01/12/2025: Blogging Roundup
Blogging, vblogging, and novel writing through the holiday season
I continued to blog steadily from the end of November through the third week in December, when I discovered my predilection and hunger for posting minute-long video rants on TikTok and Instagram, and embarked on an unexpected international trip to Vietnam. The result has been a paucity of blog posts since, amid an onslaught of other epic experiences.
Settling back at home this week, I’ll no doubt start typing again soon — while in parallel posting what has now become a daily deluge of rapid-fire video blog POVs. The written blogging and performing vblogging complement and feed off each other — a rich topic in and of itself — while what’s most surprising is the exponentially superior reach of the ranting:
Suffice to say that for 1/100th the effort (per video on average 10–15 minutes to shoot, caption, and upload), I’m receiving 100x the reach (per video on average 300–500 views, 30–50 likes, dozens of comments — with several going viral into the 10s and even 100s of thousands of views, with proporitional engagement), so I must have a knack, and will continue.
The 10,000x ROI for video vs blogging is enticing, but I am and will remain a writer at heart. If nothing else, my growing social media following will hopefully help fuel interest in my essays, stories, plays, screenplays, and novels. I’ll give my burgeoning video presence a whirl when my sci-fi novel publishes, and see what happens with the shameless cross-promote.
Within the midst of all this I had a thrilling and illuminating trip to Cam Rah, Nha Trang, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — with gigabytes of photos and video to draw from and continue to comment on. The prospective client who sent me there needs a multichannel upgrade to their online presence, my tactical recommendations ones I will try to follow, too.
That all said, 2025 is already gearing up to be another transformative year. Professionally I’m in dire need of new monetization, while creatively I’m poised to self-publish my second novel, continue my gleeful video ranting, and launch my own podcast. I might be several million people behind the likes of Joe Rogan and Mark Maron, but you’re never too old to rock ‘n roll.
Finally for now, the last item on last year’s trad blogging agenda is this unfinished Roundup, which got truncated with the distractions leading to my international trip. So for the sake of closure — and as a reminder to myself of the last few blogs I posted before the flurry of activity — here’s summaries and links of what was on my mind at the close of 2024:
Like any independent moderate (albeit one leaning toward Libertarianism), I’ve been slammed for Bothsidesism — especially regarding the Middle East. Worse still, my “balanced perspective” has come across as pro-Palestinian to Zionists, and anti-Muslim to Arab Nationalists and Jihadists, so go figure. Here I was striving for more understanding:
Good friends are hard to find, and harder to keep. Erika and I have been pals for more than two decades, throughout that time each of us continuously writing, each in our own way. About a year ago she started sending me her poetry, and its been my pleasure and honor to my personal favorites as part of my monthly blogging on Medium. Here’s another gem:
Singularities — the boundaries between one state and another — are where exciting, meaningful, and frightening things happen. At a crossroads between full time communications strategist and out of my mind creative writer/video ranter, I’m acutely aware of the thrilling possibilities and risky realities looming ahead. This post caught a whiff:
Despite the various pressures facing someone in career- and life-transition, I’ve never been happier. Part of my pollyanna attitude and optimistic enthusiasm stems from my eagerness to differentiate linear from logarithmic experiences, and judge my own perceived success or failure accordingly. The math here is remedial, the wisdom transcendent:
Prose has always come naturally — so much so that I’ve no doubt neglected other forms of expression. Inspired by the poetry of my friend Erika, I switched gears mid-blog from long form to what one commenter described as lyrics to a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. I enjoyed the process and loved the result so much that I’ll no doubt do more:
Here’s my first instance of blending my video ranting with blogging — transposing a weird musing on how the rapidly evolving AI chatbots are going to have to cannibalize the content they’re ripping from the Internet, and likening it to an even weirder musing on adopting a chihuhua dog while owning an apartment full of cats — video to blog and back again:
Part of my creative frenzy the past couple years has been going through my archive of writing projects, OCRing the ancient scanned hardcopy documents, editing the translation mistakes, reformatting and posting them on Medium for anyone to see — and the AI bots to rip and ingest. This collection was delayed due to a laggard story, which still needs tweaking:
This shorter post was a long time coming — so to speak — and was, like its theme, eminently worth the wait. If I’ve learned anything at all in life, that’s to successfully ignore feelings of artistic jealousy and regret. There’s a time and place for everything, especially receiving the Muse’s mandate for unbridled and zealous creative indulgence. I’m blessed to have it now!
Not to air dirty laundry, but when I moved from New York City this summer I specifically chose as destination the heart of Nowheresville, California, to be close to my creative partner with whom I continued to work on our first self-published illustrated novel series, Super Santa. Suffice to say that partnership imploded, for reasons I implicitly share here:
Onward into 2025! Given my new found fetish of video ranting, coupled with entering the home stretch of my second self-published novel, The Lovers’ Guide to the Infiniverse, my blogging might be more sparse that it has been — but as I mention above, I’m first and foremost and forevermore a writer at heart, and will continue typing to my dying day, Bots Beware!
Thanks for reading me on Medium. If you’re curious about my 1-minute video rants — many of which are transposed blog posts, or seeds of new blog posts — then check me out on TikTok as @mookiewriter, and on Instagram as @instaspitz. If the former dies a State Department death I’ll likely hop to YouTube, where I’ve already started as @mookiespitz…
