Terry Pratchett

I read this morning that beloved fantasy star Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It's all the more shocking when you consider that he's only 59 years old. Terry Pratchett is quoted as saying that early onset cases of Alzheimer's are rare, but the stats I found show that 5 to 10 percent of Alzheimer's cases are considered early onset- starting before the age of 65. That's about 200,000 cases in the U.S. alone.

I am incredibly saddened, as Terry Pratchett is one of the best fantasy writers in the history of the genre. Like a lot of people out there, I have a family member with Alzheimer's and I know how awful the disease can be. Here's hoping for a few more books from Pratchett and a timely cure for Alzheimer's.

I signed up for PPP!

I just got approved at Pay Per Post, so I hope I can justify continuing my blog now. A personal blog doesn't usually make any money, and it can take a considerable amount of your time away from paid writing. But, just about any type of blog, personal or business, can sign up with Pay Per Post and make a little extra for sponsored posts. I first heard about the site from someone on a writer’s forum who runs several blogs and uses Pay Per Post to make money on all of them. There are a lot of bloggers out there who make quite a bit each month with their paid posts. I probably won't be one of them, but a little bit now and again couldn't hurt.

Pay Per Post is an interesting site, and I've learned a lot about blog monetizing by reading the many post offers that are available to members. There are offers from a wide variety of sources- more than enough for just about every blogging category. The blog has to be at least 90 days old and you have to have at least 20 posts to qualify. It also can’t be a blog about illegal activities and/or porn. So, if you have a non-pornographic blog, sign up to get paid to blog.

I Don't Want to Buy a Vampire

"Wesley, werewolves buy vampires because someone is selling them. If no one was selling them, they wouldn't be buying them."

What the heck is that? I have no idea. That was the last line of a dream I had, and the only part I can remember before waking up today. I love those in medias res lines that you can sometimes remember when you wake up. If you keep a notebook next to the bed, you can record lots of weird snippets and strange ideas before they fade away. I have one, but unfortunately the pen wasn't working today. So, I had to repeat those lines over and over to myself as I raced down the stairs to find a pen. Thank God no one was home at the time.

If you have a bit of weirdness to start with, random lines and scenarios can be a starting point for short story or just a creative exercise to get your mind working in the morning. Just seeing what your mind is capable of coming up with is a good way to keep yourself unblocked and ready to write.

Sitepoint, Non-Payers and Plagiarism

I saw an interesting discussion on Sitepoint the other day. A potential website owner wanted to run a news site but didn't have the budget to either hire writers to write news stories or to go out and buy the products that he wanted to talk about and write them himself. Of course, that's a clear indication that he shouldn't do it at all. Surprisingly, person after person told him to simply plagiarize someone else's work. After all, he wants the site and can't afford it.

This case isn't the only one that I've seen like it. Many people tend to get defensive about their budget, even if their budget isn't enough to pay for the thing they want. I'd like to own a Domino's, but I don't have the budget. Should I steal one? Um, no. I can't afford one, so I'm not getting one. For some reason, people can see this clearly when it involves a brick and mortar business. But, when it comes to an online one, many people believe they are entitled to have one even if they can't afford one. This leads to plagiarism, content scraping and people who outright steal other people's work and then refuse to pay for it.

So, what happens if they can't afford to pay their writers, or can't afford to populate their site with any content? They should go out of business, just like any other business person who can't get the capital together to keep going.

It's kind of the same way that I see the fast food industry and minimum wage. If minimum wage was raised high enough to give workers something closer to a living wage, fast food restaurants claim that they'd go out of business. Great! If you can't afford to pay your workers a decent wage then you should to go out of business. If the fast food industry disappeared, teenagers would stop spending half their week doing low wage labor and perhaps go back to their studies. Adult workers would be forced to look into some of the free job training provided by their county (just about every county in the U.S. has training centers free to low income workers) and stop working at a dead-end job. Customers would have to put some thought into their meals rather than buying the cheapest, fattiest food available just because it's convenient. You'd have less obesity, less poverty and fewer hideous fast food restaurants littering the roadsides. It would be better for everyone.

The same is true with websites. If the people who couldn't afford to go into business stayed out of it, the bidding sites wouldn't be littered with weirdos hoping to find someone willing to work for .01 a word. You wouldn't have junk websites hiring people to write garbage in the hopes of making .50 a month through AdSense. This too would be better for everyone.

Cybersquatting

It's been a wacky week in freelance land. The wackiest day of the week came when eBay sent me an email threatening to sue me for cybersquatting. I wrote a fairly short ebook about selling on eBay, which I sell regularly on eBay itself as well as having a ClickBank listing. I thought it might be nice to have my own site to sell it on as well in order to avoid the steep fees that I pay to both of those sites on each sale. Well, apparently they are going after everyone with a domain name that has the word eBay anywhere in it, and using the cover of cycbersquatting law to scare people into taking their sites down. The cybersquatting law was started to prevent people from buying domain names that are the names of existing companies and then offering to sell the domain to the company at an increased rate. Obviously I didn't do that.

They also said that someone might confuse my piddling little site with one that was owned by eBay, which was also untrue. I have no discernible web design skills and the site was extremely plain, consisting only of a page about the ebook and a link to buy it. I can't imagine anyone believing that it was in any way a part of eBay. The example they used in the email was their successful blockage of the domain "ebaysecurities." I don't have any proof, but I believe that was an attempted phishing site being used to trick people into giving up their personal information. I didn't do anything of the kind. I would have likely won in court if they had decided to take it that far, and I am incorporated, so I can't see them getting much more than my laptop, some office paper and possibly my giant box of Bic pens even if they won. But, in the end, I decided not to mess with it. In an uncharacteristic backing down, I erased everything from the site. I just don't need the aggravation and I don't really have the time to do much promotion for the site anyway. I may have an obnoxious streak, but I don't mean any harm to anyone and don't want any trouble.

If you have a site with any company name in it, you might think about checking with the current cybersquatting legislation just to make sure you're on the right side of the law. There are other companies shutting down domains, but so far none of them have been tiny sites selling an ebook.

How Words and Letters Effect Everyone

I think we all realize how words can affect us, from the words we use to the words we hear and read from everyone else. The PC notion was started with good intentions- to reduce the sexism and racism that was present in some of the everyday language that was common. No, "man" does not mean human anymore than "woman" does. Specific words hold strong distinctions that can affect us subconsciously, though the entire notion has gotten extremely out of hand. Merry Christmas!

But, I found out recently that even the letters we are attracted to are letters than have significance to us. The initials of our names create a preference for words that start with those letters. This has been found even in GPAs, with people with names starting with A and B getting better grades than people with names starting with C and D. People choose their brands with a preference for ones that start with their initial letters. Since reading that, I've noticed how many of the brands I'm loyal to start with an S- there are a lot.

That's how deeply words can affect us. We see the words around us as being personal and connected to us, even when we don't realize it.

More Queries

Since getting my rejections from a couple of children's book agents, I really believe that the project would better be pitched directly to a publisher. But, I am choosing right now to concentrate on a non-fiction book that I think has a lot more market possibilities. The question for this one, of course, is whether to query agents or publishers. I's rather try to get an agent to do a lot of this for me, but I think I might just query publishers right now and try to get somewhere that way. In the end, there is the distinct possibility that none of it will matter and no one will be interested in this book. My time would probably better be spent on seeking new freelance clients.

Will that stop me? Heck no. There's nothing like a book project to get me feeling creative and excited. Most of my fiction has been abandoned at some point because there's really no limit on what can happen in the book. I can go on for years with fiction, tooling and retooling a piece of dialogue or adding scenes that I thought of while in the shower. But, a non-fiction book has a much more distinct flavor. There's an actual stopping point with non-fiction. At some point, the topic has been covered to your satisfaction and the book ends. So, win or lose, this is my project and I'm going to try to get it noticed. I'll post when I start getting rejections.