My first freelance article (Amy)

Happy Autumn and Halloween!

First of all, I have to vent a little. I got accepted to write informational articles for a freelance writing site. Tom's been doing this for awhile, but it's all new to me. I just finished my first article yesterday. It was pretty stressful, but also exciting to be writing for pay :D. I was waiting today to see if the article got accepted, and just got a reply that they wanted revisions. Now that's nothing unusual in this business (I've learned from seeing Tom go through the learning curve), but the thing this client wanted from me was MORE KEYWORDS throughout the article. I took the time to write the article carefully so it would be informative and make the reader want to read it. It was much better than anything written on the rest of this client's website, and yet they didn't care because it didn't have a high enough percentage of the total article in keywords. Why do people like this bother to pay someone to write their articles, when they could just as well use the 550 keywords they sent me in a list to use for a 850 word article and get the same effect? I'm not exaggerating. The list of words they sent was 64% as long as the total article they wanted. If I had used all of the keywords they wanted--many of which are spelled incorrectly on purpose--I wouldn't have been able to use complete sentences.

Today's lesson, for all of you future entrepreneurs out there, is that if you inundate your web copy with keywords just to get people to find you in a google search and click on the ads on your web page, you will get the opposite effect. Google will not bring up your article in their search field if it is made up completely of keywords. It will red flag their system as a spam site and will not be recommended to people. If your overpaid publicist is telling you that this is the way to get people to your site, you should fire them and find someone else who actually knows what they are talking about!

Okay, I think I've finished my vent. I added an additional bunch of keywords to that article--another 10% of the total. I'm still not sure it's going to be enough for my client. My article is now less informative and more clumsy, but there you have it.

On a lighter note, we're looking forward to going to a party tomorrow night at Jenny and Jonny's house down in Spanish Fork. Tom and I both have Star Wars themed costumes. I'll try to get some pictures of the party up in the next couple of days.


In other news, Tom starts his NaNoWriMo tomorrow (or really he started it about 45 minutes ago, since we're sitting a bit after midnight now). If you don't know what this is, here's the site. http://www.nanowrimo.org/ We're all cheering him on--GO TOM!!

PRESENTS!!

Did I mention I'm looking forward to Christmas vacation? I seem to mention it every five minutes these days. I think I'm making Amy crazy with it.

Amy and I just solidified our plans with my brother John. We're carpooling up to Seattle for the week of Christmas.

This should be a great Christmas. It's been five years since I really spent the holidays with my immediate family. I'm sick of white Christmas. I want wet Christmas. We don't sing "Walkin in a winter wonderland" up there. We sing "Walkin in the rain and the fog." Sounds good.

I won't be ringing the bell for Salvation Army this year. They won't take me since I won't be available for the days leading right up to Christmas, and we'll be living far from any kettle location anyway. I thought about doing it on a volunteer basis this year for a day or something. I really rather enjoyed it, but out move down to Spaulding Manor sort of precludes that.

So in spite of Thanksgiving being the holiday I usually look forward to the most, this year I'm really excited to get out of town for Christmas.

Acobox - Mixed Results from Image Provider

Blogging is a jungle. In this weird competitive niche of writing, attention is like gold. And nothing grabs and holds reader attention than the right pictures. Finding images for blogs can be a tedious and fruitless process. I’ve often found that my own photos are more than adequate for garnishing my ramblings. Sometimes though, it’s clear that my own photos often won’t do the job of holding the reader’s attention.

The search begins. I do the standard image searches and scroll through picture after picture. It’s a struggle to find anything even remotely relevant, let alone images that look good.

Acobox provides a modest array of sharp, clear images for use on blogs. Their home page is stark, but inviting. The designers seem content to let the images do the talking: they’re slick, professional, and full of eye-popping color. Selection is somewhat limited. There are fourteen categories of photos, and some of those only have between five and seven images in each.

The images are easy to transfer. You just select the size you want, and copy and paste the URL. The buttons in the image tool are only compatible with Internet Explorer. As a Firefox user, I found this annoying.

While the images are of the highest quality and flexibility in terms of sizing, I find the relevance of the images to be tenuous. I can’t begrudge Acobox this weakness. Blogging covers such an array of subjects that finding the most relevant images for all blog users is impossible.

In spite of the weaknesses of Acobox, I’m willing to keep my eye on them. The images are so well done that they almost have an “ooh, pretty” hypnotic effect. Find an excuse to use them in your blog and you’ll get replies from people asking where you got them.

Strawberry Days 2008

So my mom decided a few years ago that she needed to start up some new family traditions. One of those she wanted to start was an annual "Strawberry Days" celebration. She planted loads of strawberry plants intending the whole family to get together and pick them sometime in August every year. Well, there have never been many strawberries to pick, either because they don't grow fast enough because it's too cold, or the deer eat most of the plants. This year, she decided she had to have SOMETHING there that had to do with strawberries, so this was what she came up with...


Ella REALLY loved the chocolate strawberries. She kept picking up new ones just to lick the chocolate off.



Mostly Strawberry Days means getting together and hanging out doing a whole lot of nothing. I wish we had gotten a picture of everyone on their respective laptops, it was pretty funny. I think we figured out there were no less than eight laptops in the house while we were all there.



The latest Spaulding family photo. Take a close look at Ella's face--she looks like she's mad at the camera. Leo has the right idea, he decided to hide in the shadows to protect his eyes.



Matt and Deneal had a big announcement. They had Ashton unzip his hoodie with a big reveal... Deneal is due in March :D



A bunch of us went over into Blackhawk to do some shooting on Labor Day. Tom and I finally got to shoot a muzzle loader. Isn't that smoke cool?










We took Devin's projector outside and watched a movie on the side of the house. The movie wasn't one any of us will probably ever see again, but it was a lot of fun being out there. The next morning, the kids took all the pillows and blankets we had taken outside and piled them up to jump in. Ella especially loved playing with Ashton; they got along really well.



Here are Ashton and Ella feeding one of Mom's baby goats. You can't see it so much in this picture, but Ashton is a bit nervous of the goat, almost as much as he is with dogs. He keeps backing away like it's going to bite off a finger or something.

FINALLY FINISHED!!!

I feel like throwing a party tonight. I just finished the basic first draft of my book. I hit 52,948 words, which got me a bit farther than I expected to be. Now I have the rest of the week to take this at a slower pace and go back and add to the scenes I flew through in my rush to finish the draft.

There's still a long way to go before this will even be remotely readable, but mostly I'm just pleased I survived without having any complete breakdowns.

Thanks to those of you who have been offering me encouragement through this. Don't be offended if you try to get ahold of me and I don't get right back. I think I'm going to be catching up on my sleep in celebration! I'm hoping to have another draft of this story finished by the end of September so I can start passing it out and getting feedback from friends and family.

Attempting the Utterly Ridiculous!

So Tom and I have been trying to find the best ways for each of us to get some serious writing done. We've been looking into books on writing and editing, and what it seems the universe has been trying to tell us is that the book in a month style is just right for us. I'll try to keep this ticker updated as to my progress, but my goal this month is to finish the first draft of a 50,000 word novel. It will be far from a completed work, but it's a start. Next month Tom will get to try this and I'll pick up the household chores and meals. We're not exactly the normal couple, I realize. I'd appreciate any encouragement getting through this!

As of right now, I have 9,042 words out of the 50,000.

I'm a rotten blogger!

Holy cow--I sure didn't realize it had been so very long since we posted on our blog. Pretty sad, really. Our life has been going crazy (as per usual, I suppose). Tom and I are both trying to work more on our writing. Tom is getting to write full time from home--mostly copywriting for companies trying to get their websites up--which has been fantastic. We're enjoying seeing more of each other and spending less on gas. Good time for it, lol. We're both working on some freelance short stories and also novels. It's been really fun to make writing a higher priority in our lives, although I admit I still have a hard time just seriously writing when we're in the same room together. I'm too much of a talker I guess, *blush*. We'll try to keep you updated as these projects progress.

Ash has been pretty sick. We had to change her dogfood from what she was on for awhile. She's lost a lot of weight and is shedding like never before. This is saying something, since she has always been a crazy shedder.





It's like she has a litter of puppies every couple of days. Pretty gross, huh? Hopefully this will slow down to normal shedding soon :P

Well, I'll really try to be better at this. Have a great day!