Saturday Stumblings - Randomness from the Writerly World

Happy Saturday folks! It's a gorgeous day here in my part of the world. As I rub the sleep from my eyes and chug down a pot, ok two pots of coffee, I send up a silent plea to let me stay upright and not actually trip over my own feet.

I'm in the process of gathering and jotting down ideas for future posts for this blog. I let it languish long enough and want this blog to be fun as well as more interactive for the readers. Over the weekend I'll be busy typing away. I hope to have a weekly feature or two that y'all can look forward to.

In case you haven't heard, big changes are going on in the writerly world this week. Bright Hub has just announced the end of their writer program, summarily dumping writers and editors alike except for a very few. The worst part is along with this announcement, they informed writers they'll no longer receive page view payments as of December 15th. I know quite a few writers who wrote for them and think BH hit everyone with a low blow. The fact they *might* return some articles while hanging onto others and not pay for them is lower than low! In the words of a fellow writer....they pulled a Mahalo on their writers. Way to go BH, NOT!

Yahoo! formerly Associated Content (AC), formerly Yahoo! Contributor's Network (YCN) has now officially become Yahoo! Voices. *phew* Enough with the name changes people. With the change in name, they retired AC forever. I for one will miss that. I think it's safe to say I won't be the only one who will always think of it as AC. There are new submission guidelines in place too, but, at least to me, the changes aren't really anything "new." What I do disagree with is retroactively applying new guidelines to content written under totally different rules. Some writers have literally thousands of articles published. There's no freaking way they're going to go through all of them with an eye on whether or not it meets new guidelines. I think it's crap.

Last bit of news, which really isn't news at all, is about DS, or DMS, Demand Studios, Demand Media, whatever they want to call themselves. They pulled the rug out from under many writers and those who worked in the titling department were blindsided with an email informing them they no longer had a job doing titling work. Fellow writer Amy Brantley over at Freelancin' for $1000 a Week made her thoughts on this move by DS. Read all about it here.

Some writers have no titles or they see titles but don't feel qualified to write them. I'm with that group myself. The "home" titles I won't even attempt to touch. I won't be responsible for the death and dismemberment sure to ensue telling someone how to build a barn or tractor. :-p

Oh....just one more site I got word about was Wisegeek. They're also not going to produce anymore, or very little, content and are letting the majority of writers go as well.

Take a deep breath everyone and let's evaluate where we're at and where there is left to go. We are writers, hear us roar! We'll survive.