Category Archives: Suite 101

Buildipedia, freelance writing, Suite 101

The Freelance Writing Report

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I wrote yesterday that I had a good day of writing, being at home due to the snow storm. That continued into the evening, as I completed the research on the next chapter of Documenting America, and wrote most of it. I also did the work I needed to do on Life Group class teaching prep. I haven’t quite finished typing the handouts yet, but I’ll get that done after work. So the day started well and finished well.

I thought it was time to make an overall report on my freelancing activities. Here it is.

  • Suite101.com: I’m up to 120 articles there, having posted 4 so far in January. I’m working on a series of genealogy articles right now. After that I may get back to stock trading articles. Beginning with the month of December, we now receive data on which articles actually earn money. I’ll watch these new stats for a few months to see if there’s any pattern, then maybe change up my article mix. The month of January is on track to be my biggest revenue month there, though I’m earning a paltry $0.14 per article per month. I do it because I enjoy it, seem to be somewhat good at it, and, well, I just want to.
  • Buildipedia.com: I had another article posted there today. I’m not quite sure how many this is, somewhere around 15 I think. I need to get my records up to date for them. Yesterday I sent the editor an e-mail, pitching 5 more articles. He’s interested, and we’ll talk next week. I’d like to do an average of two articles a month for them. They pay pretty good, and I think the exposure I get there is excellent. They also seem to be growing, which can’t hurt. I’m also getting articles by assignment for them, which is nice. The whole query-go-round for freelancing is not particularly enjoyable for me.
  • I reported yesterday that I had been approached by an editor about writing an article. The publication is “Safe Highway Matters”. Today the editor and I agreed via e-mails that I will write the article. I’m waiting for the exact assignment details. This may well be a one time gig, but having an editor come to me, based on writing of mine she saw on-line, is sweet. And maybe in the future she’ll need another article. Or maybe some editor will see my writing in that publication, and….
  • I have given up trying to find print publications to write for. I won’t say I’ll never go back to seeking that publishing outlet, but for right now, no. The pay wasn’t much better, the query process stinks, and my limited experience shows they don’t pay on time. For now, I’ll stick with on-line publications. It has been a good, professional experience for me.

One other thing I should mention. The article I did for Buildipedia on the Crystal Bridges Museum, which posted there on January 6, 2011, was new ground for me in that I had to interview someone I didn’t know. That was a definite first. It made me feel like a journalist. Not that I really know what that’s like. I have absolutely no journalist training, took no classes on it in college or in writers conferences. But the editors I work with seem to like my writing, and other editors are taking notice, so maybe in a sense I am a journalist. That wasn’t planned. I just want to be a writer when I grow up.

I originally shifted to freelancing as one plank in a “platform” to present to editors or agents to whom I would shop my books. Now that I’m considering e-self-publishing my books, as I have discussed in recent blog posts, the platform doesn’t count for as much. My freelancing doesn’t generate fans of my writing. Yet, I think I’ll keep with it for a while. It never hurts to learn to write to deadlines, to figure out when something is done rather than to endlessly revise, to learn how to please an editor, and to make more and more contacts.

Documenting America, self-publishing, Suite 101

Two Nights of Research and Writing – What a Concept!

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After my post from work on Monday, about needing to have writing available worthy of eSP, I came home and took the evening to research and write. I had already done some research into my next genealogy article at Suite101.com, so I decided to write the article. I did so, it taking less than an hour after the research was done. I’m not up to 119 articles at that site.

Having finished that, I went to my book set Annals of America to look for something to write for my Documenting America series. I pulled out the volume covering 1895-1904, mainly because I hadn’t yet done anything after the Civil War and I want the series to cover much more than that. I found a good article, by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts (the first one, not the second). I read the article and found lots of good material for my article. By the time 11:00 PM rolled around I had the quotes identified (if not yet condensed), the introduction written, and a fair couple of paragraphs. Tonight I’ve been working on the actual chapter, and it now stands at 950 words, on its way to 1000 to 1200. This writing took me longer than expected, because I haven’t written this kind of piece for a while.

It all felt good. I’ve written very little since mid-December, except a Suite article and a couple of articles for Buildipedia. The reading I’ve done to research To Exile and Back was fine, as was my reading of Eudora Welty’s short memoir. But there’s just something about writing new material from original research. Kind of like home-grown tomatoes vs. store bought, if you get my drift.

I can’t abandon market research, or eSP research. Actually, I did some of the latter today by reading two writers’ blogs. But I have to say that carving out some writing time was really satisfying. After I check stocks, I’ll head upstairs, turning back down the thermostat in The Dungeon, sit in my reading chair—perhaps with coffee—and try to complete on paper the ending of my Documenting America piece. The title of it: “We Have Lost Sight of These Vast Interests”. Fitting for a writer on two days he sets aside for pure writing.

content writing, copyright, plagiarism, Suite 101

The Plagiarism Posse

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The writers at Suite101.com have become more active lately at fighting plagiarism and copyright infringement of their articles. Of course, that’s happened to me twice (that I know of): once at a site called gogreentoolbox.com, and one recently at a site called Market Mentalist. I’ve seen a number of my articles listed at news aggregation sites. These are sites that simply provide a link to an article found elsewhere, and maybe display the first 50 words or so. These are harmless, and the links may actually help a little to give your article “Google Juice”.

After my last event, which was more or less simultaneous to similar circumstances of other writers, we formed the Plagiarism Enforcement Posse. I lobbied for a name change, since we are fighting not only plagiarism but also copyright infringement (the two overlap but are not identical), but lost that argument. About 25 writers have signed on. The goal is to band together whenever someone on the site posts to the forums saying their articles have been swiped. We hope that with quick and overwhelming action the site owner will take the articles down, or the host will disable the site, or Google will de-index the site, removing their source of income.

Today another writer found a site that’s stealing articles, consolidate-debt-easy.com. Once he posted, the Posse was alerted. We began making comments to the stolen articles, saying they were stolen. Someone found the site owner’s e-mail address, in a country with abbreviation MD (not Maryland), and some of the posse e-mailed him DMCA violation notices. As of about 3:00 PM today, the four articles listed by Posse members as stolen were all removed.

Then the original writer, who just joined the Posse when this happened, just posted to say articles of seven other Suite writers are posted at this site. The theft is a curious thing. The articles are all posted saying the author is Danielle Nelson, but then at the bottom of the articles the name of the copyright holder is given—the original Suite101 author. And the site has no ads. Normally the site of an article thief is covered with ads. That’s the whole point: steal articles, keep the site with fresh content, hope to score well in search engines, and hope those who come to the site click on an ad. Or possibly they have ads that pay “per impression” rather than “per click”. If that’s the case readers don’t need to click on the ad for the thief to make money. But this site has no ads. What’s the point of stealing articles and plagiarizing them if you aren’t trying to get ad revenue?

So it looks as if the Posse is being successful this time, though much more work lies ahead with this one site. I wonder, though, if we are on a losing effort. The criminals are like the cockroaches we used to be plagued with in Kuwait. Every morning we went on roach patrol, killing those who came up through the drain the in the night into the sink and couldn’t get out. No matter how many we killed there were as many more the next morning. Same with copyright thieves. We’ll stamp out one today and find three more tomorrow and five the day after that. That’s the bad news.

But the good news is that these sites have a very low ranking with Google and the other search engines. The don’t score very well on search engine results pages. So maybe they aren’t taking much revenue away from us. Still, having your work stolen is disheartening at first, maddening second, and angering third. I hope the Posse rides on, into the night, through the day, finding the thieving cockroaches, capturing them, and herding them to the gallows. Cyber capital punishment is fitting, I think.

Don’t worry Neil, Damien, Joseph, Jim, Nick, Victoria, Asa, Brenda, Jennifer, and anyone else at Suite101 whose articles this site has stolen. We’ve got your back. Ride/write on.

copyright, plagiarism, Suite 101

Market Mentalist: Guilty of Plagiarism/Copyright Infringement

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Today I did a Google search for a couple of my articles at Suite101.com. I found this article:

Market Cycles Defined

also posted verbatim at this link:

MarketMentalist theft of my article

The owner of the site has given no contact information, and the domain registration is hidden.

I’m posting this here so that Google–and hence the world–will soon know that Market Mentalist is a bunch of thieves. Or maybe just one thief.

ETA on Wednesday Dec 1, 2010: I changed the title of this post to better describe what the site did. I also want to report in-post, not just in the comments, that the site owner took down my article immediately upon my request. Good for him. However, today I looked for more articles, and found another one of mine stolen at Market Mentalist. He included my name as the author, but he never asked my permission to post it and I obviously never granted permission. Hence, I have sent a DCMA violation notice to the legal department of his web hosting site.

ETA on Friday Dec 3, 2010: I sent that DMCA violation notice to the legal department of the host. Yesterday I received a return e-mail from the legal department, saying they had contacted the owner of the web page and he had taken down the offending material. Again, good on him. It is all resolved without a major fuss. I can now go about looking for other instances of my copyright being infringed and go after them.

Buildipedia, freelance writing, Suite 101

Freelancing – Can this Rose Bloom Again?

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It isn’t all as bad as the title of this post sounds. Actually, my Buildipedia.com writing goes well. I had a conference call with the editor this afternoon, and he gave me another assignment. Don’t know if it will be a $100 or $250 article, but I suspect the former. Ah well. But, with the articles already turned in and in the queue to publish, I’ve earned in the four figures there in just two months of publishing, three of writing. This new one and the one on asphalt pavement solar collectors will make it all the more. Can this continue? I hope so.

Unfortunately, Suite101.com does not go as well. Page views have recovered. They are up 46% in September over this time in August. September revenues, unfortunately, are barely ahead of August. I guess students clicking on my history and poetry articles don’t click on ads. Oh, for the detestable flat belly ad to come back, and a bunch of anorexic high school girls viewing my poetry articles to click on it!

There’s something I’m not getting about web writing for profit. For fun, yes; all my articles are enjoyable to write. But either I’m not getting the concept of search engine optimization, or writing to lead people to click ads, or finding profitable niches. The graph I’ve added to this article is a new stat I’m tracking, page views per article per day, for 2010. It’s now below where this was in 2009.
I could accept this easier if my page views were strong and growing. But they are not. In this blog post I gave the same stat. Comparing the two graphs you can see I’m no where near the peaks I was at late last year. If I grasp for a silver lining to this cloud, it’s that I’m about equal or a little ahead of last September based on page views per article per day. I guess I can get motivated for a while based on that.
The most disappointing aspect of freelancing is complete absence of any work other than these two gigs. The one I thought I had in March fell through. I find solace in that it wasn’t for much money. I don’t want to do more content writing. If I have to freelance to build a platform so that someday I can sell a novel or non-fiction book, I need more than what I’ve got. Why don’t I have more? Mainly time, I suppose. Time to find and study markets. Time to formulate ideas geared to those markets. Time to prepare dynamite pitches. Could I get work—even print work—if I could find the time to pursue it? I think so, though of course I have no guarantees.
So maybe the bloom hasn’t come off freelancing so much as it isn’t reforming on life in general, as measured by time to do what I want to do. Not much I can do about that, I suppose, except to carry on and hope for a window, somewhere, sometime, that allows for a bit more of what is needed for a writing career.
Buildipedia, Engineering, home improvements, Suite 101

Good Days and Bad Days

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I have so many facets to my life that it’s sometimes difficult to say, “Today was a good day,” or “Today was a bad day.” It might be good in one sense but not in another. Take yesterday for example. Was it a good day? Here’s the things that suggest so:

  • My weight was down to the lowest it’s been in months, back to that set-point weight I always bump against but can’t seem to get through. I think I have motivation to break through it this time.
  • The mediation preparation in the morning went well, although I think the City (our client) is too willing to compromise. If they let the contractor sue them and they counter-sued, I think the City would win on 14 points out of 15. What some people do to avoid litigation.
  • I had a pleasant lunch with our Transportation department leader, after the mediation prep. He’s leaving us in a couple of weeks, going back to Texas, so this was sort of our goodbye lunch. He’s a good friend, and an excellent engineer. Hmmm, should this be on the good list or the bad?
  • I studied some floodplain issues I had been putting off studying, since our young engineers have been asking me questions about these issues. I’m aiming to give a training class on this within a month’s time. And, I found I could probably get three articles for Suite101 out of my prep. Of course, the bad news part of this is that my Suite articles still aren’t earning much.
  • The editor at Buildipedia e-mailed me, asking me if I wanted to write a certain article for publication in late October. I believe this is the first time that an editor has solicited me, which is a good feeling. Now I just have to see if I can write the article he wants.
  • I prepared a mailing to our former pastor, returning a book I borrowed from him. I included copies of the adult Life Group lessons I wrote from the book. To the P.O. today to mail. One more item checked off the to-do list.
  • I balanced the checkbook, an easy task this month. I had one $2 error, on the third-to-last entry. Took less than 1/2 an hour.
  • Even though I was tired in the evening, I went to the basement bathroom and did the trim work on the painting. I had finished the primer touch-up the night before, so this is the finished color, a nice lavender the wife picked out. In fact, she came down and helped me with some of it. I’m sure we’ll need two coats, but it’s looking quite nice. Progress in home improvements by inches and feet.
  • Went to bed at the time I wanted to, and fell right to sleep; slept well until 5:15 AM, when the arthritis pain woke me and let me sleep only fitfully thereafter.

But in other ways, it was a bad day.

  • After a morning without too much pain, my rheumatoid arthritis flared up by the end of the evening, and I went to bed in considerable pain in my right wrist and arm, the place of “Arther’s” current interest. Woke up in the night with much stiffness (guess I said that already), and worse this morning. Typing is quite painful. Oh, wait, I can’t put that on yesterday’s good and bad list, can I?
  • My powers of concentration at work were poor. After the mediation prep took up the entire morning, I was not terribly productive. Yes, I did the floodplain issues study, but what should have taken me 2 hours took 4. I’ve got to recover my powers of concentration.
  • With the evening activities, I did almost no reading and no writing. The Suite floodplain article was 90 percent done, but I couldn’t push myself to pull up the article editing screen and do the work. I have two Buildipedia articles under contract, but I couldn’t push myself to spend even 15 minutes working on one of them.
  • I did nothing on stock trading. I had no trades on to take advantage of the recent market run-up. And I call myself a stock trader.
  • I missed my noon hour walk, although I walked 12 minutes in the evening, two laps around the circle plus up to the stop sign once. So maybe that wasn’t all bad.

So was it a good day? I say yes, though in many ways it good have been better. Today, except for the arthritis, is starting well.

Buildipedia, Engineering, home improvements, Suite 101, Writing

Improvements to Body, Home, and Writing

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The “hit by a bus feeling” I wrote about on Monday has ended. By bedtime on Monday I was much better. Woke up on Tuesday with the normal morning stiffness, but my right wrist and arm felt much, much better than it had for several days, perhaps even a week. When I weighed in at work on Tuesday I was down 5 pounds week over week, back on track for a net loss by the end of the year. Maybe the better eating, more exercise, and general level of activity did something positive.

Monday evening I was able to write an article for Suite101.com, the next in my series on stock trading. Tuesday noon I was able to finish the article on the Crystal Bridges Museum for Buildipedia.com and submit it. That leaves me two still under contract at Buildipedia, and of course as many as I want to write at Suite. The money at Buildipedia is nice, at Suite not so much, but I see little signs of improvement there. Perhaps these recent articles are generating ad clicks at a higher rate than some of my early ones.

Last night, instead of writing, I finished the primer coat in the downstairs bathroom. Well, almost finished. I found some places I missed on the trim, and other places I had failed to wipe away the dust of sanding. With wet paint in the room I didn’t dust and paint those. So looks like tonight will include a little more painting, maybe no writing.

And on both Monday and Tuesday, as the day ended, I had enough energy and brain power to read a good amount in Athanasius. I really liked Monday’s reading. It was in the place where Athanasius speaks about the Christian’s attitude toward death, basically that he despises rather than fears death. This was so close to one of John Wesley’s sermons on death that you know this is either a source work and derivative or the treatment of the subject hadn’t changed much in the 1,450 years between the two. I found it interesting reading.

So what will today hold, in this adventure called life, juggling devotion to God, being a husband, being an empty-nest father and grandfather, an engineer, a writer, and trying to maintain a house and property? I’ll be writing today, items needed for one of the papers I’ll present in February. So that’s good: any writing is worthwhile writing. I always feel good when I make progress in whatever I do.

Buildipedia, content writing, Suite 101, Writing

Writing writing writing

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Well, my third article is up at Buildipedia.com, the second in my five part series on construction contract administration. These are shorter articles and pay $100 each. I have also submitted my second feature article but they haven’t posted it yet. These are longer and pay $250 each. I’m quite pleased with the site, and hope they keep giving me assignments at a similar rate as now. I’m under contract to do three more contract admin articles, and one news article on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

I’ve also been preparing a longer article pitch (or could be three feature articles), on asphalt solar collectors. Not sure how I came across this concept, but I’m intrigued by it. Use existing and new asphalt pavement as solar collectors, with required retrofit. Worcester Polytech (the university I was accepted to but couldn’t afford to attend) is doing some good research into this, though the data I found is about two years old. I hope to make this an interview article, as well as research and apply good old common sense and engineering judgment.

At work today I wrote also. Item 1 was to re-write a contract for a water transmission main relocation. We are already under contract for this, but since the Arkansas transportation department is paying the bill, we have to restructure our contract in accordance with how they want to see it. As I worked on that, I had to retype the whole thing because the electronic file mysteriously disappeared. And I found the description of the work to be performed very inadequate. Item 2 was also marketing related, a brief scope of work to go in a proposal for a major development in the Tulsa suburb of Catoosa. Naturally the developer wants to destroy a floodplain and wants us to assist him. I wrote the scope for the flood study portion of the project.

Ideas for articles for Suite101.com continue to flow into my head faster than I can capture them on paper. The Catoosa flood study has given me ideas for about three articles I could write—and that’s before we do the study! The flood zone we will be working in is a Zone A, which has the least degree of attention to establishing it of all the regulatory flood zones. Consequently it is least written about of all the flood zones. I have an excellent FEMA manual on these zones, but it’s a difficult read. I could see doing a Frequently Asked Questions type article, or the three I mentioned, and doing a real service to the regulated community, maybe even my wallet.

My other area of concentration at Suite is in stock trading articles. I have four or five planned, and maybe over the next week I can get a couple of them done. I feel good about these articles being better earners than my US history and Robert Frost poetry articles. The ads Google puts on the pages are all relevant and reasonably attractive. A couple of Suite veterans (I don’t consider myself a veteran there yet) have said I ought to write about 20 trading articles and see if that makes a difference in my revenue. Since I earn less than 50 cents a day there on average, a hub of 20 articles should tell me something.

We, I’d better run and do some of that. Those articles don’t get written when I practice Internet writing on this blog. Also better add the checkbook since I paid some bills tonight. And, St. Athanasius and a NatGeo issue are beckoning to me.

Buildipedia, holidays, reading, Suite 101

Working Hard at Doing Nothing

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I should go back and review the post I wrote on Friday, about looking forward to a holiday that was both productive and restful. I wonder exactly what I put down for the productive part. Whatever it was, I’m sure I didn’t accomplish it.

On Friday afternoon neighbors offered us their spare tickets to the Saturday afternoon Northwest Arkansas Naturals game. They are the AA farm club of the Kansas City Royals. The stadium is only 30 miles from our house, but we haven’t gone to a game in the few years they’ve been in the area. Part of that is busyness; part is hoarding of restricted recreational dollars; part is simply I’ve fallen out of love with baseball. That was the game of my early youth, till I played and became a fan of football. Then baseball progressively fell out of my favor as football’s star rose. The 1993-94 major league strike ended baseball for me, though I was just looking for an excuse. The later NFL strike didn’t impact my love of that game.

Don’t get me wrong; baseball is a great game. It’s just that football is a much better game for me, and so it gets my limited sports watching hours. But we decided that the diversion would be good, so we went. We had four tickets but had trouble finding anyone to go with us. Finally found one person. We both enjoyed the game. Fortunately our seats were just in the shade the whole game and we didn’t have to fight the sun. The Naturals lost to the Tulsa Drillers, mainly because of a stupid handling between the pitcher and first baseman of a foul ball. It would have ended the first inning. Instead the Drillers went on to score three unearned runs, and eventually won the game 5-2.

The rest of the weekend was marred by minor physical ailments. Last week I was fighting a mild summer cold. I thought it was pretty much over Friday night, but it came back Sunday. Spent most of that day and Monday just resting to try to knock it out. Also on Monday my rheumatoid arthritis flared up. Well, some of it may be osteo as well, in my wrists. Monday morning it was all I could do to crawl out of bed to my reading chair in the living room or to the sun porch. The only physical exercise I got was a ten minute walk down and up the hill and around the block Monday evening. However, by the end of the day I felt pretty good. Cold symptoms gone; rheumatoid gone; osteo better; energy level up.

I finished The Adams Chronicles on Monday and wrote my book review about it. Also on Sunday-Monday I wrote my next article on contract administration for buildipedia.com and sent it off. And I did research for and started writing my next stock trading article for suite101.com. I checked my reading pile for what I’m supposed to read next and decided I didn’t want to read that right now. Rather than re-shuffle the pile, and not feeling like tackling the magazines and newsletters that are piling up again, I decided to try reading Athanasius’ The Incarnation of the Word of God—in English of course. I got through a couple of chapters of it and kind of understand it. I’ll have to finish it when my powers of concentration are at their greatest and distractions at their least; and not necessarily in consecutive sittings.

Tonight I hope to finish and post that Suite 101 article, and maybe get through a couple of mags and/or newsletters. And I’ll take another look at my reading pile and see what looks good next.

Buildipedia, home improvements, reading, Suite 101, Writing

Reading, Writing, and…Demolition

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After a busy weekend last weekend, painting the walls in the family room and stripping wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom, I took it easy on the physical labor this past week. Did some light work in that bathroom, removing bits of paper we’d missed. Put some pictures back on the walls, and restored some other things in the family room. But I didn’t undertake anything major.

During the week we had the air conditioner man out to look and see if he could see what is causing the staining on the ceiling in our computer room and in the guest bedroom next to it. He said he couldn’t see anything with the limited view he had, and that we would need to tear out some of the fixed ceiling to tell anything. The restoration people said their meters detected wetness in the ceiling. Insurance wouldn’t cover what caused the problem, but after we fixed the problem they would restore everything, including ceiling that we had to tear out to find the problem.

So yesterday, after washing windows, screens, and window sills in the computer room, I began tearing out ceiling. The first piece comes out with the most difficulty, of course, as you pierce that nice finish and use the hole to begin the tear out. I started where the stain looked worst, and the first piece felt a little wet to me. But it was cold, being right near an AC duct, so maybe I was feeling the cold and thought it was wet.

I kept at it, removing enough so I could see what was up there. It’s a spaghetti mix of water pipe, AC duct, drain lines, and electric and telephone. All the ceiling board seemed dry, though staining on the back side sort of mimicked the stains visible below, except more extensive. Looking through the joists, into the ceiling above the bedroom, I could see that the hot and cold to the washing machine was right above the stains. But nothing looked wet.

So maybe the water came from two problems. A year (or maybe more) ago we had to replace the garbage disposal, a hole having been worn into the side of it. We figured this was the cause of the staining, as the kitchen if right above that part of the computer room (The Dungeon, as I fondly call it). But the staining in the bedroom showed up much later. Maybe it’s a leak associated with the washer. Or, the main house drainage line for the upstairs is right in that area too. Maybe it’s something to do with that.

It appears that we will have to run some appliances and watch and see if the area above the stains looks wet. That means everything will be torn up for a while, since we won’t have the new carpet put down (as a result of the hot water heater leaking) until we have the ceiling fixed, which won’t be till we find the leak.

In the meanwhile, I’ve got lots of reading done, not in a book, but in accumulated magazines. I finished the latest edition of Poets and Writers today, finished an old (2008) National Geographic yesterday, and got some good information about a sci fi subject I was thinking of. Have about finished reading the latest Quadangles, the URI alumni mag. And it seems that I read something else earlier in the week. Oh, I’ve read some in an investment/trading book, and have brainstormed a series of articles for Suite101.com on the subject. I hope to write one tonight.

So all in all a productive time. I’m fairly well caught up on mags, so will go back to my reading pile and see what book is next.