An Open Letter To A Coworker

Posted on November 25, 2024November 25, 2024 by Leland Lydecker

This is a letter they’ll probably never read. But in light of national events earlier this month, there are a lot of people who need to hear this.

In the wake of November 5th, I have been checking in with friends and coworkers I know or suspect will be affected. Just a quick, “Hey, how are you holding up? I’m here if you need anything.”

These are people who shared their hopes and dreams, fears and concerns with me. They’re people who’re in groups who will be most heavily impacted.

This letter is not for them.

This letter is for the longtime work friend who, after I asked how she was holding up, expressed confusion about what that had to do with the election. “It won’t affect me,” she said. “It was going to be bad either way.”

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Part II – How Do You Fix Burnout?

Posted on November 8, 2024November 8, 2024 by Leland Lydecker

If you’re struggling with the kind of burnout I experienced, or think you might be headed there, this post may help. Here are a couple of things you’re probably going to have to come to terms with, and some helpful tips to avoid winding up where I did and to help heal the damage if you’re already there.

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Burnout Part I

Posted on October 27, 2024October 27, 2024 by Leland Lydecker

Shortly after publishing Necrotic City, I returned to traditional employment to rebuild my savings. At the same time, I continued creating content for this blog and working on longer stories. It was sometimes a struggle to find time for all of it, but I still had a dream of fully supporting myself by writing, and I didn’t want to lose the progress I’d made.

Fast forward a year, and it had become apparent that the new job wasn’t much better than the last one. It was a miserable (and miserably unsafe) place to work, and I wanted out– the sooner the better. To that end, I gave Patreon a shot. I hoped that by increasing my workload for a time, I could build up enough of a following to replace the day job– or least get close enough to stage an escape.

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The USPS Is Drowning

Posted on December 25, 2023December 25, 2023 by Leland Lydecker

Your local post office is in trouble.

Problem 1: Volume

The volume of mail (letters, magazines, catalogs, and especially packages) that the United States Postal Service delivers in some areas has doubled or even tripled since 2015.

Officially, First Class Mail and package volume have generally been declining. (Source: Postal Facts: A Decade of Facts & Figures.) This doesn’t account for the fact that in rural areas and places with a high cost of living, shoppers have turned to online retailers like Amazon to buy household goods that used to be purchased locally.

According to Postal Facts, the volume of First Class Mail (things with stamps, like letters and bills) has fallen almost 50% since 2013. Meanwhile, package volume has nearly doubled from 3.7 billion pieces to 7.2 billion pieces.

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Post Move Update: Dry Cabins, Futility, and General Darkness

Posted on June 25, 2021June 27, 2021 by Leland Lydecker

I’ve been somewhat absent online for the last several months. First it was the move, and the frantic last week or so of packing, trucking, and cleaning. Then it was viciously thinning out my stuff to fit comfortably into a place with less than one third of the space of the old one. Since then I’ve just been trying to regain my equilibrium.

I’m still working on that last part. It’s always fun hunting for some tool or spare part you know you have, but which you now can’t find. Usually because it wound up buried at the bottom of some tote behind five other totes of tools and gear in the storage space under the stairs.

But I digress. Things have been less than great in a lot of ways. Moving back into a dry cabin (in Alaska, ‘dry’ means no running water) after having the unbelievable luxury (sarcasm intended) of an indoor toilet, shower, and on-site laundry really drove home the point that poverty is inescapable.

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Patreon Flagged My Post as a Game of Chance

Posted on April 22, 2021April 22, 2021 by Leland Lydecker

If you publish content to Patreon or are considering setting up an account with them, you may be wondering what kind of content is prohibited and if there are any hidden trigger words that can get you in trouble on the site.

I urge everyone to start by reading Patreon’s Terms of Use, Community Guidelines, and Benefit Guidelines. Then I’ll shed a some light on what’s not covered in Patreon’s public documentation.

What sparked this post? Well, when I went to upload Scrapyard Spiders, I received this message via a yellow notification box at the bottom of my draft.

“It looks like you might be promoting a raffle, which is outside of our Benefit Guidelines. Check out our blog post for more information, and email us if you have any questions.”

Wait… what?

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Facebook: Publishing Platform?

Posted on March 25, 2021March 25, 2021 by Leland Lydecker

On Tuesday, March 16th, the news broke that Facebook plans to launch a platform for writers to publish content and earn income through monetization tools such as subscriptions. Here’s how Engadget summed up Facebook’s initial offering:

“It’s reportedly a free-to-use system that will tie in with Pages, letting you publish live videos, Stories and other material that goes beyond articles and newsletters. You can create Groups and check stats on your work, too. And yes, there will eventually be ways to earn money from your writing, such as subscriptions and ‘possibly other forms’ of income. Facebook is paying the test group to help get the tools started, according to the tipsters.”
J. Fingas/Engadget

Apparently the offering is meant to be an addition to Facebook’s Journalism Project. As such, it appears to be aimed at journalists and writers of short fiction/non-fiction rather than book publishers. There’s also a good possibility that this project is an attempt to draw users away from rivals like Substack, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

As an author, blogger, and longtime Facebook user, I have some thoughts about the potential of Facebook Publishing.

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The Aftermath of the Other Job

Posted on February 15, 2021December 19, 2021 by Leland Lydecker

I often joked that the Other Job was eating my life, and that’s why my presence as an author was slowly fading. I did an undeniably poor job of keeping up with friends, staying active in writing groups, and staying on top of schedules for my blog and Patreon– not to mention actually writing books.

But in a very real sense, the Other Job consumed my life. I lost touch with most of my local friends outside of work (although I made new friends at work.) After I got out and started to try to reconnect, I learned that several of the people I knew had died. Others are gone, moved to parts unknown.

Worse yet, for me, the other job consumed my ability to write and be creative. It happened so gradually that I didn’t even feel it happening, and what I did notice was easy to attribute to stress and lack of sleep. As in, “I’m just tired, I’m sure this’ll be easier after I get some sleep.” Or “I’m just stressed out– I’m sure I’ll be back to normal when I’m not.”

So it came as a shock that, once I left the other job, things didn’t go back to normal. I wasn’t the same person, and I still couldn’t plot complicated stories or focus well enough to write. And that was absolutely horrifying.

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The End of the Other Job: Escape & Loss

Posted on January 30, 2021January 30, 2021 by Leland Lydecker

I left the Other Job nearly three months ago. At the time I had immediate plans to write a blog post as a sort of wrap up to the saga of corruption, disaster, and misery that I’ve been chronicling for the last couple of years. I thought it’d be cathartic. I thought I’d know exactly what I wanted to say.

I didn’t wind up writing that post because I felt like it was all stuff I’d said before, and at the time the last thing I wanted was to extensively revisit that hellscape of disappointment and failure.

In the ensuing months it began to become apparent that going back to what I was doing before the Other Job would be significantly more difficult than just walking away. I had reoccurring nightmares. I had trouble sleeping. I seem to have lost a lot of my creativity, and almost all of my ability to plot stories. Which is, to say the least, absolutely horrifying.

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Facebook: Biased Purveyor of Political Misinformation?

Posted on October 25, 2020January 12, 2021 by Leland Lydecker

Recently the Wall Street Journal (not exactly a bastion of the left-leaning press) broke the news that when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of political news, the company’s engineers intentionally designed the system to disproportionately impact left-leaning news outlets.

While assuring Mother Jones editorial director for growth and strategy Ben Dreyfuss that the algorithmic changes were not designed “in a way that favored or disfavored any single publication or class of publisher,” Facebook deliberately and knowingly wrote its algorithms to favor right-leaning pages while suppressing left-leaning ones– and this was done with Mark Zuckerberg’s explicit approval.

Indeed, the Zuckerberg who once claimed he would prefer to leave the politics to others has been doing anything but. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Zuckerberg is now an active political operator. He has dined with President Trump, talks regularly with White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, and has pressed lawmakers and officials to scrutinize rivals including TikTok and Apple Inc., people involved in the discussions say.”

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