Click my articles, I will click on yours

Today on myLot, I was reading a discussion where the poster was asking for people to form a partnership with him on one of the writing sites (one where you get paid by the page view).

His idea (or was it a she---I couldn't tell from the avatar or the user name---doesn't matter) was that if you become his friend on the site, and click on all of his articles, then he will click on all of yours. "That way both of our earnings could go up!"

Hmmm...I am a happy little cynic: if you click on his articles, how do you know that they are going to return the favor? Furthermore, isn't this a violation of most of the user agreements that the writing sites use?

And here is the real tragedy for you. If you actually want to make more money, you are actually better off writing more articles and advertising them rather than doing a scheme like this.

Don't believe me: try such a scheme with a willing writing friend and track the amount of clicks you do, the amount of time that you waste, and how little the two of you earn. Then get back to the typewriter (my age is showing) and continue writing. Forget such schemes; they do not work.

Whole three days lost

Well, just in time for the three day weekend, my wife got sick. So I ended up doing no writing this weekend, and next to no work on preparing for June 5th Open Full Moon Ritual that I am leading. And true to form, having dealt with her being sick for three whole days, and getting nothing accomplished, today all I have really done is to stroll around a new Golden Dawn forum. Hopefully, tommorrow I will get back into work mode. As for the rest of today, I think I am going to go read and nap with my familiar.

Writing short descriptions of Egyptian gods/goddesses

Making progress on getting ready for the June 5th OFM. Wrote out ten 25 (give or take a couple) word descriptions for some of the Egyptian gods/goddesses I plan on using.

I am glad that I have started working on this project already, rather than waiting until the last minute. Given the amount of work that I did on it yesterday and this afternoon, I can see that it is going to take a lot more work to get ready for.

The short descriptions may be the easiest part of the whole project. After all, I just need to tell the name of the god/goddess and their baseline Golden Dawn function. It is not like I am actually trying to condense three thousand years of Egyptian and Hermetic lore into twenty-five words.

A couple of samples of what I ending up with:

There are two forms of Anubis used by GD: one in the hall, one outside. One functions as a guide; the other as a protector.

In her aspect as goddess of wisdom, Isis was the patron of the first GD lodge. Her function is fertility.

Amseht is the humanheaded son of Horus. He is the vice-regent of the element of fire, and the guardian of the initiate's airy body.

Hardest ten pages

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that these ten pages about Willa Cather will be the hardest ten pages that I have ever written. It may just be the number of interruptions that I am experiencing: bad timing events that keep throwing me off my stride. I am going to try a couple of banishings and see if that helps.

Bad timing on marketplace

Today, I recieved one of the Helium Marketplace alerts, the email for those who have written articles similiar to those currently being requested by someone in the marketplace. And I promptly said "Damn it" when I saw the deadline---this Sunday.

Talk about bad timing. There is no way I can even hack out a single astrology article before the deadline; I have finals to cope with. I still have a week to go, plus one day. At this point, I have to study for two finals, and write twenty pages for papers that function as finals (plus complete research).

And I know that I can do the type of stuff these requests are asking for; after all, I started to write astrology articles for one of the college newspapers this last semester. But there is no way that I can make the deadline for this set.

I wonder if they will have any more marketplace requests later this year. I hope so. But if nothing else, I have another marker about how much to price the astrology articles I intend to write this summer. That is something positive, isn't it?

Coming around the bend

I can so tell that I am nearing the end of the college semester. For the past couple of nights, I have insisted on turning on the television; and when not wasting time in front of the idiot box or playing games, I have found myself working on the Bast Temple website or researching the upcoming June Open Full Moon Ritual. Even mowing the lawn is preferable to doing any more homework.

I am eager to get back to regular writing, despite the fact that I am doing my best to ignore the twenty or so pages I need to hack out for classes by Tuesday (not to mention studying for two essay style finals). And I have so been resisting the urge to write a couple of Golden Dawn related articles.

It is probably hard for non-writers to understand how a writer's mind can associate writing with recreation. But we do, or at least I do.

Here to the final week and a half of the semester: may it not be too brutal.