Long Post Coming

Since the events of last week, I've been trying to organize my thoughts about what happened to me and to the area as a whole. I want to write something, maybe many things, about the experiences with the tornadoes and what came afterward, but I don't know what I am and am not willing to share just yet. I'm planning a blog post or two, two apocalyptic short stories and a few informational articles out of it all. But for right now, I'm just trying hard not to think about any of it anymore.

Suite101: A Panda Casualty

Suite101, if you aren't already aware of it, is a long-standing website that pays a revenue share to freelance writers who take on various topics and categories. I started writing for them about three and a half years ago when I'd been ghostwriting a lot and needed some Web bylines to get new clients. They proved to be fun to write for, and I made my minimum hourly amount with them, so I stuck around. After a year or so I became the feature write for the online publishing category (there is one feature writer per category). It came with a pay raise and some extra exposure, and I still got to choose my own topics within that category. Win-win.

The May Google algorithm change last year, however, cut some of my income from them and made them a little less attractive to write for. I lost about 20 to 30 percent of my monthly pay from them, and it became slightly less than my minimum hourly. Not happy.

And now Panda, a Web explosion that has decimated nearly all rev-share sites, has utterly destroyed Suite101. The site is pretty much over, and it's kind of sad. One of the Google guys actually specifically mentioned the site when talking about getting rid of sub-par sites for Panda. With a slight algorithm change, there is hope for the future. With a careful weeding out of specific sites that one guy hates, there is much less hope. I seriously doubt they will come back from this in the next year or two, if ever.

Just how bad is it? Here's a taste: on an given day I could expect $5 to $15 a day to come in on the stuff that I've already written. I wasn't getting rich from it or anything, but it was only about five hours a month and it was nice to have it coming in while I was building some bylines to show to prospective clients. Yesterday, I made .05. That's it. They've entered Triond/Bukisa/InfoBarrel territory. Lose-lose.

How did it happen? Here's what they did wrong:

They didn't screen content well. As a decent-paying rev share company, they were inundated with applications from all over the world and tons of content being written by the people they hired. They weren't as selective as they needed to be. There is some great stuff there- parts of the gardening section are particularly good, but some of the content on the site is really, really, really horrific. I'm assuming they figured that no matter how bad some of it was, they were making money off it and it should stay. That was shortsighted and ridiculous.

They stressed quantity over quality. They talked a lot about the quantity of output, but rarely said anything about the quality of it. Many of the writers assumed that the more they wrote, the more they would earn. This is not how rev shares work, and it's not what makes money for a site overall. A site that old should have known better.

They didn't listen to me. I mentioned two years ago that the increasing emphasis that the site was putting on its writers, rather than on its content, was going to do the site in. In other words, plastering "Write For Us!" across the front page made them look like tools. They constantly advertised for writers, and every page on the site has a "Write for Suite101" link at the top. That makes the site look amateurish and ridiculous. Any site worth reading doesn't do that, and that's likely one of the things that got under Google Guy's skin. If you're just there to grab writers and try to increase your workforce, you aren't a site that people are going to go on purpose. I did try to mention this and to lay it out simply and logically. I was given an award for pointing it out. Just kidding- I was emailed by the site editor himself and told that I would be fired if I ever said that again. No lie. Guess what? I'm saying it again. That editor is gone now anyway.

It's probably too late. They are dumping yucky articles, relaxing the article minimums and giving more screening to what gets published. But, it's likely too late. Being specifically targeted for demotion and spending so many years doing so much wrong has left the company with a bad reputation. The best chance to turn things around is to get a new domain name, reorganize the company and start again with a different way of doing things, perhaps migrating the best 1/4 of the content to a new site with a new name and management that hands out awards for helpful observations.

I haven't written a word for them in more than a month, and I don't know that I will. I do know that many people have jumped ship because of it all, but I haven't decided what to do. I only have to write one article a month to stay on. Do I do it?

Recuperating and Excitement

I had a six-hour surgery last month, and the recovery is proving to be slower than I imagined. I think in a civilized country they would allow you to stay in the hospital for more than one night after an ordeal like that, but this is not such a nation.

However, a couple of days after the whole mess, my book came in the mail. The publisher was nice enough to send along six advance copies, and they were pretty exciting to see. The book that I struggled with and lived with and eventually hated is a real, physical thing now. I suppose it was all worth it in the end.

Of course, the next book they offered me I turned down. And by turned down I mean I demanded three times the fee I got for the first one and refused to budge, knowing that there was no way I'd get it.

I think this is the last non-fiction print book that I want to do. EVER. I'm working on a new ebook that I want to sell on Kindle and I am expanding the existing ebook that I sell on my own site to create another Kindle book. I'm aiming to have both available for Kindle during the summer. I'm also moving a little on my fiction writing. And by moving I mean thinking about writing it. Hey, it's progress. Sort of.

Still Alive, Still Obnoxious

Wow, it's been quite a while since I updated. I don't think I've ever gone this long between posts before. The two people who read it must have been disappointed. :(

Since I've been away from here, I've mostly been obnoxious. I've always known that I have some obnoxious tendencies, but over the past few months I've really started to notice just how bad it really is. This week I've been thinking a lot about where that comes from and whether that's part of what drives me to tinker obsessively with impossible stories that just seem to never quite come together in their potential entirety.

Is it obnoxiousness that drives writers? Hemingway was pretty full on, and most of the greats seem to be pretty terrible. Darwin was apparently nice, as was that guy who wrote the Wizard of Oz books, but that's pretty much it. The rest of them are people who get in fights every time they go to Chick-Fil-A. Um, not that that happened Tuesday night. But yeah, most of the writers you read about were essentially damaged in some way. Obnoxious, secretive, reclusive, obsessive- these things irritate the people around me, but they worked for Poe, Faulkner, Byron, Wilde, Blake, Barrie, poor Mad Shelley and Vonnegut. I'm starting to think that people without a little crazy in them aren't really worth bothering with.

The next time I see the neighbors watch me going outside and sort of wince, I'm going to try to think of the great company that I am in and not how much I want to tell off most of the people around me.

The Tale of the Christmas Tree Massacre

As expected, Kirk looked great in a tree
But who, I did ask, will represent TNG?

Picard is a safe bet, but seems to lack luster
Riker instead is the one to pass muster

The Riker ornament came, but its weight brought surprise
How could the uniform hide so much heft for his size?

I hung it carefully on a tree slightly weird
Believing it was a safe home for his beard

As Kirk looked on, Riker weighed down the fir
His weight pulling it down in a deafening blur

Broken glass covered the floor, with Riker to blame
My opinion of him will never be the same

Christmas Donations- Want an Ebook?

If you read The Bloggess, pretty much the best blog ever, you may have seen her amazing Christmas donation thing going on. She committed to giving out Amazon gift certificates to people who simply said they needed them. That has blown up into a snowballing network of people who are donating gift cards to people who have asked for them on her blog. Today that has apparently snowballed into other blogs where people are doing Bloggess-inspired giveaways. My funds are pretty well allocated for the next few weeks, so I've been trying to figure out what to donate. It occurred to me this morning that I could donate emailed copies of my ebook about how to sell on eBay.

This isn't really as stupid as it sounds. I sell the ebook for about 10 bucks through my own website and I believe it costs a little more than that on Lulu. I've heard from many buyers that it has been quite helpful to them in starting an eBay business. It's also specifically written for people who have very little money up front to get their business going. If you want a copy, just contact me through here however you do that and I will email it to you. It may not be a gift that you can buy presents with, but it is something that can give you hope for creating a better new year. That hope may be just what you need to get through the holidays.

Cave Men, Writing Time, Asimov and Captain Kirk

I once read a short story by Asimov called "Writing Time" that I really found fascinating. I mean, most of his short stories were pretty thought provoking, but this one really struck a chord with me as a teenage wannabe writer. The gist is that there is a guy who is constantly waiting for cabs, waiting in line for elevators, walking home or to the store, etc. His dearest wish is to have more time to write. He happens to have a friend with a sort of genie, so his friend makes a wish that the guy will have plenty of writing time.

Suddenly, he never has to wait for anything. There are never lines, cabs follow him around in case he needs a ride, every appointment is on the first floor, doctors take him right away, etc. The result is that he can't write a word because during all of that waiting and drudgery he was doing the real work of writing in his mind. Without that time to stand around with nothing else to do, he had no ideas and stopped writing completely.

I think that dissecting that situation and looking at my own has taught me a lot more about what and how I write than sitting and staring at a computer has over the years. That's one reason that the excessive use of cell phones really gets to me. It's stealing your writing time. No more, no less.

Over the past few weeks, it's started occurring to me that we really don't have much more real time than cave men did. Now, I think about cave men a lot, and I mean a lot. I actually think about them more than I do about Captain Kirk, which is probably way too often for good mental health. I've started thinking that the time we spend on staying alive longer is waaaay more than we realize, and that if you take away all of that time, what you really have left is the time that cave men had because they didn't have very many strategies for that. Buying and taking supplements? No. Getting car checked out, strapping on seat belts, going for checkups, picking up prescriptions, getting the heater worked on, paying the insurance bill, etc., etc., etc. take up a lot of our time each day. If you don't believe it, for one day pay attention to everything you do to stay in good health and/or to live longer. If you subtracted all of that time from your life, you'd pretty much be left with the 25 or so years that cave men had. Cave men!

What is the moral here? I really don't have one. Sorry about that. Maybe only that time is a funny thing. Whether it's dealing with garbage collection/washing vegetable/insert other good habits or standing around thinking or wondering what Captain Kirk would do, your lifetime will be spent somehow. It's up to you whether you spend that time getting some decent writing done or simply dealing with life in an effort to get more time to write.