Creatively Techie

Probably akin more to this

My husband and I are both creative souls, but in vastly different ways.  I write creative and not-so creative things.  I create beautiful things.  I sing.  He programs computers to do his bidding, codes long strings of letters and numbers that look like something that happens when I bang my head on the keyboard, and he makes pixels do interesting things on small screens.  He also complains that sometimes, when he talks about work, I glaze over.  I have this image of myself with my mouth drooped open, a tiny rivulet of drool headed down to my chin, with a vacant, after-the-lobotomy-in-one-flew-over-the-cuckoo's-nest stare.  I hope it's not quite that bad.

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.]]

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!

Meet the Bitch: My Inner Editor

She really is a bitch.  She's precise and cranky and perfectionistic.  I don't mind so much, cause I need her to be that way when she's editing what I write, but that Inner Editor, she can scare people away.

And that worries me, because I just handed off a manuscript to a great friend, one of the sweetest, kindest, loveliest ladies I know, and Miss Inner Editor had been having her way with that script.  She ran out two pens doing so.  She likes ink, Miss IE.

The first time I let Miss IE loose on a friend, it changed our relationship forever.  When I let her loose on my husband's writing, his reaction broke my heart.  I've tried to tame her, and I can rein her in at first, but that godawful honesty gets in the way sometimes.

I love to read as much as I love to write... maybe even more... and I tend to even get Miss IE's ire up when I'm reading badly written prose.  She was rewriting passages of Twilight madly, frantically, as I read that series.  Lately she's been getting all giggly over reading "Mahalo" being thrown around in a book I'm reading - "Spider Bones" - which is taking place in Hawaii.  It shouldn't be funny, it's just where I work, but for some reason, Miss IE is tickled by it.

So, you're wondering how things are going at Mahalo, are you? Me too, kind of.  I've been having issues with being sick with an unbelievable sinus infection, and it's made meeting my minimums a sketchy prospect at best.  So far I'm managing, though I find myself sometimes inwardly cussing at my outer editors - the ones on the site.  It's not really their fault, it's an issue where they may not catch everything they want me to change on their first read-through, and then on the second read-through, after I've made the changes they did ask for, there are more changes to be made on the second go.  Confusing enough for you?  Yeah, me too.

It's just frustrating, when I think I've fixed something to still have more work on it.  It makes my hourly wage go down (which is averaging at Mahalo something like $4 an hour I guess, counting revision work).  I haven't been sleeping much, which isn't helping the sinus infection, and have had a two day migraine, so I'm probably just cranky about it all.  These are two of the pages that required double revisions: http://www.mahalo.com/trenton-nj and http://www.mahalo.com/toledo-oh It was purely a matter of something no one had on the gold standard guide page, but that appeared on the gold standard page itself.  What I mean by that is, we have a page that lists what you have to do for each type of page, then an example.  You obviously can't follow everything on the sample page, because every city (or author or movie or whatever) is different, but you kind of have to figure out what's wanted.  If you can't, you'll be revising it once the editor lets you know!

Where have all the Novels gone?

When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher assigned us to write a paper on where we would be in ten years.  I know now that this was a pretty typical assignment, but at the time I completely adored my teacher - Mr Bob Sheldon, I wonder where he's at now? - and not just because he wrote in my yearbook that I was his bright and shining star.  I really, genuinely wanted to impress him.  And so, as a result, I wrote a long and impressive essay that detailed how in ten years I would have graduated college, married, had three children and produced no less than five New York Times bestselling novels.

Yeah.

I wanted to be a writer from pretty far back, much before that essay, but it surprises me now how easy I thought it would be.  Everyone told me I had talent; friends, teachers, even the parents of friends, and so I decided it would be easy to write novels and get them published.  My favourite authors at the time - Stephen King especially - seemed to publish prolifically, and I saw no reason why I couldn't do the same thing.

Unfortunately for me, I came of age in a time when short story magazines were dying rapidly, and the novel didn't seem far behind.  No one was buying books, I was told, everyone cared about this new thing - the INTERNET, and print media was on the way out.

It may still be hanging on by a shoestring, but I think people weren't far off with that assessment.  I agreed with the predictions and went on to pursue other things that interested me.  By 25, I had done none of the things in my essay, but had explored a multitude of other areas that turned out to be just right for me to explore.  Today I do write to pay my bills... just not bestselling novels, or novels of any kind for that matter.  I still write fiction, but it's just for fun.  To pay  my bills, I write for a few different freelance agencies, and that's what this blog is all about - the life of a freelance writer in a digital age.

The primary site I'm working for is Mahalo, where I'm what's known as a guide.  My husband works there as well - but as a walkthrough writer, and we have vastly different experiences, connections, and types of interactions there.  I'll see if at some point I can convince him to ghostblog for me and talk about what it's like to write walkthroughs.  From my POV, writing walkthroughs means getting to play games all day, but what do I know? Check out the very first walkthrough he did for the site here:  http://www.mahalo.com/splatterhouse-walkthrough