I used to have this notion that I had lots of good ideas all the time. When I was young I thought I would become rich off my own endeavors. I still think I have good ideas, and can get rich off my own endeavors, but I’m way less young now, and I’m not a very good capitalist.

This year has been the most difficult one of my adult life. Here is my personal blog where I can write about whatever the fuck I want. I had created a means to a comfortable living for myself with Extra Chill. Things were going very well for me in 2023. And then the world, and specifically Google, had to go and change.

The problem for me is that I don’t really have any ideas on how I can replicate the income from SEO with my current business in its current state. There is no money to be had because getting traffic to a website based in content creation has become damn near impossible.

I have no idea how to recover my lost Google traffic. I don’t have the money to invest in a team of people to help me figure it out. I am left with my writing talent, my creativity, and my passion. Living in a new city is a challenge in itself. Austin is big and wide and there are a ton of people here.

In Charleston, I became very well-connected. I lived there for such a long time, and I went to lots of concerts all the time for many years. It was a great place to live during my 20s.

I need to figure out how to make money off my business again. It has become clear to me that driving traffic alone is not going to be enough. I need to do something else.

Lately I have been doing AI training for work and it has been a pretty good endeavor for me. It turns out that both my skills as a writer and my experience using AI are useful and can get me paid. I’ve been pursuing this and enjoying the work. It’s hard, and it isn’t as consistent as I would like, but at least it keeps the bills paid.

This is really just a journal for me that is public. I don’t care if anybody reads it, but if you did read it, you would learn a lot about my mindset and state of being. That’s why I do it I guess.

I’ve also discovered that my resume is not really that impressive to people who would be hiring somebody with my skill set. It is hard to put my skills on paper, especially because I spent 8 years working as a boat captain while building my business on the side, and then quit to go full time.

If I went back into the marine world, I could make a good living driving a sail boat for the rest of my adult life until retirement. However, for various reasons, I don’t really want to do that. I’ve always had this creative drive and I want to use it to support myself.

I’ve dreamed in the past of using my creative talent to create fictional narratives, such as screenplays and novels. I have a knack for storytelling, and writing with a voice such that it feels like I don’t need a clear drive or direction to make something interesting. As evidenced by this blog article, if you have read this far, I guess.

But what is confidence in my abilities without sitting down to actually complete my story? I know I am capable of fictional narratives that are completely mind-bending. I’ve had a lot of wild experiences in my life and continue to interact with the underground world that most people don’t ever experience. I also have behind the scenes knowledge of the music industry that allows for a really engaging story to be crafted.

However, I am fueled by financial needs at the present moment, which is the main conundrum. When I started working on boats, I had a novel I was working on. I actually completed the whole thing, and then stopped. But it was a readable story that built from start to finish and a few of my friends read it.

At some point I decided it needed to be rewritten, and I rewrote half of it and then stopped. It might be worth going back to read it again, as it’s been 5 years since I’ve looked at it. My conclusion at the time was that it was trash and needed to be scrapped in favor of a completely new idea.

That being said, I was young when I wrote it, and I was still young when I dismissed it. I can confidently say right now that not only could I make it better now, but I am even more capable today of writing an entirely new novel from scratch, and probably faster than the first one.

The question then remains. Will I end up writing that novel, or will I continue to muse about it in notebooks and blog articles until the day I die?

I don’t know. I did write a collection of poems earlier this year, which are shared on this blog. That’s a start. Writing this blog post is also a start, in a way.

So, I guess we’ll see how the plot unfolds.