blogcritics as well. I even wrote a couple of essays meant specifically for the site.

Blogcritics moved me onto a plane I never thought possible, mainly to where actual people were reading my stuff, and not just my old college buddies. The site gets tens of thousands of readers every day, and with the exposure came comments from all over the world. Like most blogs, Blogcritics allows any reader to write a comment about the posts. This gave me a lot of feedback about what I was writing from readers who didn’t care if they hurt my feelings, or lost my friendship or not.

Apparently, I was doing alright, because within a month I was voted Blogcritic of the Day. A few months later, my review of Talk to Her won the editor’s Pick of the Week Award.

Hit Points

Blogcritics was part of a general plan to get more readers. It was ok for just my friends to read my blog when all I was writing about was my daily activities. With review writing, I wanted an audience. While Blogcritics was giving me more eyes than ever glaring at my words, the site was doing little to bring actual traffic to my blog.

Once you get a hit counter it becomes an addiction. Two, three times a day I was checking my stats, seeing if anyone new had come to my blog. I added a signature to my e-mails directing people to my blog. Something I had loathed to do in all the years I’ve been online. I joined countless newsgroups in an effort to send more e-mails to potential readers. I even joined several sites promising to bring more readers to my site than ever before.

It became an all-consuming thing to bring more eyes to my little corner of cyberspace.

Burnout

I was now writing full-length reviews of every movie I saw, and book that I read, plus writing new essays about French culture and detailing my daily life on the blog.

With all this writing and hit mongering burnout wasn’t far away. Soon, I began to get bogged down in reviewing everything; writing cleaner-more interesting essays, and pimping myself out to the highest hit count. I had to take a break.

I spent a couple of weeks writing very little, killing my review everything method to concentrate on a few better-written reviews and breezily adding tidbits from my life.

Unfortunately, my break ran into my vacation and then my departure from France.

Here and Now

So here we are. The blog has gone from a personal diary for my eyes only to a conglomeration of essays/reviews and pseudo-professional writing space begging for visitors.

So now that I am back I have to ask

NOW WHAT?

I’ve thought a lot about what I am going to do with the blog when I went stateside. From this point on I will pretty much leave any journaling about my day-to-day life out of it. There is nothing wrong with personal diary blogs. Many of my friends have them and they are a great way to communicate with the whole world, and plenty of people enjoy reading those things.

It’s just not what I’m interested in. If I was to write about what I’ll be doing in Indiana, I’d bore myself. So, I’ve broken down what I plan to do with the blog into a few categories:

Reviews: I still plan to write one full length review per week. Be it movie, book, or hopefully music, I want to keep up the critiquing for as long as it entertains me. I hope to write little mini reviews of all the artistic endeavors I consume. I even plan to go back and give ratings to everything I have reviewed in the past.

I still like the idea of having a large database of reviews on my blog. Partially because it will be a nice way for me to remember what I have seen/listened to/read and how I felt about it. And also because I totally dig having people come to my site and be able to dig through a large list of all the stuff I’ve consumed and how I rated it.

Stories: I think I’ve led a pretty interesting life so far. I also enjoy telling a good story. I’ve been known to make a pretty mundane occurrence into something funny and interesting. It’s probably the one thing I’m pretty good at.

Phone Conversations: I work at a call center, and there are always interesting, funny or just plain weird conversations that happen over the phone there. Whenever I get one, I’ll blog it.

Essays.: Once in awhile I get an itch to wax on (wax off) about all things pop culture.

French Editing: I hope to go through my old posts and edit them into a cohesive whole about my experiences in Europe.

And there you have it.

This is way long, I know. If you read all the way to hear, you’ll receive a lovely prize in the mail shortly. I wanted to put out what I planned to do with the blog and it turned into a long history of the last year in my life. But, there it is. I spent all this time writing, so you get to suffer through reading it.