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.

Saturday Stumblings - "N" Randomness from the Writerly World

It's still Saturday morning, quickly closing in on the noon hour. I'm armed with my trusty cup of coffee and prying my eyes open. Walking over to put my coffee on, I tripped! I look down to see if I tripped on air again, cause I really am a klutz and do trip on air often, and what do I see? I see the letter "N" laying there snickering at me. If you really look at it, you can see how it's made for tripping the unwary walker.

Well, my day is off to a great start now. Tricky "N" was determined to make sure I didn't forget today I'm writing about him. Or at least words that begin with him. We'll begin with the word no.

No, I do not like the latest update to the guidelines at DS in the home and garden section. There's nothing wrong with the industry standard of single quotes, which is also followed by AP. You want everything else in AP, but insist on making up rules left and right to make us look foolish. You want expert voice and writing, but then do stuff like that. Hopefully the weekend gives you insight and come Monday you'll have come to your senses.

Winter Fog, pdekker3, sxc.hu

We'll move from a bit of venting to something we writerly types might do a lot of certain days, noshing. We nosh on whatever is handy absentmindedly throughout the day as we churn out our works of art. Brownies, chips, pizza, and snack cakes are consumed to give us energy. Some are capable of noshing on the healthier things in life such as fruits and vegetables. One of my favorite things to nosh on is cottage cheese and crushed pineapple. Yum! Give me some broccoli smothered in cheese sauce and I'm in heaven. Good grief I'm making myself hungry.

Moving along before I start eating my keyboard. Our last "N" of the day goes to nebulaphobia. I'm sure you see the word "phobia" at the end and have guessed it's some sort of phobia, but which one? It is the fear of fog or clouds. I can see why someone would have nebulaphobia. Fog has led to horrific pileups on roads and has been used to scare the bahjeebus out of people in movies. When you see a foggy night and a lone person wandering in it, you know this won't end well.

So ends our "N" randomness for this Saturday. Take your new word and use it well.

Saturday Stumblings - "H" Randomness from the Writerly World

My purple H

It's not Saturday anymore, but I did stumble around two days ago. My dern legs just wouldn't work right! Now, I'm stumbling a bit mentally working to get caught up, but I'm almost there and I'm getting things done, so I really am doing good.

Instead of my usual total randomness from the writerly world, today's random stumblings have a purpose, sort of. Today is the randomness of "H." I could be extremely creative and post random "h" words, naughty and nice, but figured I'd be nice.

How the heck do some CE's at DS justify rejecting well-written articles based on their opinion?! Another example of this came up today, as a good writer had an article rejected because the CE had never heard of something before, even though it was only mentioned once in 400 words or so and not to mention the references provided by the writer had the item the CE said essentially didn't exist, right there. How they think that what they did was right we'll never know.

High five for getting caught up! *grins* It's Monday, so if I can manage to get "I" done before midnight, I'm finally up caught up with the A to Z Challenge. It's a nice feeling. I won't slack off though because I want to get ahead, so I'll do at least two blog posts for the next few days before cutting back to just one. I've been writing this entry between DS articles.

Saturday Stumblings - Randomness From the Writerly World

So here I am stumbling my way through this Saturday afternoon. It's just that kind of day folks. I heard that....no I haven't hit the bottle already. The only stumbling going on is in my head. I figured I'd get some of the writerly randomness going on in there out onto virtual paper and free up room for a bit of clear thinking. At least I'm hoping that's how it's gonna work.

Let's tackle the subject of DS or DM or whatever the heck you want to call them now. I'm going to keep calling them DS. My biggest problem with them, lack of titles. It's been going on far too long now and is killing my earnings. I started out writing health stuff when I was accepted back in July of '09. By Oct I somehow got into writing gardening titles. The irony being that in real life I don't have a black thumb so much as it's the whole arm. I like to say I'm so bad I can kill a fake plant.

All I can find nowadays is installing, rewiring, building and other stuff I have no clue about. Not to mention all the law, auto type and computer topics. It's not as simple as, "go look it up then," cause I've done that and find a lot of crap that can't be used as a reference. I'll take anything if I can find what I need, but when the subject is something I know nothing about....it does me no good. I did find 2 titles just now for a total of 3 whole titles to write out of a queue of 15. At least it's something.

On to cheerier topics. I will have my FC articles ready to turn in as soon as I get my first assignments for my new FC position. It feels good to start ahead and I'm going to stay that way. I decided I'll apply for the next FC after the 1st, wait for the decision, then have those articles done before the first of the next month. I'm determined to stay one step ahead. Between then I'll of course keep writing more articles for FC's and toss in a few others on subjects I want to write about, like genealogy. There's so much to write about that it's hard to pick what to do.

And lastly.....I applied to the Decorating channel at Bright Hub. It's something I can have fun with and enjoy doing as much as at Y!CN/AC. The subject matter that is. We shall see how that one turns out.

Feeling a bit less stumbly, so off I go to pull myself together and get some writerly stuff done. Have a great day and night y'all!