Formerly Hope27, Life Explorer is a product of seven years of failure, and seven years of not giving up. The story behind it could not allow the blog to be focused on any other niche except inspiration. Below is the story (please take note this is from the post “How did I become the blogger?”

Introduction

In 2013, a senior teacher by the self-given moniker, Pee Prize, invited us to the Library. There was nothing in the library for the building to deserve this name, and Prize had a plan. He was senior, thanks to promotion, and not age.  Then a man in his mid-late twenties believed in adopting the digital means of going through our problems. He was there to influence the school’s decision-making panel to consider adding internet and WiFi equipment to the shopping cart.

In the library, he took us through an hour of lecture, “How to use the Internet?” This lecture was intended to get us started with some computers that had been recently installed in the library. The computers were now connected via Ethernet.

By then I had only made a few phone calls and not a single Google search. I was seventeen, doing my A-Level, which comprises two years of learning before going to the University. This turned out to be a lecture that changed me entirely. I now needed the internet more, keeping in mind Pee Prize’s final advice as he closed the lecture. “Do not ever abuse the internet!!”

The internet instead abused me. I quickly got addicted to some explicit content, and wasted much trying to end the addiction. On the positive side, I was up to “hows”. How the internet works. From transactions that are performed, jobs that are pulled, and careers that are made to the content itself, I had all the relevant knowledge about the internet’s workings by 2015. I even attempted to master PHP and JavaScript, two important web-Programming languages. I needed a computer to be able to do my best, and I was hoping I could have all my future lived as a mobile game and app developer. But challenges had me in the middle like a quicksand. My family was not willing to support an individual with delusional dreams. Mainstream online payment systems like PayPal do not practically work in Zimbabwe and there are plenty of go-arounds. Toolkits for developing games like Unity 3D and rendering engines can be just as expensive as a brand-new current iPhone. You still need powerful expensive computers to run them.

In 2016, I got enrolled on a degree Programme and the University of Zimbabwe. The sunshine was right in front of me, I had to open my eyes to see it. But then there was this family I was in. Grandfather, a primary teacher before his retirement in 2007, had mentored me in competition. “You don’t sell out. If you can’t beat them find means, don’t join anyone.”

At this moment the extended family was getting richer and my family was getting poorer, and mom getting seriously sick. Funding my delusional dream could have taken a few phone calls to my uncles. But my ego considered calling anyone into this as selling out. Yet I couldn’t achieve this alone. So I down-scaled to blogging.

Twenty-seventeen, First year of trying to be a blogger.

I created the blog Afro continuum on a free wordpress.com plan. Sooner I realised that I was not quite good at writing about scholarly stuff; the niche I had chosen for the blog. In June of the same year, I came up with another blog Motivation, Life and Study (motilifestudy) and again it was on a free WordPress plan. The latter attracted a fair share of traffic but I did not see it that way. I was supposed to build it, upgrade its plan and keep writing. It could have been a different story by 2020. But I started to slow down as you shall find out reading further. 

 On a free WordPress plan the site’s url is https://blogname.wordpress.com instead of https://blogname.com. You cannot get to monetize it. You can’t put ads on it and have premium subscribers of premium content on it. 

Twenty-eighteen [2018], Second year of trying to be a blogger.

Not much progress was made during the year. In June my laptop ceased to work and, although I tried, I was not able to get it repaired. I was quite sure that I was far away from affording another second-hand laptop. That was my problem. My problem was the belief that nothing blogging can happen without a laptop. Since the laptop was unaffordable, without it I was doomed to stay off my blog.

On the University campus I still edited the post previously made on any of the PC’s the in library. This is how I left my WordPress account logged on somewhere dangerous. Someone deleted all three sites (AppXplorer is the third) and created another site, LeoMed. This became the end of an era and I was officially without a blog for the next three years.

My progress between 2016 and 2018, and what I learned out of it• I can only say, that I am lazy. I cannot follow up with actions that I have in my plans. Plans fail, they come back again as matured versions, and they fail again and come back more mature.

Each year passing is a decade in the digital world. New tools appear and advance to rescue you where you cannot. Some you discover as you dig deep. Similarly, the WordPress or Wix mobile blogging app in 2023 can perform better and has as many functions as the same app in 2016.

My writing was way poor than this when I started in 2017. In 2018, I now had extensions like Grammarly to help me with perfecting the language. Having the tools like Grammarly in mind, and since they do not function well enough at the freemium level took me to the drafting table. (There is a Grammarly keyboard in the Play Store. You can also try the Ginger keyboard, alternatively). I realised that more capital than I previously thought was needed.

You need to know what you are before it is too late and protect your progress. I failed to notice earlier that I had become a blogger, and that motilifestudy was attracting good traffic. Failing to notice this meant that I had to miss what I needed to keep myself a blogger. To keep rising you need to open an eye that sees you rising than rely on that see you failing, and suddenly pitfalls become ingredients for your actual rise.

To protect your progress as a blogger you also need to have every copy of the article you write backed up somewhere. When something happens, you can still get your work back and keep advancing. You can also have offline and hard copies of the same work stored elsewhere. It is truly emancipating to resort to paper when there is time and space for that. 

Twenty-nineteen [2019], Third year of trying to be a blogger.

I became aware of what was to be done except I did not know how and what to begin with or what to never do. Knowing what to begin with is knowing what is important and what is not. But then the heart speaks for itself. You cannot command it so that it cannot get to disallow you to do what you must.

I started the year doing as much as I could to write as much. But what was I writing about? Writing novels meant that I had to start from scratch and develop a novelistic writing skill, one I had not invested in. I didn’t think about keeping up, building on writing inspirational articles.

Once novel writing became the way, I thought of following it up by immersing my life into what I was writing about–love. I had to fall in love and there was an easier target on which to fall to. This was a mistake and also a source of other articles on this blog like The Letter to Ex-lover. But mistakes first!

I scrolled upwards until I landed on her number which I had last dialed three months ago. I saved her number. A “Hie” on WhatsApp double-ticked. She had blocked me all over in September 2018, and now she had loosened the blockade. But again she had no idea how to let me know. My “Hie” was an opportunity she chose not to miss. She sent the same hie to me with a love emoji full stopping it. I didn’t respond, and that was the beginning of the story on her side. “How are you, my love!” She begged and begged until we were finally back in love in late March 2019. This latest and the last streak of our affairs was to leave us more broken than we were.

In April 2019, I dropped out of college. One of the reasons behind this decision was I wished to be like my girlfriend, that is being without a college certificate. The benefit of dropping out of college was I had some tuition funds to turn into capital. (Only I have been late to pull out the funds from the University’s account. Some of these should have never been paid to avoid inflation chipping away at their value). The funds, however, had to dress me. I had to be looking good each time I paid a visit. She, too, dressed up to the elite standard. So, I bought some expensive shoes and I had to buy ourselves the best lunch my tuition funds could afford. I bought her items on her request list, some cheap earphones, and jeans and I bought them meat for a barbecue. While I was progressing in love. Getting her to like me more, I was making huge strides backwards from my dreams. 

In June, I moved to my uncle’s place. Later, in that very month, my phone stopped working. Important files, including personal diaries, were never recovered. This slowly changed me. To keep writing I had to involve a pen and a paper. Having been used to a computer and its software, this was the beginning of a reboot. I started to appreciate the pen and the paper more. But I did not purchase stationary as I should have done. I was busy spending on everything else. I remember in July 2019, walking about the neighbourhood and getting to buy snacks each time I felt food had been delayed or a morning meal had been not good enough. To make matters worse, I had no active expenditure tracking system and food at my uncle’s place was never good enough. I chose to be rather worried about how I was fed.

On the other hand, my earnings were a limiting factor. In June, I earned nothing. In July, I had $20 making landfall in my pockets once. The figure doubled for August. Uncle, my then-guardian, announced that toiletry, blankets and other consumables were now ours to cover. My mispenditures combined with this demanding situation top a strain on my earnings.

The university library  link• Although I had dropped out of college during my final semester, I had failed to pull my mindset out of the college. My university identification card was still valid until late August 2019. I was good at using it, entering the library to update the web-edited documents of my novel. The idea of investing in my hardware (laptops and so forth) was far away. The university library link increased the distance between me and the sad idea.

A twist had happened in my blogging story. I had entered a phase where all my hardware had to be purchased by none other than me. My failure was not getting to notice the twist happening. Now I had to waste plenty of funds trying to get myself to places where I would have some hardware to put into use for free (the university library) or on a paid basis (internet cafe).

The university library link expired. From September, each time I visited the library, I had to pull out a good count of tricks to enter. My old ID had an old colour that was easily detected by security. Sometimes I waited outside the library for hours and hours waiting for a time for a security guard on the entrance side to visit the restroom. The remaining guard on the exit side was good at detecting unwanted entrances from afar, and I had to outsmart him/her. Once in, I had to remain in. So I stuffed cookies in a pouch in my waist to keep me from starving. The cookies had to be bought.

Was it that I had no funds, or I had no strategy? I earned $165 in September and October, which is one of my highest two-month period earnings during my pre-2023 years. Since this was a lot of money and I have allowed myself to conclude that I had no strategy. In 2019, I had forgotten about blogging in favour of a novel that I wasn’t sure that it would or not sell. This long-term project had proven that more time was needed in its first three months. I should have given up on it then and found my way back to my blogging. But the strategy, which I prefer to call no strategy, was to write the novel to finish and get it to sell online. The proceeds were to alternate into the capital to fuel my blogging journey.

The Failure of No strategy• On 23 December 2019, Firnicus Heartpinch, a novel was published. On the very day, I had to eat from a garbage bin to slake my hunger on the campus of the very college I had dropped out of. Once online the novel never sold. Had I learned something about novel writing that would translate to “inspirational novel writing”? Yes! No attempt was made to deposit into my Visa account a bit of the $165 earned or to buy relevant hardware (laptops and the like).

You have to use no strategy. Fail. Find the strategy. Fail again and find again. Learn. Until again breeds another and yet another, your success keeps on waiting and buried deep in the future.

Some notable purchases on hardware? There were not any notable purchases on hardware to talk about except my stupid purchase of a Lumia 640. Windows Phone had become desolate, an abandoned OS planet with no apps. I decided to buy an even older Lumia with no Windows 10 and a good count of apps. Four months later I decided to take the phone back to the streets to swap it for a better one. I lost the phone and the top-up money.

Informativus? The idea of giving my blog the title “informativus” started in August 2019. My initial Google search was “informative”. It ultimately landed me on informativus. But again informativus was not to be a blog at the time of my planning. It was to be a social network?

Twenty-twenty [2020], Fourth year of trying to be a blogger

I am so sure that when you change your past story, the future rises to your surface. But when the thing you cannot change or run away from is the present itself punishing you for what you have been. If you have been a liar, you will face the truth and your punishment is one of telling the very truth. I have been running away from hardships. I have been buying snacks each time I thought I might be hungry. In this very year running from hardships turned out to be a hardship itself. I had nowhere to run. I also lost the girl. The new situation meant that I could not afford to travel and get to see her. I could not afford to call her either. For up to five times in just a month I walked from the town’s centre on foot to my uncle’s place. Fourteen kilometres is the length of the distance. 

I have been lying to my family that I was still at College, extending my degree programme. What were they going to do upon hearing that all was nothing but lies?

Before the lockdown in March, I have been leaving my uncle’s place early pretending to be going to my former university. A crumbling sanitation works nearby was one of my go-tos. I would find my hiding place and start to write. The hide-out strategy has been a lift to my songwriting than to my blog. But this is worth a mention.

Covid-19 • The world halted. Lives were lost. Economies, companies and citizens had to adapt to cope with the pandemic. Services, lectures, meetings and to name a few had to be done online. From far-fetched reasons like censorship to a poor-performing economy mobile data had been expensive in my country. Yet this online phase demanded that internet connection be made cheap and available. Mobile network providers had to come up with data packages, not cheap by definition but would equate to a monthly subscription to a WiFi service. In a country whose per-capita income is under $3000, domestic investment in home internet hardware is minimal. Mobile network providers had to do something.

While a Gig of data for one month was costing around $10, the so-called “WiFi data bundles” were introduced. 8GB, monthly, the starting package, would require one to have around $10-13, to find the best exchange rate. WiFi bundles were never scrapped after the lifting of lockdown restrictions. From 2022, the WiFi bundles were available for purchase in US dollars.

Starting from scratch and false scratchy starts •  The novel had failed. Again it alone had swallowed whole the whole year. But again I was adamant to accept the failure. On 26 February 2020, a diary entry indicates that I had decided to pump my earnings into my Visa account and advertise the online published novel hoping that it would sell. I was still working on a sequel by the end of February 2020. 

I then swiftly registered the novel a failure in March. It was painful to accept this. I had to give up.

Twenty-twenty-one [2021], Fifth year of trying to be a blogger.

[H1•2021] The First Half of 2021 was one of my best trying times. The effort was intense and the result was never pleasing. The effort, if it should be kept coming out of one, is required to be not broken by the result effort might bring. It is effort, not results, that turns impossibilities into possibilities. It is the effort that improves your ability and capacity in the war you fight on the doing front. This is what I had to learn in 2021.

I cashed in $90 early in January, clueless about how to spend it. The following day the government announced strict lockdown measures making it almost impossible to flee the city, except if more money than necessary was involved. 

I had lied to my mom and my uncle that the results from the exam I had written were out. I was going to graduate sometime in the year. My uncle being my guardian during my stay in the capital in 2019, 20, Q321, 22 and 23, was happy to hear km this. I left the town, joining my parents whose home was rural. $40 instead of $12 was lost on this journey to my parent’s home.

Once there, I promised myself that nothing was not ever going to uproot me from my parents’ home. I wasn’t going to let go of this new scene of my operations. I had a working laptop that I had bought during the previous year in November. My Uncle’s home seven times in value situated in the capital city lacked the electricity to keep my tiny laptop power. And a ration of a single charge in two or three days made matters worse. My parents had an electricity line reaching their home. I needed this.

In reality, the first three months of the year passed while I was only planning instead of doing it. $30 was already in my NameCheap account. I had no choice but to go with this hosting service. The WordPress.com option was not going to be viable since there was no way to pull back the $30 and reroute it to WordPress.com. More funds were needed. There had to be a source before the funds could appear. 

I asked Mom for some help. Since she struggling with her bills she had to borrow from her friend. $100 was injected in. Instead of injecting it whole into the blog, I had as little as $40 into the Visa account. From mid-April 2021, informativus.online was live. Informativus’ Content Management System (CMS) would then become WordPress.org. This “open-sourced” version of the CMS WordPress.com has no mobile app to make blogging on a smartphone possible.

With no friends and acquaintances in the village and no TV to watch, I had the stage to fill. While I was working on articles to upload, I was writing a short book on my dropping out of college. Why did I drop out of college would land on the blog in June•23. 

Internet connection and the hardware• One of the basics that was a serious cost. 21.4% or $80 of my expenses in 2021 had to cover the internet data bill. 8 Gigabytes of data on a monthly package averaged around $13. It could take having the money converted into RTGS, a local currency and legal tender that worked not past the borders. Hunting the favourable conversion rate of the day was another challenge.

I had a Mobicel V1 (later sold in Q1• 22 for $), an entry-level phone with a Gig of RAM, 8 Gig of internal storage, Android 7.0 on the OS department and a Snapdragon 200 series SoC. It had no LTE but so were the Network towers in rural areas. 3G was enough to get me to block. I had to keep it in a sock hanging on the wall where I was certain that the signal would be better.

I had a 2017 HP mini laptop (I don’t have to repeat this). The tiny laptop was the recipient of the WiFi signal from the phone’s mobile hotspot. It was never that fast with handling its task; running a browser.

The success of the blog • By the end of June I had uploaded up to 45 articles, and I enjoyed reading them. My worst fear is having to do work and accomplish something but not finding myself not casting a smile at it. Being able to like my work is itself the success I can still count on that I failed. I wrapped up the month of June having attracted less than 10 views, all of them being search traffic from Baidu. Everything, including blocking spam comments required either an upgrade to the hosting plan or a premium plugin. In short, I needed to keep watering the blog with more money if any money was to be its fruit. I had no money.

In June•21, I had to help a town-dwelling cousin’s brother with renovating his rural home in our village. He had to give me $20 as a token of appreciation. In May•21, I joined a fellow villager whose toils were tilling lands with an ox-drawn plough for a fee as little as $40 per acre. From the $60 he charged for his two days of intense work my share was $15.

[Q3•21] Work on the blog continued. But I was beginning to lose momentum. On July• 21, I remember dragging a whole week trying to get the money I lent to Mom. I had it back forcefully, transferring the balance to my phone without her agreeing. It was only after this procedure that I was able to buy my 8GB of mobile data.

The belief is, one must be in the town, get educated and find a job. One of mom’s friends would come over and talk to me about what it meant to ground myself in the rural scape. That very woman lent my mom the $100 I used to finance my blog on April• 21. She was a powerful figure in my family. Having been one of our labourers in my parent’s fields, now she had taken the lead (I had to work in her fields in July 2021 to receive $5 a day). The lady used the word rombe in trying to explain what I would become. Rombe as a Shona and also Barwe word translates to a vagabond, one begs and is poor, but is also sometimes bound by something unseen like spirit to become and remain so.

This should happen. When you have a different approach to life, or you want to come up with things not seen before by people around you. People around you, have to throw at you words that can not only hurt, but lacerate you and chop you into pieces. I am quite convinced you can only become broken and torn apart. The very reason why very few people have found their success out of this torn and broken backdrop is they don’t contribute and help what seeks to tear them apart to splinter them apart.

I looked into the lady’s eyes. I smiled, agreeing that she was making sense by nodding my head. I was the one not making sense. After all, she had helped a lot by being there when mom asked for funds from her just to bankroll an idea that wasn’t to take off. This lady I am writing about here gave me a chance to try and fail, and, of course, it was not deliberate on her part. My mom also gave me the chance to try and fail. I respect the fact that this chance ever existed. I was only learning.

Then in August, I was sincerely interrogated by Mom. She wanted to know if I was graduating or not since the graduation days were only in September.  This was the beginning of an end to a lie, I had maintained for two years. I had dropped out of College in 2019, during my final semester. I certainly knew that Mom was going to do all in her powers and imagination to drop me into that final semester. When I finally revealed the truth in September, it was certain that my rural tenure was over. I was to be shipped back to the town.

Complex projects were on the rise. I had sticky notes on the walls, glued and grouped by their topics. But this was the time to let go. Only two articles were uploaded in September. I was overheating with stress and thoughts. Getting back to College was not my choice and I was embarrassed by an image I had created for myself. A liar. A failing liar. A dependant and a liar.

[Q4• 21] In mid-October I landed myself in the capital city. Priorities shifted. I had to upgrade my wardrobe and it was now harder to charge my laptop. Having used to it easily charging easily had serious implications. While I was trying to adapt, the laptop got damaged by rain on its way to charge. This was the beginning of the end. The Informativus era was ending.

In December 2021, I chose to buy clothes ($40) than load up my Visa account in preparation for a second-year hosting subscription. I made the same decision in October when I entered the city. A total of $150 was needed for the hosting service subscription before 10 April 2022 to keep the blog running. Before the deadline, I would have managed to set it aside had I chosen to keep Informativus alive. In the period Q4• 21 and Q1• 22, expenditure rested at $259, with “electronics”, “apparel”, “phone and mobile subscriptions”, “transport”, “bad debts and theft” and “incidental” claiming, of the total, 59%, 23%, 7%, 7%, 3% and 2%, respectively. $239 was the total earnings.

A Microsoft launcher I installed on an Android 10 OS entry-level device my sister had given me had a sticky notes section at home. Little did I know that it was syncing the sticky notes to my Outlook account. And I was going to be reunited with my sticky notes on an Android One Note app in July 2023 after upgrading to a better phone. They proved to be useful again. But back then these sticky notes were fragments of inspirational thoughts with no relevance at all as far as my writing of articles was concerned. What failing to give up does to one is it lets him read the map, find the weaknesses in his situation and him, get a direction and conquer. Situations have weaknesses. We face them to discover how to conquer them.

The mobile smartphone was beginning to make sense. Relying on a laptop as the ultimate blogging tool had failed to work. It failing to work meant Informativus had failed to work. Being resourceful means you are well aware of those options that will give function to your minimal resources, than options that need resources you scarcely have.

Twenty-twenty-two [2022] Sixth year of trying to be a blogger.

[Q1•22] The first quarter of the year makes me shiver when I hear about it. It contains the so-called F-curse. By F-curse, I refer to the incidence of not getting to earn in February since I started to record my finances in 2019, except in 2020. Worse, in 2023, January before February had been plain of earnings.

Then there was this confusion. I had written a lot, and I was scared of letting it go cheap. Sixty good articles making the blog informativus.online could have garnered a good starting point if I were to start a WhatsApp group delivering the same content. The group would have many versions of it easily supplied by copying and pasting at once and a wider readership. (I do not have to retell and tell the position WhatsApp had in my country to one who is following my story).

I felt what I had written was not that junk, and there was no way I could degrade it to WhatsApp groups. To make matters worse, I did not have a better-performing phone. A laptop? I had none. I thought of building content blocks that deserved to be classified under the junk bracket. And so I started to write the so-called Web Novels in my first language, a Bantu language spoken widely in Zimbabwe (Shona). This quarter was a waste. I wrote a lot. But I wrote nothing that would be relevant enough to give me a step forward in my journey.

The First Quarter of the years between 2019 and 2023 gave me time to settle down and write. I was rarely busy with manual work work which was the main source of capital in the said quarters. But I rarely utilised the time well. The same could be said about 2021. You are also to find out that much of my Q1 2023 settled time was claimed by a video game.

[Q2•22] In this period any work relating to the blog was suspended. I could not manage to generate any income in May after having spent on buying a poor-performing tiny phone and a faulty laptop. The Oppo R1C had a malfunctioning battery. The HP Mini was way worse in that very department and was too slow for general use.

I have had to spend the previous quarter working, that is Q1•22, and earnings came late. Buying gadgets and depleting the funds in an instant meant that I had to be involved in another gig, earn and have the money and plan again. But College happened. I had no choice but to go back to my former university and accomplish my final semester that was holding my graduation back.

Capital squeeze was activated as a means to tap funds for my projects out of what my parents and uncle provided for my education. Weekly I had $10 for my commuting. I would catch a cheaper train to the town, and walk from the town to the campus on. On my way back I would walk again before catching the train. Once in the campus on Mondays it was wiser to sleep in a seminar room, and luckily there was one without a locker. Up to $7 a week were made available through this strategy.

[Q3•22, July•22] This was an exam month. While some had managed to submit their dissertations in June, I failed to submit mine in July. But the capital squeeze project was still on. I had secured $15 for a power bank. I had to buy another one since I had lost another one on the train back in June.

No article whatsoever was written in this period. But an addition to my writing style can be said to have originated in Jul•22. The breakdown sessions. It was first deployed when I was reading a book on a train as I headed home, to my uncle’s place. See it from the screenshot below.

Aug•22] My last dissertation was submitted on 02Aug, over a week after I had written my last exam. I wrapped up the semester. There was no longer a need for a laptop which was proving to be an expense to keep. It was unusable, slow and buggy some. It could rarely charge to 100%, preferring to terminate the charging in the sixties. If forced to reach full battery through the trick of unplugging the charger over and over. 50% would become its shutdown level once unplugged. I had to sell the laptop. The $25 the sale brought in could not buy me a second-hand smartphone as I had hoped it would if it were $10 more. I was not going to load it up into my Visa account. I had suspended any plans to start the blog hoping to start WhatsApp groups that were to bring profits through advertisements and subscriptions.

I used the $25 on unplanned expenses, mostly my unplanned visits to the campus. The $110 purchase had served its function during my last college appearance. If there were to be any like it in the future, it having a good battery was to be the priority.

Sep•22] A SubjectME entry on 08Sep22 had it that I cashed in an extra $50, increasing the counts of funds in possession to $70. I was to buy a phone and I did my worst with this decision. I bought two smartphones instead of a single better-performing phone with a much more recent software version. Oppo R7 Plus ($35), was the best of the two acquisitions, and had a good time on battery. As for the Le Eco Lex 620, both the 300mAh battery and the buggy software disappointed me. The phone kept crash-shutting itself down, turning itself on and repeating this more than any normal moron could bear until low battery. I was a moron. Moron in the sense that I was senselessly after a goal that appeared to be decades away from being achieved.

With the Android 7.0 Lee Eco out of the game, the idea was to download earlier versions of apps via third-party stores that would support Android 5.0 OS on my Oppo R7 Plus. Some third-party stores keep all the versions released of an app in case guys like me might need them. That way I had a 2015 release of Word and One Note by Microsoft for Android running on my phone and all free to use. WordPress, too, had moved to Android 7.0 in its then-recent version.

[Q4•22] One Note served. The stick notes section handled quick “quotes” I generated out of my mind randomly while at workplaces and home. During the middle of the night, I could wake up from sleep and start to write. One Note quickly became the new home of my Easy Tides (songwriting) department.

I lacked a strategy that could harness my creative genius into generating any meaningful work. I was hoping I could keep it all on the phone without ever getting to use the pen and the traditional paper. I was wrong. I was in and out trying to have what the likes of Mandela and Broughton said and get to break it down, hoping to come up with articles like so. This failed to work as expected.

I was hoping that I could come up with a WhatsApp group and have my captive audience that could pay subscriptions to get to read some of my content. Lining up ads from people selling their items could work as an alternative. But I did not pursue this idea. I backed down.

On the other hand, the more I stayed on WhatsApp, that was the more I was distracted by the phone which should have worked as an aide to my progress. I joined countless other groups, especially those with sellers of digital stuff. Such groups made it easier for me to get to know the prices of phones I should have chosen to buy in place of the R7 Plus and of laptops, among others. 

Twenty-twenty-three [2023]

[Q1•23, Jan•23] The first quarter of the year comes after the Christmas season when heavy expenditures leave most families cliff-hanging on the edge of their finances. The opening of schools days after New Year’s Day demands that much of what is left is diverted towards the needs of scholars in the family. Incessant rains in the Eastern Highlands, courtesy of the orographic uplift of South East Trade Winds from the Indian Oceans and more extras that would drain into the Geography subject than I would wish to, do not make it easier for tractors to haul the timber. Timber gets expensive in Harare and all over, only getting poor and poorer in quality terms. If not a ceiling contract, a much more lucrative roofing contract cannot easily show up, especially to ones who do not advertise themselves online and offline. Uncle’s attitude towards advertising was hostile and each time we provoked him with the topic he would voice; only God will provide.

I had entered the month of January with up to $38 earned from the previous year in my savings. I mostly bought stationery with it. This was my first time buying stationery in quantities. And for the first time, I had box files, clipboards and perforators. A simple choice is the root of countless other choices that seek to validate it. The Mentor’s Letter to Sister, an idea with a frail image within my thoughts was brought front and was on paper. I began writing the said letter in late January. At first, it was just a letter which I intended to deliver to its rightful owner without getting to sell it. It became the foundation of the blog.

[Feb•23] The outlook changed. Writing the letter happened faster than I thought. As we were spending much time at home, there was nothing I could do more than write with the right tools at my exposure. I thought of having the letter integrated into the blog itself. Two more writings commenced in February, all with the theme adopted from Letter to Sister. These were The Book of Addictions, a retake on 2021’s Why Did I Drop Out of College and Letter to Ex-Lover. While February provided an environment for me to be intense in my writing it still had the f-curse on. Feb•23 would become my third consecutive February free of both earnings and expenditure. In Feb•20, I earned $30 and lost all to conmen.

But there was a rising distraction, a doodle game that I had no means to stop myself from playing it. Mini Militia (older versions) could accommodate up to 16 players, all connected by a single offline host who must turn on his WIFI hotspot. My 2015 Oppo R7 Plus was the only device capable of this function without dragging the light game. Fellow boys in the house would come and request a match that would stretch up to 15 minutes while I was in the middle of developing thought and writing. All this was happening at the time I had managed to fend off my watching of explicit videos online, thinking about getting myself out of the game drove The Book of Addictions ahead. In a SubjectME diary entry on 15 Feb 23, it is said that the addiction to explicit content would make up 8% of what delayed me from meeting my ultimate goal of making an income out of blogging.

I went through a lot.

If you have a pen of your life to write about what you go through, I learned, going through a lot gives you a story with detail as hard to find elsewhere. You should not hesitate to have yourself risk going through a lot.

[Mar•23] I was now looking forward to my acquisition of a PC. This time I was looking for a battery machine, one that would have me stay at it longer without having to be worried about getting to recharge it.

Keeping the battery inside had to become a new policy. Instead of buying a $60 power bank, adding $40 more to buy a smartphone or any working screened device now made sense.

[Jun•23] More than often, to be able to come up with something different the world you are in will demand from you a certain character. This is not the end of the story. That character should be along with the doing commanded by that said character for that said world to be able to give you something. A positive character demanded from you in this case is more like you finding a snake in your house and instead of killing it you do the worst of your potential evils. You drag it to the forest by the tail where it can have more life. In this case, you have saved yourself and the snake.

Unpleasant situations are like snakes in the house. Instead of fighting them all, I learned of calming them all. Calming them is creating a ground that is safer for all the parties involved. The situation ceases to be the snake. It becomes one of the parties involved crossing into the other’s sphere, and so causing a danger to the said other. We are to each other snakes in the house in situations that may erupt between us. How then do we solve our snakes makes the difference? It either escalates it or worsens it.

Despite having spent $100 (or should I say 19% of my annual earnings, [if I am to base all this on my 2022 earnings, i.e. my highest annual earnings ever]) during the previous month on securing a Tablet PC with the best battery I had ever witnessed, I entered the Jun•23 without it active. The charging port had to be replaced. I had wrongly assumed that I needed $12, $2 covering transport costs to meet the best tech physicians in the centre of the town. I kept waiting for a cash-in as high as $20, cashing in $10, $3, and $8, in mid•Jun, mid•Jun and late•May but still not getting to have it repaired. On 27Jun23, the Tablet PC was finally back in business, repairs costing a total of $9.

Upon arriving home or at my uncle’s place where I stayed, I forked out my new three-metre-long cable and had it occupy one of the two USB ports on the solar charging regulator. The two ports each with an output rating of 5v, 2 Ah and 10 watts were the only permitted connections between the power source, a 12 v, 100 Ah Li-ion pack, and the device being charged. My Tablet PC on the other hand could only charge as slow as 5v, 2 Ah and 10 watts, making it unreasonable to charge it while in use. Unlike any devices I ever had in the past with Windows 10, the regulator was its home, and it could join cheap smartphones, charging on the cheapest solar configurations and, if any need, rarely in other people’s cars. When I bought it I thought, it wasn’t going to drain much out of a solar and battery package that allowed occupants of the house to watch TV up to any time they wished, waking up at 01:00hrs once a month to watch WWE’s big pay-per-view live events.

The night turned out to be the mother of another tragedy. First, the three-metre cable was condemned. It was way too long, and Uncle feared it was a power wastage in itself. Then the tablet was given a ban from the two ports, after another Tablet PC owner had plugged into the same adapter supplying the TV his Core M5 Dell Venue, a 32-45 watt charging beast, and hid it behind the TV. I was told to find a charging brick and have it charged via AC during the noon. I reacted.

When I was told to charge my power bank which I certainly knew demanding more power than my Tablet PC. In a harsh tone, I said I was going to find means to charge it on my own. Having cashed in $100 during the previous day, I thought of buying a foldable Anker solar charger with four CGIS panels retailing at $50. The solar had four USB ports with a 2.4 Ah output rating and I was only going to make the most of it if I had more power banks to stockpile the daytime power in. I had to walk myself out of the reaction chamber.

I reasoned that I was the one begging. And so I had to act like a beggar and go round and round finding means to get what I was begging for. After seven years without reaching the goal, I needed a breakthrough. None, except me, knew this. My begging at this point had reached its new phase. A phase where I was no longer begging out of my possible means to get myself in front of a screen displaying what’s from a Windows motherboard. This was a new phase where I had to beg for the power to keep my devices on. I had to so act in such a way that could not take me back to begging what I used to beg for some time ago. 

Instead, the $50 was going to acquire me a 5.7-inch screened  Lumia 950 XL which I was going to force install Windows for PCs. Having the OS on a smartphone was my Holly Grail, and I was looking forward to having a PC browser experience on a smartphone, blogging that way. Alternatively, a second-hand Android smartphone, a Huawei Y Max with a 7.0-inch screen could be bought at $90 and run a triune of apps that can make it possible to port some Linux and open-source Linux computer programmes to it. The much sought-after being the likes of Mozilla Firefox for PCs. The latter option, while less likely to guarantee stability, had zero risks of bricking the phone and was expensive. Spending less and less on tools, and being resourceful with them was all I could do to have more funds for hosting the blog and getting myself connected to the internet.

[July•23] Change of plans• At a very critical time, a time I was so close to touching my dreams and having them in my own hands something happened. Having had maintained Facebook friends well below 75 since 2021 when I created my account, I looked no further than using Facebook as a media for advertising my work. I lost track of this. On 10July•23, I said hie to one random girl who happened to be online at the time of striking. And it couldn’t take a while to get her number. “Rue” was her self-given nickname.

She honestly told me that she had a boyfriend but I had already liked to taste her. To get to meet her and tell her my story, beg to be her new boyfriend I thought I needed more. My wardrobe had to be updated. My collection of photos had to now involve expensive cameras and an actual cameraman behind them. As for me $40 back then was expensive.

I lost track of a lot of things. The Lumia 950 XL turned out to be an impossible to purchase, with wardrobe upgrades claiming all the few dollars that were getting into my hands. In total, I earned around $100 in July•23.

But while I was trying to get to meet her (not finding free days to do so; getting a free day on a Monday and she saying she was only free at Weekends; and she had appointments on one of the weekends) I switched to faster gears. I now had my phone on rooftops, trying to capture ideas into a draft post raw. The WordPress App also had countless reminders to keep me alive to it.

The WhatsApp route• WhatsApp groups had to be created and used as media to reach local leadership. In my country, WhatsApp had emerged to be the bigger internet. By 2018, 34.4% of 6.104 Terabytes of all internet data consumed were via WhatsApp, so said P[ostal] and T[elecommunication] R[egulatory] A[uthority]  of Z[imbabwe]. WhatsApp would then emerge as a Web-Novel store, a marketplace, a news platform and among others. Advertisements were part of the package.

These were the benefits of the “Rue” encounter:

Aug•23: On 17 August, a WhatsGroup was created. Instead of distributing the link myself, I decided to try a “WhatsApp marketing agency.” I paid forward the fee for them to run the ad with my WhatsApp group links. I was hoping that in two days the group would fill with as many joining via the link. This idea was a failure. I had to join as many WhatsApp groups as possible and distribute the link.

A PC browser on mobile • I failed to run the commands needed to run other smooth distros. I had to go for what was easy (Debian via the Android app Debian).

The Linux distro (Debian) proved to be so unusable. I had issues with text scaling. The fonts appeared so small and trying to enlarge them was a zoom-in to everything on the screen. Chrome on the Linux distro performed well, utilising my mobile data like any browser, but the distro is in the landscape while the smartphone is designed to work best in portrait mode. An external bluetooth keyboard ($20) was the only option. I quickly bought one and never to put it into use. (I gave up the distro. Getting to install one had taken a huge chunk of my mobile data).

I upgraded my Chrome (mobile) browser and tried to open the wordpress.com website in desktop mode. The desktop mode could allow me to upgrade the site, install themes and so on but getting to type anything there was not an option. Some paragraphs just disappeared in my first attempt. The mobile app on the other hand miss options like getting to upgrade the site’s plan and install the installables, but you can still type on it.

Is it possible to have a smartphone as your only tool for blogging?

Yes. It is possible but there are ifs to count. If you opt for wordpress.com not wordpress.org, it means you have an app to cover you where the mobile browser cannot. You, therefore, must use both the mobile app and the mobile browser interchangeably. 

My experience with Chrome for Android was not that good. You cannot get to work around with the blocks and typing stuff in them smoothly. You can lose a far-fetched idea if it is coming straight from your mind when pouring it straight into the blog via the Chrome web app on a mobile smartphone. I also quite concluded that the bigger the screen, the better the experience you will have blogging using your smartphone.

This is also true for Wix, another Content Management System that has a mobile app available for download across the mobile apps store. When using Apple’s iOS you can “request a desktop site”. Once the website loads click the menu button “Aa” on the top corner of Safari. No browser can be as better as Safari on iPhone in performing such functions. Chrome is the best option on Android and the alternatives have more than the potential.