I Did It!

Hi Everybody,

I know I have been away from this and my Glad Living blogs for the past couple of months. I thought I would update you all on what I have been doing. I took the NaNoWrimo (National Novel Writing Month) Challenge back in November and wrote 60K words. I finished my novel on January 9^th and pre-editing I have 146, 548 words. This has been a wonderful experience overall, despite a few times where I doubted I could actually do it. I would encourage writers with novels inside them that have been putting them off for another day to learn more about the NaNo Challenge, and to look around the various communities there where writers can find plenty of free resources to help with writing that blockbuster novel. Bookmark this blog first and then follow this link for more information. http://www.nanowrimo.org/

What’s next for my novel? Editing, editing, editing! I am also researching going the route of obtaining a literary agent to do the work of shopping my book to publishers. I know there is a lot of “buzz” about self-publishing these days, however this just does not seem appealing to me at this point. I may change my mind on down the line, but for now I will polish my manuscript, draft a powerful query letter, and make a few submissions to literary agents and see what happens. I have read in various web articles and blogs that it can take a year or more for a good novel to make it onto bookstore shelves. I will keep you updated on what happens with my novel Wish me luck gang!

 

Online Grammar and Punctuation Tool

It is easy to forget the rules of writing sometimes. Refresh your memory, see real examples of how to use punctuation correctly, and even test your knowledge if you dare. Visit the GrammarBook Today.

Free Online Thesaurus/Dictionary Resource

I found this tool especially useful when I was writing my book. I even came across slang words not included in Word’s main dictionary for my main character’s southern speech. I now use it when writing articles and I need some more suggested synonyms than my Word processor offers. You can check out this free thesaurus and dictionary using this link.

Writer’s Roundtable

Happy Valentine’s Day Wishes to everybody. I have my TV tuned to NASCAR, with the race delayed by a pothole of all things. Sounds like Indiana roadways to me. I have spent weeks editing my novel and I am now happy with everything although I accept the fact that an editor will suggest even more changes. Welcome to the realm of working to get your works published. I have also sent out queries to a few literary agents seeking their representation so I am now in a pins-and-needles wait mode which may continue for quite some time. Through my research, I have learned that waiting...waiting...waiting, is pretty much to be expected. I am trying to steel myself against the inevitable rejections which every writer gets. Wow! That is not so easy when writing is your passion and you pour your heart into the words you write. This is how it goes though and I have signed on to see this through knowing that I will gain experience and knowledge from each facet of this process of trying to get my first novel into publication.

In fact, I have already learned several aspects from the novel writing and publishing industries that I did not know before. I did know beforehand that I could not simply write a novel and “poof” it would somehow magically wind up on a Barnes and Nobles store shelf or listed for sale with Amazon.. I was under the false impressions that if I could write it in 30 days, I could edit it in 30 and have a publisher pick it up by day 90. Yeah...I will wait while you all laugh your butts off over that one. In actuality, it can take a year or more to get a book published and on store shelves and that is assuming you have an agent that can convince a publisher to take a chance on you and your book. Even many established writers still need a skilled literary agent to broker publishing contracts for them. I discovered that how you format your novel manuscript is ripe with controversy. Some say to format your manuscript using the font Courier 12pt. while others insist it should be Times New Roman 12pt. No one seems to be able to agree on word counts either. The more I read the more confused and worried I got that I was not doing something right. I finally decided to just write my novel and to worry about formatting it to suit a particular publisher’s editor when the time came which freed my mind up to let my creativity flow.

I will share more of what I have learned so far and what I discover as time goes on in with my first novel writing experience in future posts. Feel free to add your comments about this post and to share your own experiences with writing and publishing your book length works.

Chronicle Your Life: It Could Lead to a Novel

Dear Diary/My Life

As many young girls do, I kept a diary that I wrote in every single night before going to bed. Making my nightly diary entry was something that I really looked forward to as bedtime approached.

I had received one of those 5-year diaries as a holiday present at around age 12, and was immediately hooked on the idea of writing down my private thoughts and feelings. I especially liked that my diary had a lock on it to keep prying eyes from reading my most intimate feelings that I was not always comfortable sharing with others.

To be sure, there was not much room to write the days events in such a diary. That didn't sour my enthusiasm to make an entry however. I enjoyed the challenge of condensing the detailing of my day. After making the present day's entry,I would read the entries I had made previous years. I found it kinda "neat" to read them and remember what I was doing and how I felt on that same day, in different years. I even discovered times I had detailed an event thinking that what had happened was the end of the world, only to be reading it a year or so later, and realizing I was no longer even bothered by it.

I fell out of the habit of keeping a diary for a while when I became an adult and started to make my way in the world outside the walls of my bedroom, family home, and high school. I came back to it soon enough though with the grown up version of a teenagers dairy, the journal. Through the years, I have found that keeping a journal has served many purposes for me. I have recorded events that I never wanted to forget exactly how wonderful I felt when they happened. Journaling has helped me to sort out my feelings and work through some of the darkest times in my life as well. My journals could even lead to a novel or several: one day. Yours could too.

You might not think that your life is interesting enough that anyone else would want to read about it, much less buy a book inspired by your life. However, people find first-hand accounts of common and not-so-common situations of living, quite intriguing reads. Sometimes mere curiosity draws people to such personal chronicles,while others want to know they are not alone in having certain life experiences. For some writers there would be no greater accomplishment than if something they have lived through might offer someone else hope as they face a similar circumstance in their life. Perhaps your journal or multiple journals, could lead to a book that offers understanding and hope to someone who really needs it.

Whether your personal journal ever results in a publication for writer creds: and money, there is good reason to consider keeping one. A journal records happy times you want to remember always. Journaling can be therapeutic and even help you to know, understand, and love yourself more. A journal can be a keepsake, a legacy of you that generations of your family can read and know the person, and the times they lived in of the person who wrote it-You!

Include photographs with your journal entries whenever possible, to add pictorial documentation that will aid you in keenly recalling or better illustrating for others, those memories later.



Author: Julie Morris. Freelance writer and blogger, all rights reserved. Visit my website: http://thewritestation.yolasite.com/ Contact me: twsstaff@yahoo.com

Twitter Attack No Treat for Tweeters.

Hackers hit Twitter (a popular social networking site) with what  Co-founder: Biz Stone, describes as a ‘denial of service"’ attack that disabled the site for a couple of hours this morning with users continuing to experience intermittent problems accessing their twitter pages several hours later. This CNN article discusses the attack on the Twitter site further.

I was finally able to log into my twitter account @ 1; 30 pm. EST. Hopefully this means the gargantuan hacker-traffic attack of 8-6-09 is over and we can all happily get back to some sweet tweeting!

Social Media and Marketing Continued

In a previous post on social media, I mentioned several applications that most of us are familiar with through using them ourselves or by having heard about them. This is a continuation in my series on social media and the effectiveness of marketing your business through social media. I hope readers will find the information presented useful in helping them to take advantage of the social media applications they are using just as the top online moneymakers are now doing.

Turning your Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter account into a successful marketing machine is not difficult at all. Keeping the following tips in mind can help transform basic online socializing platforms into mega-successful traffic, income, and profit generators. I have condensed things a bit here by only mentioning 3 of the many popular social interactive sites available to users online today. Insert the name(s) of the social media applications that you use if they differ from the ones I have listed. The principles for using them to your advantage in business marketing remain the same nonetheless.

Ø Let the popularity of top social media applications do the work of finding traffic for you. Make sure that you set your profile or updates page to ‘public’ so that the larger flows of traffic to these sites can find you. Keeping it private will mean that you will have to find and invite people to visit your pages, which can be time-consuming and slow to show positive returns for your efforts.

Ø If you are using your social account for promoting yourself, your business, or business programs, be careful about posting negative opinions without some substantial information to back it up, or stuff you would be embarrassed for strangers to know about you. You will find that posting some personal things like having attended a concert or what you had for dinner will bring visitors and a lot of times followers to your social pages. You never know what seemingly mundane activities or subjects may spark someone else’s interest until you post something about it and gain traffic from it. Just temper such personal postings with common sense. Remember that once you post something in cyberspace it can exist forever.

Ø Do not use your social media applications to hard sell your business interests. No one responds very well to such tactics. Include links to articles, web tools, and sites that are likely to be of interest to your target audiences. Space these between your regular updates on your business products, services, etc.

Ø Learn how to create intriguing headlines and short sentences that really grab people’s attention. Space for communicating with others is typically limited in these social media applications so make the best use of the space that is available to you.

Ø Shortening links to your websites, blog entries, or articles you have posted online will give you more room for expressing why someone should want to click on the link(s) provided on your profile or updates pages. Many people use http://www.tinyurl.com/ for this purpose and I have used it myself.

By following these tips, you can supercharge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns using various social media platforms with less effort and time. Did you find this article helpful? Please share your comments.

In the next in this series on social media and social media marketing, we will be looking into synchronizing your site, blog, and forum RSS feeds and updates for greater visibility and productivity, and blog and forum postings for creating web presence and for branding and marketing your business products, services, and programs.

Author: Julie Morris. Freelance writer and blogger, all rights reserved. Visit my website: http://thewritestation.yolasite.com/ Contact me: twsstaff@yahoo.com

Streamline Multiple Inbox Messages for Greater Productivity

Keeping track of more than one inbox and updates to your Facebook, twitter, or other social accounts can cut into your time and productivity. Consolidating multiple accounts into a single condensed message that arrives to your main email account’s inbox can save you lots of time and can help you focus on getting more work done. You will not lose minutes logging in and out of each of the other email clients you have only to find the inboxes empty or filled with junk mail. Save time and increase your productivity by scheduling a short synopsis of the messages contained in each of your email accounts to arrive in a single email note to your main email account.

Nutshellmail makes this simple and supports most email clients such as: Yahoo, Gmail, MSN Live, Hotmail, and others and can grab updates form your social network sites like: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc to include in the single message sent to your main email account per the schedule you set. Learn more about streamlining the time you spend trying to keep track of messages and updates from multiple email and social network accounts so that you can be more productive online by visiting NutShellMail.

Promote Your Blog + Get More Readers

Beginning Series on Social Media and Social Media Marketing

This is the first in a series of articles on social media and channeling the power of social media into massively effective marketing campaigns. Many of us are already using popular and highly trafficked social applications like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Plaxo, Linkedin, and others to connect with family, friends, and colleagues. Then there are the zillions of blogs, bulletin boards, weblogs, vlogs, podcasts, forums, and niche sites that exist in cyberspace to enable people from around the world to socialize and communicate with one another on small and mass levels. Let us not forget communication tools like Skype, MSN Live, Yahoo Chat, IGoogle, and other instant messaging applications that also allow people plenty of online socializing opportunities as well.

The Internet has Granted Media Access to Everyone

Traditional or broadcast media remains primarily a restricted medium with access reserved mostly for industry professionals with a few exceptions. Social media on the other hand is an open-access medium that allows almost everyone with an internet connection to generate web content and to share that content with small or large audiences, locally, internationally, and as most of us know-globally! You do not have to have professional associations, media-related degrees, or a huge bankroll to participate in social media. Most social applications are free to use and basic spelling and grammar skills or a quality program that checks for mistakes before publishing to the web, is all one really needs to begin building an audience of readers The more skills that you have the more you can take advantage of all that this platform known as social media offers

Well-informed entrepreneurs have found these online social media applications to be great sources for excellent business advertising and branding with little or no costs to them and requiring barely any effort at all besides catchy headlines and some carefully chosen words. We will be exploring social media business marketing, branding, and other concepts involved in utilizing the power of social media successfully in other articles in this series.

I would love to read your thoughts or any additional information and knowledge that you could share with readers about social media and social media marketing.

Fourth of July Humor

Just a few jokes to yuck it up with this weekend. Please share your clean fun jokes.

Q. Why did Paul Revere ride a horse to warn the British were coming?

A. The horse was too heavy to carry.

Q. Mix a small curly haired dog with a patriot and what do you have?

A. You have a Yankee poodle.

Q. What would you get if you mixed cattle feed and George Washington?

A. You would get the fodder of our country.

Q. Early settlers were much like ants because why?

A. They too lived in colonies.

Q. What might Thomas Jefferson’s favorite dessert have been?

A. Monti-jello

Q. What would you get if you mixed America’s national bird with snoopy?

A. You would get a bald beagle.

Q. What would you get if you mixed a tepee with a colonial wig?

A. you would get a powdered wigwam.

Q. What did the man say to his friend as they were parting ways after their visit to the Statue of Liberty?

A. Stay in torch buddy.

Q. What was the name of the ghost that haunted King George the III?

A. The Spirit of 76

Q. What is red, white, blue, and green?

A. Uncle Sam suffering from seasickness.

Happy Fourth of July 2009

Many people will be having cookouts with family and friends, attending parades and festivals, and watching night skies illuminated by colorful fireworks this Fourth of July. This is a time to celebrate and have fun, but it is also acknowledge and offer our deepest thanks for the sacrifices that our military men and women make on behalf of protecting the liberties the rest of us take for granted far too often. Have a safe and fantastic 4^th of July!!!

Your Brain on Autopilot

Here is a brain thing that occurs on autopilot and it sure surprised this skeptic!

How it happens

• Sit in a chair and lift your right leg to a comfortable level. You do not have to raise your leg very high, just enough for your foot to clear the floor.

• Now, begin rotating your right foot in a clockwise-circular motion, and at the same time with your right hand, sketch an invisible number 6 in the air.

When you do this, your brain will automatically tell your foot to move in the opposite direction (counter-clockwise.) After a few tries you may be able to activate the manual switch in your brain and counteract this autopilot activity. Then again, maybe you will not be able to. I know that in 10 tries my foot still moved counter-clockwise when I drew the 6 in the air with my right hand, although my foot was initially moving in a clockwise direction. Try it and see what happens when you do.

Chat Forum Undergoes Name Change 6-25-09

I made note of the name change to the chat forum in the chat index. However, I wanted to let all of you know about it. Some readers might have previously visited the single entry under "chat" and may not look there to see the updated information I placed there this morning.

To save you from having to click on chat (found on the side bar) to read about the name change to the chat forum, below is the message I posted there.

Updated Information 6-25-09: The chat forum has a new name. It is now the NetBiz Network. The url for the forum has not changed as of yet, due to the number of places I will have to update with this information before considering a change to the URL. When and if I do decide that changing the url is necessary, I will let everyone know about that change here.
Nothing else about the forum has or will change. Writers, internet entrepreneurs/marketers, and all those interested in working and making money online utilizing the powerful technology of the internet are welcomed and invited to share information about working online/ business opportunities/ and how to be successful at making money online.

Happy Fathers Day Wishes

Happy Fathers Day to all the good fathers in the world! Your presence in your child's life and being a positive role model for your children really does matter, and is something that will stay with your child for his/her lifetime.

Target Searches for Better Results

You are too busy to be wasting time scrolling through long pages containing only general listings results for the search queries you make. Target your searches to gain better results and significantly reduce the inclusion of tons of generalized listings on the results page that offer you little in respect to the information and resources that you are searching for.

You can target your searches and save yourself loads of time and the tedium of having to weed through volumes of garbage to find the true treasures in the mix, using specific keywords, and keyword phrases in the search window.

For instance if you are a writer looking for writing jobs you might consider using the following terms to mark your searches to experience better returns for your search queries.

• Authors
• Article writer
• Article writing
• Article submit
• Paid articles
• Ghostwrite
• Paid to write
• Writer
• Writers marketplace
• Writer forum
• Buy/Sell articles and content
• Freelancing
• Freelance writing work
• Writing and translation jobs
• Work for freelance writers


If you want to find the best online places to help promote yourself and your business, targeting your searches will help tremendously to provide you with more useful information and links to follow than general searches produce.

Determine where the people who are most likely to be interested in receiving information about and buying the products and services that your business offers congregate in large numbers. Forums, blogs, discussion groups, and social sites are excellent places to find eager consumers.

If you have a work from home or online business opportunity that you want to get more exposure for consider trying these terms to target your searches to narrow results down to the best places for you to promote your work or business opportunity through.

• Wahm
• Work from home
• Work from home jobs
• Work from home business opportunity
• Online business opportunity
• Online jobs
• Online services
• Online business listing
• Webmasters
• Webmaster forums
• Online business advertising
• Free classified ads


Sometimes even when searching the web with a couple of different keywords you can keep seeing the same results appearing on the results pages the search engine you are using presents to you. Click on your tools tab and clear your browsing history and cookie files, and then try searching with a new keyword. You might also find it helpful to use the search suggestions that search engines like Google and Yahoo often recommend in a box that opens below the search box as you are typing your query. Switching to another search engine may also provide you with different results.

If you have a niche business opportunity or services to offer use a keyword, keywords, or keyword phrases specific to your businesses niche to get better results from your search queries.

Increase your productivity and find exactly what you are looking for more successfull by targeting your searches.

Proofing Your Work for Comma Usage Errors

I confess- I am addicted to commas! I have to proof my work carefully because I often add commas to my sentences unconsciously. Thus, I often use them without any regard for whether they are really needed or proper.

I cannot rely on my word program grammar checker alone to catch these punctuation mistakes for me either. Just as it is not wise to rely solely on the spell-checking feature of your document program to find misspelled words, it is not wise to assume that the grammar check feature will uncover every instance of improper grammar usage in your article or document.

Use the spelling and grammar usage checking features of your document program for sure. Yet, you will need to proof your work yourself as well to ensure it is free of errors before you send it someone else to view.

Here are two good tutorials on the proper use of commas put out by the English department at Purdue University to help you in proofing your work. Proofing for Commas, and Further Comma Use Rules.

As easy to understand as the information presented in these tutorials is, I cannot say that it will stop me from placing unnecessary commas in my work. I guess I will have to take a one-day-at-a-time approach to resolving my problem of overusing commas like people with other addictions do.

Proof, Proof, and Proof Some More!

The importance of proofing your work before sending it out to clients, or displaying it somewhere for other people to read cannot be overstated. It can sometimes be difficult to proof and edit your own work. The following tips may help you to better proof your work to ensure that it is error free.

1. After you have written or typed your piece, click on your tools menu and run a spelling and grammar check if you have those tools available to you. Correct any highlighted mistakes. Do not depend on these program tools only in proofing your work. It will skip over words spelled correctly, but words you may not have intended to use in your sentence. The show will go on rain ore shine. That sentence does not make sense although there are no errors in spelling. The show will go on rain or shine. This second sentence makes sense. There are many other instances of words having close spellings and very different meanings that spelling tools may miss.


2. Read your document through to get a sense of how it sounds (reads.) Does your document have a natural and sequential flow to it? It helps to get a trusted friend or editor to read your work for you as it can often be hard for writers to separate how their brains say it should read, and how it would actually sound to readers. You can do this on your own. Only you may have to put it away and come back to it several different times to make sure it reads well.


3. Now go through your document again one sentence at a time, reading each sentence aloud and making any changes to your sentences that you think are necessary.


4. After you have done a sentence-by-sentence check of your document, it is time to read your entire document again. Why should you do all of this reading and re-reading? Because, you want to make sure that your written works are as free from errors as possible. Your works are representative of your writing skill. You do not want easily correctable mistakes to shout to readers, “Hey, look at me, I cannot spell or use grammar properly.”


5. Save and close your document and do something else for a while. For how long is up to you. Many writers will set aside their completed works for a day before going back to them again for one final reading When you have cleared your head from your previous proofreading of your document, open it for a final reading to make sure it reads exactly as you want it to.

I hope you found this article on proofreading your work helpful. We will be discussing other mechanics in writing in future articles.

Here is a Bright Idea

Would you like to add a free or paid forum to your website? How about a guestbook, web polls, surveys, mini-surveys, a visitor counter, a contact form, Q&A page, or newsletters? Perhaps you would like your website visitors to help you build a strong link list. Maybe you could use an ad manager to help track your numerous advertising campaigns. Sparklit has it all!

This is where I created the NetWrite Chat Forum, and I have used several of their other products with good results.

Place Free Online Classified Ads

You can place your business and other ads here free. Ads will run for seven days.

Read more about the great advertising opportunity this could be for your business promoting. The fact that it is free is not too shabby either. See: ClassifiedsforFree