What I’m Going to Blog About in 2026

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I’m going to stick with daily blogging. It’s fun, it helps me collect my thoughts, and it keeps me accountable.

What it doesn’t do—at least not very well—is increase blog traffic. As expected, the traffic spike I saw last month was mostly caused by scammers adding my site to their bot comment databases. I receive plenty of suspicious emails and replys about AI tools I should “recommend” to my readers, as well as automation services that promise to send me traffic and make me famous as easily as snapping a finger.

It’s all nonsense.

Real traffic is probably only about a third of what I saw last month.

Still, I’ll continue writing daily, as I enjoy daily tasks. Establishing a routine is basically half the battle. And blogging is a mostly free way to market my books—even if, for now, I’m only marketing them to a handful of regular readers.

Topics I’ll Write About Next Year

I’ll stick to the topics I’ve already started:

  • Blogging basics
  • SEO basics
  • Movie and TV show reviews
  • My author project

I’ll also publish regular updates on my goals for 2026:

  • Writing 12 books in 12 weeks (expect weekly updates)
  • Reading 52 books in 52 weeks, with a weekly book review
  • Monthly “Author in Progress” reports, sharing all my numbers in real time

In addition, I want to share my experiences with freelancing. I’ve been doing it for over a decade, and during that time I’ve had to reinvent myself more than once. For example, I used to make most of my income as a translator in the beginning. Around three to four years ago, translation work dropped by about 95%, largely due to ChatGPT and other AI tools. Still, the core principles of freelancing remain the same.

Adding Images and Graphics

In general, I need to think more about adding graphics and photos. I’m a writer first, so the text should always be the main focus. But an image here and a graphic there can make longer pieces easier to digest and give readers a much-needed break from pure text.

Tracking

In my report posts, I want to expand what I track. Especially with writing, it could be interesting to see how many words I can produce in a given amount of time. How long does it take to edit a 60,000-word book? How long does translating that same book take?

These are interesting questions to answer.

I’d also love to include numbers for book sales and Amazon KENP (Kindle Unlimited page reads). But to be honest, I’m not selling many copies right now, and there are usually only a handful of KENP readers each month.

So there isn’t much to report yet. If that ever changes, I’ll add it to the reports.

Reading a Book a Week Again

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This year, I must have read less than at any point in the last 20 years. I haven’t even counted properly, but it must have been only around ten books. Last year I read about 60, and the year before that it might have even been close to 80.

There’s a giant stash of unread books on my shelf. I also didn’t make enough use of Kindle Unlimited to justify paying €12 a month. Even when it comes to comics, I didn’t read as much as I wanted to.

So one of my main projects for 2026 will be to read and review one book per week again. I did this years ago on Medium, on X, and on a German site I used to own. It motivated me to read even on busy days. And since next year is going to be busy, I’ll need that motivation.

Fifty-two books in fifty-two weeks is a nice challenge. I’ve seen it on many websites, and it’s always enjoyable to read about. Ideally, this will be a project that improves both my life and my blog.

Books I need to finish

  • The James Bond novels (I must be about halfway through Fleming’s originals. Goldfinger is next on my list.)
  • Harry Potter (I haven’t started yet, but I already own the books.)
  • Reacher, Miss Marple, and Poirot (I used to read one book per year from each of these series.)
  • Chuck Palahniuk (There are still a few works left before I’ve completed his entire bibliography.)
  • Philip K. Dick (I have a massive short-story collection of his that I need to finish.)
  • Robert A. Heinlein (Along with Dick, he’s one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately, his earlier works are hard to find in German.)
  • Bible Reading (I’ve been working on that for years. I’m still not through as a lot of books in the bible are just painfully boring.)

New reads to try

  • I’m open to exploring indie authors. If you’re an indie writer and you’re reading this, leave a comment and tell me what you write. I might check it out.
  • I enjoyed The Walking Dead comics. The same author also wrote Invincible, which I want to try this year.
  • Mystery reads: One idea I have is to look for books on Kindle Unlimited with bad covers and no reviews, and give one a chance each month. Maybe I’ll find some hidden gems.

BookTuber books

Something that could also help my own book marketing is reading books by people with an existing reach—whether through a big blog, YouTube, or X—and then writing a review. Afterward, I’ll send them a tweet letting them know I wrote about their book. Maybe they’ll check out my work or at least retweet the link to my review.

Yes, that’s marketing—but I don’t want this project to be only about marketing. I won’t write glowing reviews for bad books just to get a retweet. Still, I need to find ways to get some attention for my work, and this feels like a fair approach.

Your recommendations

Finally, I didn’t create this website only to find readers—I also want to find great books. Let me know in the comments what you’re reading. Maybe I’ll discover an amazing author I’ve never heard of before.

The Dropout (Movie/Show Review #11)

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It’s a good show that takes its time in places, though it feels somewhat rushed toward the end. Still, it is well produced and competently made.

The Story of The Dropout

The series tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes fooling the world—and herself—into believing she was the female version of Steve Jobs. Everyone went along with it: investors, the media, politicians. They desperately wanted to believe in the feminist narrative that women can do it all.

The show doesn’t explore this in great depth; it even repeatedly frames Holmes’ downfall as an inversion of the true reality. At one point, a character says something along the lines of: “When she finally fails, it will be the biggest blow to all the good female entrepreneurs out there.” The underlying message seems to be that the patriarchy is still out there, waiting to tear women down.

What the show never really addresses is that Holmes only rose to fame because she was a woman.

The supposedly patriarchal Western world wanted a female CEO superstar. Politicians helped. Investors helped. The media helped. Everyone played a role in turning every lie she told into an accepted truth—until it inevitably collapsed and reality exposed the fraud.

Ironically, it was mostly men—the so-called patriarchy—who made Holmes famous. The role of politics is only briefly touched upon, but figures like Henry Kissinger were on Theranos’ board of directors very early on, providing political connections and access to funding. The media is portrayed as the force that ultimately unmasked Holmes and revealed the truth, yet it was the same media that aggressively promoted her and Theranos in the early days as a young female genius. She fit the feminist rhetoric perfectly and satisfied the desire for a female icon in the tech CEO space.

The Story of Theranos

In the end, Theranos was the story of a woman and an Indian man scamming Western elites by exploiting leftist virtue signaling. The company was marketed as a force for good—helping the poor and the sick, fighting evil capitalist corporations at the top of the industry with revolutionary innovation, all while claiming to make the world a better place.

Add a female CEO to win over feminists. Add an Indian man behind the scenes who actually ran things, and you get the multicultural angle as well.

It was a socialist-leftist wet dream. Theranos received endless benefit of the doubt until the scam became impossible to ignore.

It is said that investors lost more than $900 million. One can’t help but wonder how much taxpayer money was also poured into this black hole.

Conclusion

The Dropout is a good watch—one that is likely to make your blood boil. It doesn’t cover all the factors involved, particularly the political networks that enabled Theranos’ rise, but it succeeds as an interesting character study: of a woman who eventually believed her own lies, and of a liberal bubble caught in the web she and her Indian handler spun.

Writing Less Will Be a Marker of Human Writing Soon

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AI can already churn out 1,000 words about a single topic. Ask it to write about writing, and within seconds it produces an article that would normally take an experienced human writer with knowledge about the theory of writing an hour.

This development will flood the internet with long-form blog posts produced at scale. Quantity will no longer be a signal of effort, skill, or insight in the era of AI.

To distinguish yourself from AI-generated content, writing less may be the better strategy.

  • Start with a clear idea.
  • Collect your thoughts around it.
  • Freely write your article about these thoughts.
  • Then compress it all into as few words as possible.

Focus on the density of meaning rather than word count. In an era where AI can generate endless text, clarity and minimalism may become the strongest signals of human authorship.