Blog

You may have noticed that I slowed down a bit in August when it comes to blogging. I have still been making posts a couple of times a week, though, and because I wrote so much in June and July, I now have a sizeable collection of things for people to read. I feel pretty okay about that.

September will likely be at the same pace as August, just a couple of entries a week. I do want to get back to writing every day in October, though. I have big plans for October!

Social media

I find social media to be frustrating. I want to write and I want people to know about my blog, but I don’t want to spend that much time marketing it on social media because it seems to take more of my time than the writing does. The YouTube channel was supposed to help promote my blog, and I do enjoy making the actual videos, but how do I get people to watch my YouTube videos? I don’t know! I just want to create stuff.

Speaking of internet videos, I think I got shadow banned on TikTok. My views dropped a lot. Before they were between 200 and 400 per video, and I know that some TikTokers will think that’s not very many, but then I had one that only got 25 views, and then one that got 12, until I was down to four views per video.

At first I was just a bit suspicious, but I thought that maybe people just didn’t like the longer videos. But then one of my friends messaged to tell me that she had to keep finding me and following me again because TikTok kept making her account unfollow mine.

But why did I get shadow banned? Was it because of my saucy cat butt videos?

After reading up on it, I thought that it might be because of my husband’s music. I had asked him to make some songs for me to use in the background of my videos so I wouldn’t have to worry about copyright issues if I used music that I found on the Internet. I think I got shadow banned because the music isn’t in TikTok’s music library so they can’t tell if I have a license for it or not.

So I deleted all of my TikTok videos that had Phil’s music. These videos had me telling my horror story, Happy Skull Camping Park. I decided to break it up into smaller videos that were around one minute each and post them in a series. I used music from the TikTok library instead of the original music that my husband made for me, and it seemed to work. My views went back up to where they were before.

So, lesson learned, right? If YouTube recognizes the music in your video, you could potentially have a problem, but TikTok is the opposite. On TikTok you’ll have issues if their software doesn’t recognize the music. It seemed that I had figured it all out.

It happened again this week. My views suddenly dropped to twelve per video. I’ve deleted my two most recent videos and I’m taking a break from TikTok for a few days, because I don’t know what’s wrong and I don’t know what to do. I’ll have a YouTube video up in the next few days, though, so hopefully my six subscribers are very excited.

Life

Summer is winding down here. My vacation is over and I’m back at work. My son is back at school so we’re working on settling back into our routine.

We finally got caught up on Stranger Things and my son has declared that it is now his favourite show. I have started watching Yellowjackets. I had been avoiding this one because I’ve heard that it’s really good and I wasn’t ready to get into a binge session. Last night I watched the first two episodes, and right now I am forcing myself to write this update instead of watching more Yellowjackets. It is excellent so far and I highly recommend it. Just be advised that there are some gory parts.

I don’t really have any plans for September. Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is in November, so I’m going to start doing some prep work for that. Do I have any friends who will also be doing Nanowrimo?