like neon

This is from one of two comments sitting in pending. This blog is over a year old and has only two comments the entire time. Regular readers catch on that I'm cool with never getting comments because, even when they are 100% positive, my autist spook alarm is set on an autist spook 5 second countdown and there goes another blog. I tried doing the twitter friends thing, but that crossed over to blogs and I had ridiculous meltdowns. Anyway, I've been so stringent controlling pingbacks that I just super rarely ever get comments any more, unlike the old days when I'd get spammed with anything and everything under the sun and was constantly deleting.

The other comment is so Matrixy that I can't help laughing. It's another company, but the company name, the date, and the chosen post to comment on all make perfect sense when you find out the commenter created a blogger bio the day before just to leave a comment. Instead of leaving a link of any kind, they left phone number, email, and full address for a rep from a loan company as if they were sharing sage advice, so guess what, I looked up the company. There is a real company by that name but their dotcom, which launches out from a FB about page, is homed in a completely different city and state from the rep in the comment on my blog, but it's all good because the company is licensed to assist home owners getting mortgages in a list of other states.

Looking over the website, it's an obvious cover. It's way too simply made, the photos are too perfect, and the help page is a basic personal information submission form. Even if the company is legit and operating, it comes across to anyone seasoned with web work as being a scalper site. The fact that one of the agents went to the trouble to create a fake bio to leave a comment initiating contact means that the cover site either doesn't know this is happening or lays really low hoping no one will connect dots that it's happening.

My comment back to that pending comment-

Every time I get 'response', like I show you guys in stats, it comes hot on the heels of something I've written and link shared.

That response came after this post. 

Guess what the name of the company was.

And now, for the first time ever in all my years of blogging, I got this.

freely free freedom

 Day 4 of the new town, have already hit 1200 points.

My biggest town transitioning through chapter 6. It's about 5 months old. This is the world that Toad and I learned how to do mercenary fellowship events on, mostly played by ourselves learning the ropes. Now we're in a big kid fellowship getting goodies.

The very first town I ever made and still struggle the most with, even though I got into a good fellowship about 2 1/2 months in. It's been interesting watching every town develop its own personality.

This town was my experiment town. I didn't try to play right at all and eventually sold everything down to the bone and restarted just to see what would happen. Doing just fine, and as I was rebuilding, someone pulled and pushed me into a fellowship because I'd been such a good trading partner.

My first human world is probably at least 4 months old now and I made it all the way through the fifth chapter solo without any fellowship help and was actually getting a bit wealthy. Until I joined a fellowship... 😂 Since it was of my own volition, I felt a little obligated to put out more effort in tournaments, and the wealth draining began. I'm stalling moving into chapter 6 while I find my new balance.

Meanwhile, I've got dueling publishers on my phone, possibly publisher wars, one very nicely insisting in a voice mail they'd like like to do a phone interview with me. That one is actually legit, easy to look up, but honestly, I'm getting the idea that some of these businesses are fronts for out of country money scalping. The publish is real enough, the websites can be very slick, but the pitches during cold calls are a bit... pushy. Plus my potential as income for someone else obviously ramps up after I've shared how many words I've written and how much I've published online (for free) and how wide my readership is with stat trackers and analytics backing that up. One day it's east coast, next day it's west coast, some leave crap messages, some leave sparkling invitations, but not a single one of them has impressed me. If I'm really such a target for contracting, they seem to be completely missing what I need as a workhorse to allow someone to harness me in.

So if I'm getting decent bounce on twitter and nice stats on dead blogs, whadyathink a book would be worth?

I think I'm worth more staying rogue and free. When I first started out I had a money plan, goals, because back then money actually was tight. Well, it's still tight, but our perspectives have changed. I never needed money to say anything I want any time I want to anyone on the planet. I feel like publishing for money would be very self limiting.

Also, in a book I wouldn't be able to share this hilarious fan edit I ran into out of the blue. Probably NSFW. Literally busted up over this one. 😂 I love fans so much.

still finding the good stuff