Recent Developments And Future Plans: Marriage, Dog, And Book

It’s been a minute! Last time I posted on this blog I had just published nine essays in nine weeks, and now it’s been… three months since my last post or so? Writing every week was a fun experiment, but it didn’t really pay off in terms of subscribers or interactions on social media, and even though I write mostly just to write, less than ten people looked at my last blog, and it got zero likes or interactions on social media, which is a pretty clear indicator that it didn’t really matter if I wrote every week or once a month.

What I’m writing here today began in my head about a month or so ago, and was intended to trick me into making writing a priority again, and to spread some news about some recent things I’ve done, but I never actually picked up my keyboard until today. Yesterday I had a sudden weird and peculiar idea, and later on you can see me work through my feelings about whether I should stop caring about sports all together? Which sounds weird, because the longest essay on this blog is about how important sports are! I can’t wait to write down and work my way through these sudden and odd feelings!

Now, since I last made a post on this blog, I’ve published a new short story on Kindle, I’ve recorded an audiobook version of the older short story, Four Cats And A Life Improved, and published it on YouTube, and in real life I’ve gotten married to my beautiful wife, and we’ve adopted a dog! Which might also seem weird if you only know me from my writing, which has mostly been about cats!

I should talk about the new short story first I suppose, a short horror about a man who is stuck inside a dream inside a dream inside a dream and knows he has to wake up before a demon from his past catches up to him. It’s called Night Of The Demon and is available on Kindle. I haven’t had much luck posting links on this site but it should be available here: https://a.co/d/aGnTLHz or you could presumably search my name and hopefully find it! I did look into putting it other places than Amazon due to obvious reasons but couldn’t figure Kobo out. If you don’t want to use Amazon but would still like to read, contact me on Bluesky and I’ll email you a pdf! My Bluesky should be accessible by just typing erikengberg.me into a browser but I am not that good with technology cool guy emoji. I will eventually make an audiobook version of this and put it on YouTube as well!

The story is based off of a real nightmare I had, and it was really scary! I expanded and made it more readable but it is pretty close to what I actually experienced. It made me aware that I get nightmares if my back is exposed and cold, like if the blanket doesn’t cover me, and I experienced it just last night too, so it’s a thing! But I didn’t know it was until that night on which the short story is based.

My old YouTube channel is called OWDMRG and I’ve cleaned it up a bit, deleted around half of the stuff I put on there, but there’s still a lot of old videos from when I was in my early twenties on there and I was experimenting with making music and video. Maybe some of it is entertaining, but if you are interested in my writing, the audiobook version of Four Cats And A Life Improved can be found here, hopefully: https://youtu.be/vZDKbPrQrwE?si=JFu4D7VRA2X0m1wr 

In real life we got a dog, a beautiful cockapoo called Ravn (Raven in Norwegian), a month and a half ago, and we got married almost two weeks ago. And it is very nice! I’m not gonna get much deeper into it because there’s no need to put that out in public.

Now I’m gonna work out some feelings I have about sports. It happened really suddenly yesterday. I'd been thinking about how stupid it is to care about sports, because when results are poor I feel bad for a week or more, and I don’t need to! I don’t actually have to care about sports played by guys who are younger than me in a sport I myself haven’t participated in in more than two decades.

It’s fine and positive when results are good, like I have a long essay on this blog about how good and important sports are, but what if they aren’t?

My phone tells me I spend more than four hours each week just looking at results of football games, I spend five to six or so on podcasts about football, and probably another two on analysis and highlights and other football videos on YouTube. I don’t even watch the games because they’re so expensive I haven’t even dreamed about paying for a TV package in five seasons I think! And I’m not even going to get into the whole “Money in football” thing, because there are already hundreds of essays and books about it that are written by much better and more informed writers than me! But safe to say it is disgusting and capitalism ruins everything!

In that other essay on here, called The Importance Of Sports or something, I talk about how I used to spend all my time on MMA and the UFC, how many hours it took every week, and how I then just stopped caring. Can I do that with football too? Mostly I do things cold turkey, that seems to be what works for me, and with an international break just starting, now is an excellent time. But do I want to?

On my results app I often mark off three or even four hundred plus games every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with hundreds more on the weekdays. Do I need to? No, clearly not. Just before I sat down to write this, I opened it and found I had marked off fifty seven games today, during an international break, which means there are actually NO GAMES. Yet I found fifty seven I ostensibly care about the results for. I went through them, and now have only five games today. I can be much stricter about which games I mark off and gain hours more time each week.

I don’t need to know the results of English sixth tier, French, German, and Italian third tier, I don’t need to pay attention to the Belarusian and Faraose second tiers. I can simply stop.

I stayed on Twitter way longer than was necessary to get football tweets, and my front page of Bluesky has been my football feed for more than two years now. But just before I sat down here I moved the football feed down to eight position in the feeds. So the decision has been made I guess, I will stop caring about football, or at least care way less. I’m gonna let the results of games ruin my mood no longer. Or at least way less. Damn. I would not have seen this ever happening just two days ago, and now the decision has been made.

Okay, about to wrap up here, but I just remembered I need to mention some things about my actual writing!

If you read my most recent blogs of three or so months ago you might remember I was really excited about having started a new fiction project, but the excitement died away! It turned out the story was something other than what I thought it was going to be, and I felt less enthusiasm about it as it revealed itself to me, and a little while ago I decided to drop it! So that’s now two projects I’ve started and then dropped, if you count the essay collection that turned into this blog!

However! I have decided that I will just push straight on and pick up writing my book that originally got me started on writing before Simba died and made me write that short story. I might write some more blogs here first, because I kind of have a “write book in 2026” feeling in my mind, so I might just enjoy reading for the rest of the year before sitting down to do some “real writing” next year.

This blog was probably pretty rambly but I’ll publish it anyway! See you later!