Again and again

So I managed to underwhelm Norah again - twice - in one day. I only sent one of them on the 15th of this month. That being the case, I'm hanging onto the fact that she has had one of my stories since mid-August.

Found it

I won't bore you with every one of these that I write but as it's my first here is my article on ehow.

another update

Just popped over to let you know that there was an email waiting for me this morning to say that my article has been accepted. Yay!!!
I have another one to do and as I have a few days to get that in I think I'm going to do it at the weekend and probably time myself to see how long it takes.
I'm not sure where the article will appear just that it's somewhere out there in the black hole called the internet - probably the How To website but I'm not sure.

e-article update etc.

Just thought I'd pop over and update you on my foray into the magical world of the e-article. I now have a follower on Helium even though I have only wrote 2 articles which is a bit weird but I am embracing the experience and on Sunday my bio was approved by Demand Studios meaning that I could claim my first assignment which I duly did. I submitted that article (about Kalo card readings) on Tuesday and had it returned for some rewriting. According to my friend who writes for them regularly this is standard practice and I shouldn't worry about it. Anyway I made the changes and resubmitted last night. When I first submitted it I did so about 11.30pm on Tuesday night and the re-write request was waiting for me by the time I got up. There was no such email this morning so I don't know if that is a good think or not.
Should they accept this article I will be paid $15 for it which is a below minimum wage return for the amount of time it took me (probably about 2 hours) but I do hope yo get quicker if I continue on this road. Finding an assignment that I can write about is very time consuming but having said that I have claimed another assignment this morning and it was much quicker.
On the fiction front, I am re-engaging with NMBK and have polished a couple of short stories one of which I subbed the other day. I haven't started any new short fiction for a couple of weeks. I have however come up with a couple of ideas for articles so I need to buy a 2011 diary and pop a couple of deadlines in there.
It's all go.

Not a page turner.

Well I've been accepted by Helium and Demand Studios and have written a couple of articles for Helium and tried to write one for DS but apparently the review I made to my bio hasn't been cleared yet so I can't write anything yet. So allow me to tell you what I've found.
Helium seems easy to write for, both of the articles that I wrote have been accepted but then I don't see how the aren't. It was like you write, you post and it's there. As yet I haven't been able to work out how you get paid. My friend who does this type of writing to pay the bills since she lost her job said the same thing so she doesn't write for them much so I might follow her lead on that one for now.
As for Demand Studios they pay regularly and quickly but I have been struggling with the articles that they want. One of the gems yesterday was Beer Faucet and Shank Assembly. What????
Needless to say I feel like I hven't got very far on the sites themselves but things that I have read on there have started trains of thought for other things.
This internet writing lark may be the future but give me a page you can turn any day of the week.

Rule number 1

I have come to appreciate that the markets available to us (or is that we) writers is a small one. Okay, so I'm a bit slow on the up-take what can I say?
I read an article the other day about someone who writes for websites and said that these were the future. A friend of mine has written articles for websites since they were made redundant a year and a half ago and seems to be quite successful. They're on holiday at the moment so I can't pick her brains but I just wondered if any of you had any experience of this outlet.
Rule number one of my "Let's do this thing" philosophy is Always be on the look out for a market.- that number is subject is subject to change as and when I come up with more rules.

An anniversary

Today is a special day for Himself and I. At 3pm, 28 years ago this very day, he and I tied the knot in St Marie's Cathedral in Sheffield. How can that be? 28 years is a ridiculous amount of time. Having said that my parents were also married in that building though it didn't have the exalted title of "cathedral" then and in February they will have been married 60 years - now that is ridiculous. However what my own anniversary means is that this place here, this county, this village will have been my home 28 years tomorrow. We spent our honeymoon here at home so I left my parents home spent one night in a hotel and then took up residence here in the North East. And to think I can remember telling Mary Elliott (girl who was in my class) that I couldn't imagine living anywhere other than Sheffield. Funny how life turns out isn't it?

I'm back from .....

...the beautiful city of York and I am happy to report that I had a wonderful time. Being a Yorkshire girl born and bred it is a kind of spiritual home and I feel so much better for bathing in it's glory for a couple of days.

P.S.

As regular visitors may know it is a rule of this blog that once it has been written it has to stay so I just want to add something to my last posting. To any editors or any one else that may be reading this with a view to commissioning my words of wisdom - I am not messing about at this - I take what I write very seriously - it's just that I am lacking a bit of direction at the moment. I need to get my mojo back.

Honesty needed but not just yet.

October is a time of relection for me. For those of you that were around when the "ugliness" was hanging over me you may remember that it happened in October so I do spend a lot of time "thinking" aound this time of year. So that is what I've been doing for most of the hour and a bit sice I woke up. To be honest there's not a lot else to do at 5.30 on a Sunday morning.
I thought that I would look back at what I was writing on here last year. After I'd done that I went a year further back and so on until I got to 2007 when I first started the blog. I maybe should point out that I only looked at the month of October and not everything that I ever wrote.
It was interesting that in 2007 and 2008 I used to write a list of what I had done the week before and then one of what I was going to do the week after. It was all pretty mundane stuff to be honest. I'd given up making the lists by last year. What scared me a bit - well not scared because that's ridiculous - but what I noticed was that some of the stuff that I was writing on there that I was "going" to do I still haven't done. What am I messing about at?
We're having a few days away this week so I know that I won't get much done until after that but maybe the time has come to re-evaluate what it is that I am trying to achieve from this hobby of mine. If it is just an enjoyable distraction that I do for myself just because I enjoy it? That is fine but something tells me that that isn't all I want from it. I need to be honest with myself because if I can't be honest with me then there's no hope and do something about it. I think that I sometimes say to myself that even if I don't succeed at least I'll know that I've tried. But will I because at this moment it seems to me that I've just been messing about.