Here’s who I am, what I’m about and what I’m about to do these next twelve months
Hello, this is me, keypressingmonkey. Nice to meet you here in this my tiny corner of the interwebs.
Who I am
I am a programmer by day, creative writer by night and an avid outdoorsman and craftsman on the weekends.
That means that I will spend the good days outside, running a YouTube channel about magnet fishing and scrap art and when the weather is bad or the sun won’t shine I sit at a desk writing or coding.
My Most Popular Articles
What I’m working on in 2021
The second half of 2020 was a pretty good few months for me personally with a new job, growing side income and plenty of…
An important guide to coder-fashion
Many a guide has been written about how to learn coding, how to survive as a junior developer and how to progress into senior developer territory — but no one ever talks about the single-most crucial piece of IT office attire. A suit doesn’t make the man, his stickers do.
The Monk
And that’s the best part about it
A lot has been written about Bitcoin from a price perspective — but to the media that is all there is to it. It is always approached from a carefully considered angle of putting it in a weird light, like a novelty that is somehow blowing out of proportion.
To get behind why this thing even exists you have to dig in, get lost in subreddits and forums, YouTube videos and whitepapers — but then you start seeing the light. You see why the novelty is in fact revolutionary: Bitcoin doesn’t care.
No single entity can control Bitcoin
That is not to say that larger entities…
Everything happens disconnected and in bursts
I have a paid writing gig under my belt now (yeah!) after about three months of trying, failing, giving up. And those first few weeks taught me a ton about a field that seems like the wild west where law is made up by whoever has the colt drawn quickest.
Getting my first recurring gig was then like someone shooting the string of the gallow just as the hand reached for the lever — an eye-opening experience.
The pitching, writing, editing processes are all independent, usually with several different people
I always wondered why people are willing to pay hundreds for a blog post when often enough it takes like an hour to…
And transformed a company everyone loved into “one of them” over night.
In case you missed it Cyberpunk was just released as one of the most expected games of recent years after seven years of development — and it backfired, hard.
It transformed one of the most beloved game developers into “one of them” and the overarching response to the game, the bugs, the dishonesty has been massive backlash from the community.
So here is a short retrospective of everything that happened since a couple weeks before the release.
They pushed to release the game before Christmas on the backs of their developers
Cyberpunk’s most notable quote for years was “it’s done when it’s done” with plenty of talk about how CDProjectRed did everything right that…
Tips to ensure that you are not wasting time on technicalities
I tend to write a bit here and there, everyday, all the time. Okay, I write a lot, daily, it’s fricking addicting. Nobody can stop me from writing, if I’m honest then nobody even tries to.
So naturally I have gotten a bit faster, more proficient, experienced in this and I want to share with you what I use to produce more in less time — all the time.
Get the basics squared away
This means that you learn to touch type, then get better and better as you practice. …
Everything I did to break into freelance writing. For real money.
I got paid today, for the first time where someone liked my work, gave me a chance and was happy with the result.
A sweet 150$ for the sample post and 300$ for each one after. That is not shabby, especially because it isn’t just one-time work where they could pay you thousands and you would still lose money due to all the job finding, application, rejection overhead.
Instead this was a very smooth process from the time I got the first response through the detail and writing the sample post.
In this post I want to write about everything…
And never default to the fade-to-black style copout again
Erotic writing as a genre is fascinating to write in on its own — and almost every book out there has a romance plot of some kind.
A lot of successful writers started their writing careers writing steamy short stories or at some point wrote them — and it’s easily one of the largest fields where self-published authors can make a name for themselves.
I once earned good money from erotica, but saw my promotion pipeline dwindle away when Tumblr disallowed erotic content. Lesson learned, I should have built an email list. But writing sex is like riding a bicycle…
Let’s take a look at what’s happening on small and large scales
I used to enjoy Dystopian fiction with a bit of a shiver, a bit of hope that the future would turn out nothing like that — and now when you look at the world around us a lot of that reads and looks just like it was written by some kind of Dimitri and has a brutalist concrete building on the front cover.
These days it seems that to escape reality we have to make the switch to apocalyptic fiction — those subway tunnels sound increasingly cozy and eating mushrooms and vitamin pills is not that far from my current…
There is nothing more powerful than being a professional amateur
Life is all about progress if you ask me, about adapting to the curve balls that life throws at you from left field. At least I hope it does because a boring, easy life is that much harder to maintain in the long run.
Over the years I have found myself in many places where I was either over or under-qualified — severely so at times — and somehow I still sit here writing this post. Which is another thing that I am not perfect at — but in writing everyone is a professional amateur.
But you can stretch that…
keypressingmonkey
Programmer by day, creative writer by night. Find me at https://codingtofreedom.com
