I mentioned in my last video post that there would be another needlework one soon, that featured a better shot of the husband's Christmas gift, and this is it. Remember, no telling! It's been hell trying to work on such a big project and keep it a secret around here. He obviously has figured out that he's getting a stitched present from all the furitive stuffing of parts in bags and shuffing of things around when he gets home early or unexpectedly! But then, he knows at least one of his gifts every year will be hand made, so it's not that big of a surprise. Last year it was a scarf I designed as a gift for my dad. When he saw it, he was so jealous and wanted it for himself.... so I wound up making him one too, hah!
Monday, 31 October 2011
Book Review - Born in Our Hearts: Stories of Adoption
Born in Our Hearts: Stories of Adoption by Filis CaseyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This heartwarming anthology of adoption stories made my heart ache. I desperately wanted to take so many of the children home and love them forever - I could feel the impact they made on their adoptive families, and the love between those children and the people of their forever homes shone through the pages beautifully.
The book ended with a rather startling - for me, at least - tale involving an adoptive mother and her new son having an encounter with the Dalai Lama in a botanical gardens during one of his visits to the United States. It spoke to me more deeply than many other things have and oddly felt like a kind of reassurance that we're on the right path, my husband and I, in pursuing adoption ourselves.
For those not in the know, we converted to Buddhism several years ago, and the peace, awareness, and acceptance it taught us carried us through some of the worst times in our lives with some measure of life still in us. I greatly respect the Dalai Lama and read his teachings with the devotion of an avid student, so this blessing... it said to me something more personal that it was here, in this book, on this day.
View all my reviews
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Book Review - The Millionaires
The Millionaires by Brad MeltzerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Have you ever read a book and thought, "This would make a great vintage Tom Cruise action movie." Not current Tom Cruise, mind you, because he's too old to be a great Oliver (the leading character) now, but in his "The Firm" era he'd have rocked this role.
Speaking of which, if you like books like "The Firm", you'll love "The Millionaires." It's full of upper-crust rich folk banking intrigue, Secret Service agent action, and even a little bit of Disney imagineers and a race through the happiest place on earth to put the icing on the cake. Oliver is a bit player at a bank for the wealthy, an associate working under one of the partners, slaving away in hopes of one day making it into an Ivy League business school for his MBA in a bid to "save" his family from a mountain of medical debt.
One of Oliver's responsibilities involves wire transfers of unclaimed accounts, which are transferred over to the government. A stray fax with some inconsistencies pointed out by younger brother Charlie - an underling at the bank and notorious "Good Time Charlie" of sorts - sparks an idea. What's a perfect crime? When no one knows a crime took place? Who would know, then, if unclaimed money went missing?
If you like action, mystery and intrigue, I recommend this one highly. It's very entertaining, and led to several nights of staying up late to catch just a few more pages.
View all my reviews
Thursday, 27 October 2011
Needlework 1: Starting Threads
In which you get to see a tiny shot of a Christmas present I'm making for my husband. There's a much better shot in the next video in this series, which I made tonight and should be posted in a few days. I'm worried about finishing it in time but I think he's going to love it. No telling him what it is, now! He's been banned from watching the videos already!
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Creatively Techie
 |
| Probably akin more to this |
The truth is, when he starts talking in acronyms I know I'm in trouble. I know a lot more about computers than many of my friends and family do, so when he talks about setting up permissions on his server I'm good. When he goes into coding talk, I'm completely lost, but attempt - usually - to look as though I'm still paying attention. Mentally, I'm preparing a shopping list for the craft store in my head. Oh, right I need to get more of the 931 embroidery floss and I should look for a nice fluffy yarn for that scarf for Mom's birthday, maybe some homespun?.... Then I glance over at him and am getting the glare. I've glazed over again.
Still and all, the talk has made some sort of a difference to me. Recently, some of the basic templates at one of the companies I work for were redone. Everyone else went "Meh, it looks mostly the same." Me? I went "Oh my god, look at all those rounded corners, that took hours!" Because yeah, it does. Not on graphics, but on tables and style sheets, those rounded corners are a real pain to get working correctly. How do I know? There was a Saturday devoted to that on the new website for my husband's IT business, Effortless IT.* You see, I finally convinced him that always giving away his services is counter-productive.Just as I'm about to start giving away my own services, by creating free teaching videos for crochet instead of being paid for classes and lessons. I do this with a higher intent in mind, of course. As mentioned in a previous post, I am working on building up my application to become an "Expert" at DMS. I am still looking for ideas for future videos, by the by, if you have any suggestions.
The fun part of it all is, my creative outlet has become writing about a computer network/IT guy much like my husband. In fact, very very much like my husband. The wife in the story might even be kind of like me. Her dad is definitely my dad. While the story is fictional, the people are people I know. It's the first time I've written something truly lifted from real people since a crazed fan/stalker thought sure my fiction was "real" back when I was in college and managed to look up and call my parents somehow to talk to them about it. Talk about creepy.. and the only similarity in that case was that my story was about a girl who went to the same college as me. If you're interested in an excerpt, click the "Read More" below.
Do you write about real people in your fiction, slightly altered from their own reality? Has it ever had repercussions for you?
*[[Thanks to learning when the glassy eyed stare starts, he's getting really talented at talking about tech subjects in a way that non-techies can understand. Check out the blog on his site to see what I mean.]]
Monday, 24 October 2011
Writing Through Hard Times
One of my intentions on starting this blog, was to talk about what it's really like to be a writer who creates internet content. I haven't done that in a while.
I think that everyone knows that someone out there creates the web pages they surf every day. I don't think they give much thought to how that's done, or who the (wo)man behind the curtain might be. When you get a newsletter in your email box from a retailer, do you think about who composed it? When you do a quick google search to figure out how to baste a turkey when it's tented with foil, do you also research the credentials of the person who wrote the article?
There's a problem on the internet today, and that is the proliferation of bad and incorrect content. It's something google has tried to address with their new Panda system for search engine optimization. This algorithm not only rates the page that is returned in a search result, but evaluates how many ads are on the page, as well as the quality of content on other random pages on the site. This has led to some interesting results.
One of the primary websites that I write for through Demand Media Studios is eHow. When eHow started out on the web, it had a bad reputation for poorly researched and poorly written content. It was similar to sites like Associated Content, where anyone can set themselves up as a writer, write whatever they like, and generate a stream of income based on ad clicks from their pages. It resulted in a huge number of pages that were complete garbage. When Demand Media Studios took over, they did so replete with trained writers and editors who would fact-check and correct basic writing issues, with the intention of creating a better type of content for readers. It seemed to work, until Panda came along.
What Panda has done in general is to make pages such as eHow and Mahalo fall in their rankings. The problem with this is, of course, when it comes to Demand Media Studios, they are making less money. That means they can spend less to create new content. So how do they fix this?
Well, for Demand, it meant rolling out a program called First Look, which allowed the highest rated writers on their site a first chance to grab the few titles they are still releasing. Over the last few months, the titles have gone from a tidal wave, to a river, to a trickle, to a dry desert where everyone sits and clicks F5 all day hoping that the mirage on the horizon is real, and eventually a title will show up to be claimed.
I'm lucky. I'm in the small percent that made it into First Look. I want to feel proud about this, but I'm conflicted. Other writers are getting evicted from their homes, are unable to feed their children, are having vehicles repossessed. Granted, I got a little late on a couple of bills when the titles dried up, but it was nothing serious, and now that I'm finding titles again, I'm able to catch up. Others are so depressed about their financial situations that they are hinting about suicide on the Demand forums. They might just be drama queens. But might is the operative word, and it's a little scary to think that those ten titles I grabbed fresh off the title editor's desk might have made the difference in someone else losing their home. Or their struggle with depression and their life.
I deal with guilt now, whenever I write a title. I also deal with a huge amount of fear. If my scores drop below a 4.0, I'll be booted from the First Look program. Titles are graded on a five point scale, and many copy editors have admitted to never giving out a five, because they think an article would have to be perfect to earn that, and no article is ever perfect (it's actually supposed to indicate "excellent" while a four is to indicate "above average", a three "average", a two "below average" and a one "poor"). My heart races as I go over every article. Did I leave an extra space after a period there? Did I use a serial comma here? And if I did, will the editor like it or not? While Demand requires that we write in AP style, not all editors actually edit in AP style. More than once I have had editors add serial commas and mark down my score because I didn't use them when AP style dictates that they not be used.
There are also some scary, vindictive copy editors out there. From the stories on the forum, I am not the only one who has run into them. Rather than risk a rejection when I get a rewrite from one of them, I let the article expire. This happened recently, and it hurt my heart to let a title go when there are so few out there for the grasping and I need the money. Still, a rejection hurts your scorecard more than an abandoned rewrite does, and that is also a part of your grade; the number of articles accepted immediately, the number of rewrites, the number of abandoned rewrites, and the rejections. I'm lucky enough to have never had a rejection, but my abandoned rewrite percentage hovers at about 5% because of my fear of them.
I try not to talk about editors much, because I'm worried that they'll read it and edit me more harshly in the future because of it. Demand is terribly unbalanced that way, because writers never know the identity of their editors. They can see our names - and occasionally an editor will use my name in the notes, which is both nice and scary at the same time. They post on the same forum, so I'm careful with my words, though I have made a comment or two about how to address craft type articles so as to get them through (write like you're addressing a first grade art class, for instance) that might have been misinterpreted. Fear. Suspicion. It's everywhere at DMS now.
Does this lead to better writing? I don't know. For me, it leads to obsessive researching and writing that almost makes the pay for the articles not worth the hours I spend crafting them.
DMS is starting to move into a new direction, with experts instead of just writers. How that is going to pan out is yet to be seen, though I'm working on setting up the kinds of resources I need now, to be in place so I can apply for an expert position. This blog is a part of that, as is my brand-spanking-new Twitter account, and my facebook fan page. If you are a fan of this blog and you twitter or facebook, I would appreciate your support. My twitter username is CraftyDivaKat, and I go by the same on facebook, with the page located here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Crafty-Diva-Kat/180386195377438?ref=ts&sk=wall
Also, if you have any requests for videos or how-to articles on some of the things that I do, including crochet, needlework, knitting, scrapbooking, altered books and more, please let me know with a comment here, a post on the facebook page, or a tweet. I'm starting a series of basic crochet instruction videos soon, including eventually a tutorial on making fishnets out of stretchy sock yarn, something I've had many requests to teach. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
I think that everyone knows that someone out there creates the web pages they surf every day. I don't think they give much thought to how that's done, or who the (wo)man behind the curtain might be. When you get a newsletter in your email box from a retailer, do you think about who composed it? When you do a quick google search to figure out how to baste a turkey when it's tented with foil, do you also research the credentials of the person who wrote the article?
There's a problem on the internet today, and that is the proliferation of bad and incorrect content. It's something google has tried to address with their new Panda system for search engine optimization. This algorithm not only rates the page that is returned in a search result, but evaluates how many ads are on the page, as well as the quality of content on other random pages on the site. This has led to some interesting results.
One of the primary websites that I write for through Demand Media Studios is eHow. When eHow started out on the web, it had a bad reputation for poorly researched and poorly written content. It was similar to sites like Associated Content, where anyone can set themselves up as a writer, write whatever they like, and generate a stream of income based on ad clicks from their pages. It resulted in a huge number of pages that were complete garbage. When Demand Media Studios took over, they did so replete with trained writers and editors who would fact-check and correct basic writing issues, with the intention of creating a better type of content for readers. It seemed to work, until Panda came along.
What Panda has done in general is to make pages such as eHow and Mahalo fall in their rankings. The problem with this is, of course, when it comes to Demand Media Studios, they are making less money. That means they can spend less to create new content. So how do they fix this?
Well, for Demand, it meant rolling out a program called First Look, which allowed the highest rated writers on their site a first chance to grab the few titles they are still releasing. Over the last few months, the titles have gone from a tidal wave, to a river, to a trickle, to a dry desert where everyone sits and clicks F5 all day hoping that the mirage on the horizon is real, and eventually a title will show up to be claimed.
I'm lucky. I'm in the small percent that made it into First Look. I want to feel proud about this, but I'm conflicted. Other writers are getting evicted from their homes, are unable to feed their children, are having vehicles repossessed. Granted, I got a little late on a couple of bills when the titles dried up, but it was nothing serious, and now that I'm finding titles again, I'm able to catch up. Others are so depressed about their financial situations that they are hinting about suicide on the Demand forums. They might just be drama queens. But might is the operative word, and it's a little scary to think that those ten titles I grabbed fresh off the title editor's desk might have made the difference in someone else losing their home. Or their struggle with depression and their life.
I deal with guilt now, whenever I write a title. I also deal with a huge amount of fear. If my scores drop below a 4.0, I'll be booted from the First Look program. Titles are graded on a five point scale, and many copy editors have admitted to never giving out a five, because they think an article would have to be perfect to earn that, and no article is ever perfect (it's actually supposed to indicate "excellent" while a four is to indicate "above average", a three "average", a two "below average" and a one "poor"). My heart races as I go over every article. Did I leave an extra space after a period there? Did I use a serial comma here? And if I did, will the editor like it or not? While Demand requires that we write in AP style, not all editors actually edit in AP style. More than once I have had editors add serial commas and mark down my score because I didn't use them when AP style dictates that they not be used.
There are also some scary, vindictive copy editors out there. From the stories on the forum, I am not the only one who has run into them. Rather than risk a rejection when I get a rewrite from one of them, I let the article expire. This happened recently, and it hurt my heart to let a title go when there are so few out there for the grasping and I need the money. Still, a rejection hurts your scorecard more than an abandoned rewrite does, and that is also a part of your grade; the number of articles accepted immediately, the number of rewrites, the number of abandoned rewrites, and the rejections. I'm lucky enough to have never had a rejection, but my abandoned rewrite percentage hovers at about 5% because of my fear of them.
I try not to talk about editors much, because I'm worried that they'll read it and edit me more harshly in the future because of it. Demand is terribly unbalanced that way, because writers never know the identity of their editors. They can see our names - and occasionally an editor will use my name in the notes, which is both nice and scary at the same time. They post on the same forum, so I'm careful with my words, though I have made a comment or two about how to address craft type articles so as to get them through (write like you're addressing a first grade art class, for instance) that might have been misinterpreted. Fear. Suspicion. It's everywhere at DMS now.
Does this lead to better writing? I don't know. For me, it leads to obsessive researching and writing that almost makes the pay for the articles not worth the hours I spend crafting them.
DMS is starting to move into a new direction, with experts instead of just writers. How that is going to pan out is yet to be seen, though I'm working on setting up the kinds of resources I need now, to be in place so I can apply for an expert position. This blog is a part of that, as is my brand-spanking-new Twitter account, and my facebook fan page. If you are a fan of this blog and you twitter or facebook, I would appreciate your support. My twitter username is CraftyDivaKat, and I go by the same on facebook, with the page located here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Crafty-Diva-Kat/180386195377438?ref=ts&sk=wall
Also, if you have any requests for videos or how-to articles on some of the things that I do, including crochet, needlework, knitting, scrapbooking, altered books and more, please let me know with a comment here, a post on the facebook page, or a tweet. I'm starting a series of basic crochet instruction videos soon, including eventually a tutorial on making fishnets out of stretchy sock yarn, something I've had many requests to teach. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
Book Review - In Search of April Raintree
In Search of April Raintree: Critical Edition by Beatrice Culleton MosionierMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
There ahave been more than a few times over the last couple of years that my book club has chosen a book that I never would have looked twice at. This was one of them.
When I mentioned to a few non-book-club friends that I was reading this book, they surprised me by telling me they'd read it in high school, and as I researched a little, I discovered that this is a fairly common school novel for teens in Canada. Being Canadian by immigration rather than birth, I started to look forward to reading it; in discussions I've discovered that my husband and I vary vastly on the books we read in school, and the same goes with some of my friends. They weren't taken by To Kill a Mockingbird or The Grapes of Wrath, two of the books in school that taught me to absolutely love books, and I realize looking back, that those are fairly classic American tales. In Search of April Raintree on the other hand is a classic Canadian tale of a Metis woman, and her struggles in Canadian society.
April, born to alcoholic parents in a poor neighborhood, doesn't really understand how different her situation is from most Canadian kids until she is taken from her parents, along with her little sister Cheryl, and is placed in foster care. Oh, she was aware she was different, particularly from white children as they taunted her and others in the playground. She knew that her family looked different, acted differently, were seperate from white Canada, but that rift became accentuated when she was placed in a white foster family.
My heart broke for April as she struggled to come to terms with her nationality, attempting to both pass for white and embrace her native half in various parts of her life. Her denial through school was easy enough, as she looked more "white" than her sister, but that relationship gave her away every time.
The style of writing in this book is sparse, and it reads much as though it was written for a younger audience (which I'm guessing it was). I usually like YA books, but most contemporary YA is written in a more adult style for a more sophisticated breed of young adults than I think this was originally written for. As such, I found myself rolling my eyes and being annoyed in some places. The dialogue is stilted and sometimes unbelievable, but the lessons and experiences in the novel are worth the occasional frustration with the writing itself. In Search of April Raintree speaks of a wound to the Metis people of Canada that has festered for generations, and has infected both sides of the divide, from the stereotyped "poor, drunk Indians" to the ignorant white populace who lost out on a chance at cultural diversity. It's sad, almost unbearably so, to follow a child's suffering, but has it's moments of triumph as well, which is what earned it a three-star rating from me, despite the technical problems with the prose.
This isn't a relaxing read, or necessarily one you'll enjoy, but it can be an important one if you are interested in becoming more sensitive to the plight of the Metis people.
View all my reviews
Friday, 21 October 2011
Book Review - The Thirteen
The Thirteen by Susie MoloneyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Imagine how much scarier suburbia would be if the annoyingly perfect snobs on the cul-de-sac earned the title "witch" in more than just the euphemistic sense? When Paula returns to Haven Woods, the suburb where she grew up, to visit her ailing mother she is faced with the ghosts of her childhood and the witches of the present. And when those witches need to appease their "father" it becomes a dangerous situation for her young daughter, Rowan and her ebbing romance with a friend from her adolescent days who is also a recent returnee to the town.
This is a fun, fantastical twist on modern life in the 'burbs. It's an entertaining read, with bewitching characters, just right for a cool October evening.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
The Presence
The Presence by John SaulMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Mysterious mix of sci fi and mystery on the islands of Hawaii. Suspenseful, quick-ish read.
View all my reviews
Monday, 10 October 2011
The Ninth Wife
The Ninth Wife by Amy StollsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Ninth Wife is a story about relationships and marriage told from the perspective of a 35 year old unmarried woman. Bess is in love with Rory, who has been married eight times before, and should she see it through, she'll become his ninth wife. It's a prospect that seems shaky to her, especially given the pain that she has seen coming from marriage, whether it is because of the horror of separation from death, as happened to her mother when her father died in her childhood, or as happened to her friend and neighbor Cricket, whose husband died several years earlier, leaving him trying to fill his husbands shoes and become the man his husband used to be, or the way after a 60 + year old marriage like her grandparents have, things might start to be more about hurting each other than loving each other.
The book boasts a fascinating cast of characters that Bess meets along the way, on her quest to discover Rory's past via his ex-wives, and exposes the best and worst that happens when we love one another.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
The Genesis Secret
The Genesis Secret by Tom KnoxMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Cleverly told, this tale of a detective from Scotland Yard and a reporter from London weaves together science and adventure in a heady mix. There are some truly gruesome moments - historically, humans have been inventively and disarmingly cruel to one another, as both the detective and the scientist discover when the leader of a gang of not-quite-thugs (more like literate, intelligent college kids) begin re-enacting human sacrifice as it has been practiced in various cultures throughout the ages. Meanwhile, a well-known archaeologist is murdered at his dig site, a site that the reporter was doing a story on, as it may have held evidence of the very earliest human civilization.
This book reminded me of a cross between "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova (one of my favourite all-time books, so that's a compliment there) and Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" which I found enjoyable, but wasn't a huge hit with me. Throw in a female Indiana Jones type who becomes a sidekick (and fiancee) to the journalist and you have a well-rounded story that will keep you up late reading. There are some extremely gruesome scenes, which can be skimmed past without losing plot points if you have a weak stomach (or heart, like me.... wow humans were historically cruel.)
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