Ahh half a year down, half to go. Welcome to June 2023 where it’s been a month of big birthdays, bills and book sales. Oh and the month where we quietly clicked over 100 posts!
June 2023 – The quick bits
What I watched: More Silo (it gets better and better), more Wayward Pines and now watching for the first time the Jodie Whittaker Dr Who Universe.
What I’m reading: Not enough really! (I need to recharge my Kindle)
What I’m playing: Mainly Battle Brothers which has become horribly addictive..
June 2023 – This website – the guy at the door says you’re not coming in.
This month I got a nice timely reminder that not everyone comes here to admire my new desk, laugh at my random adventures of read a book or two. No, some try their hardest to break in and…well I’m not exactly sure what the end goal is here. Pretend to be me and have a far cooler life? Flood the page with ads about fake Ray Ban sunglasses? Or maybe do what the last guy who successfully broke into one of my blogs did, flood it with links to buy Kayaks.
Thankfully I don’t have that isn’t here on account of the Wordfence WordPress app standing guard like an eagle eyed bouncer. Not only that, but it also tells me where the dodgy visitors are hailing from and so if you’re one of those in the list above and you’re not here because you like the place, I hope the next time you go to catch a bus the bus catches you instead if you get my drift. Points for trying to guess my password but if you thought I was going to use something obvious like ‘Password’ or even ‘1234567890’ then you really have no clue what’s going on here. You’re not coming in that way, turn away now and save yourself the trouble, I think I hear your bus arriving soon anyway.
Also does anyone else have any trouble with the Rank Math Plugin on occasion? On this site it works brilliantly but over at my other blog Driveanotherday I’ve had to dive in and manually fix it a handful of times now. Getting it to auto update itself seems to cause an error in the code that I have to fix via cPanel before the website works again. The fact that it keeps happening is very annoying, even if I am getting better at patching it up time and time again.
June 2023 – Sales of the century
Earlier this year I put my reader magnet and trilogy in a box set (even though Amazon doesn’t like the words ‘Box Set’ and far prefers collection) and this has been one of the best things I’ve done financially as an author. Right now in terms of sales it’s the 2nd highest earner of everything I’ve ever written (Hack Frost is still number 1 by a long shot) which is staggering considering it’s only been out for a couple of months.
Authors if you’ve been putting this off, give it a shot – especially if things have been pretty flat in your market in the recent months. What have you got to lose?
(What hasn’t helped was the whole Payoneer situation where their change in fees took a big bit out of things recently. But we move on..)
I’ve almost finished the second instalment of my Last Thief series too! Seriously, some book projects feel like they take a while and this one certainly has been one of those efforts. Still I look forward to finishing it up and putting it out there then exploring why the first one failed to take off (possibly the cover). Can’t sell book two of anything without a semi successful book one!
June 2023 – The finances
At the time of writing I’ve got a week off from work which is lovely, coinciding with the first week of school holidays which is a bonus. What hasn’t helped though is big bills and birthday celebrations, both of which have drained the accounts. Throw in school camp needing to be paid and the occasional entertainment for bored kids and it’s been a rough ride that’ll hopefully ease up into July.
Although no credit to AGL who have ‘predicted’ how much gas I’ll use this month and come up with a nice high number. I’m trying not to run the heater much (especially when we head out for anything) and the last thing I need is a prediction of what I’m going to use, balanced out later. Just tell me what I owe, I’ll gripe about that instead.
However my small share pile continues to grow and I’m very grateful for fractional shares. Once upon a time I’d have to save around $525 ($500 minimum, $25 commission) to buy a block of one share, so you better be happy with your one and only pick. Nowadays it’s $100 minimum but I can buy as many fractional shares as I want at $10 a pop. So I can pick and choose, grab bargains when certain shares are down and fund more of the ETFs in the portfolio when I want and the pile grows almost monthly.
And how about the price of cheese at the moment? From about 7 bucks a kilo to 10-11. Inflation, price gouging, cost of living, RBA madness – I’m still working on a million dollar idea to elevate myself out of this mire…but nothing springs to mind yet.
Oh and still haven’t sold the car yet – plenty of ghosts, no one substantial keen yet.
June 2023 – Lift across the month
Earlier in the month there was a week were I was feeling flat, so I opted out of exercising. And so to make up for things, I tried something new: Light Barbell workouts across the week with the weekend off, increasing the weight by 5kg daily. EG
Monday – 10kg (empty bar)
Tuesday – 15kg
Wed – 20kg
Thu – 25kg
Fri – 30kg
Sat – Recover
Sun – Recover
Mon – 15kg (add 5kg each week)
Tues – 20kg
Wed – 25kg… etc
And while the Thurs/Fri workouts were usually the tougher ones with the heavier weights and lack of energy, things have been going well so far as I’ve been doing this for 2.5 weeks now and felling pretty good about things. Even better, it’s chewing through my weights challenge at a rapid rate:
2023 goal – 75.4% done (6 months left to go!)
June 2023 – The rest of it
-Still working on the desk, with funds low the remaining parts on the back order. Although the new screen in there looks brilliant!
-Trying out Automated Amazon ads still but amazingly it hasn’t generated a single click. I don’t know what it’s doing but it’s certainly not actually advertising anything currently..
-And now it’s time to get my tax stuff together! Group certificates, capital gains, dividends, interest, book sales – luckily I use a professional to do my tax now because I’d still be drowning in numbers if I tried to make sense of it myself. They’re not cheap but the results are more than worth it and I do need a newer car this year..