#did I once read this was a micro-blogging site...?

[callipraxia]

Just spent about half an hour working out my answer to the question, "so, if I were to regard the plot of Gravity Falls as part of a chess game played to put Bill in check...who would fill all of the roles?" Because this is obviously a sensible use of my time after midnight...Plus, by sheer coincidence, I actually have sixteen characters who can logically compose Team Good Guys! To demonstrate, with explanations below the cut now that I know how those work on this site:

Pawns: Filbrick, Caryn, Shermie, Shermie's wife/girlfriend/whoever Shermie had a kid with, Dipper and Mabel's parents, Robbie, and Pacifica.

Knights: Dipper and Wendy

Bishops: Fiddleford and Gideon

Rooks: Stan and Soos

Queen: Mabel

King: Ford

Those last two should not be read as implying any weird ships, because...ew. Rather, it's all in how their actions correspond to the relevant pieces/the fact that they are in fact arguably both ex-royalty (Ford's the ex-king of the Finger Dimension, one could interpret Jeff the Gnome's comments as meaning that Mabel was, briefly and on a technicality, Queen of the Gnomes before she busted out the leaf blower). As for the more relevant bits:

The information in Ford's head makes him a vital piece for Team Good Guys: if Bill extracts said information, the game's over. Ford is also very limited in his options (the piece can move in any direction, but only one square at a time) and is just as easily trapped into check by his own pieces - it's his attachment to Dipper and Mabel which nearly allowed Bill to pull off a ‘smothered mate’-like situation.

Mabel is a strong piece with a very respectable track record of violence toward Bill. She can also move in any direction in a very literal way (grappling hook!) and this ability is what gives her uncles time to execute the twin switch which 'won the game.' On which note...

I think I read that it's different now (full disclosure, I'm a lousy chess player), but at one point in the history of the game, castling rules allowed an unmoved King to swap places with one of his unmoved Rooks. The Rooks, meanwhile, are moving buildings that flatten pretty much all in their path. Seemed like a description anyone Stan ever punched would agree with. Soos could go here or as Knight II; I stuck him here because he takes over the same role as Stan at the end of the series (plus, you know it would make him so happy).

If Soos is with the Rooks, then Dipper and Wendy become the Knights. Look at them in Weirdmageddon I! And in general (Dipper was pretty much born not moving the same way as anyone else in the game: ‘ladder shoes’, anyone?), but in that episode, when the two of them work together, they go from "surviving out here, which is already impressive and indicative of unusual skills" to "have decimated Bill's ground forces by flipping Gideon and are gearing up to take on a magic trap directly." Plus, Wendy customarily carries an axe; if she wanted to, she could go very medieval on folks.

Speaking of medieval (sort of) - our Bishops, Fiddleford and Gideon. Aside from both being at least religion-adjacent in supplementary materials (Gideon reads Preacher's Digest and behaves like a televangelist, Fiddleford is specifically stated to make the sign of the cross when he steps over a grave), they also fit well enough with the incomparable Terry Pratchett's description of the role in chess: "Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be." Certainly both Fiddleford and Gideon end up in places Bill didn't expect them to be, and they both go the long way about accomplishing their goals, too, preferring manipulation and ranged tech (robots, science guns, proxies, etc.) to direct confrontations, though they will if they must and may well show slightly disturbing glee while they’re about it - rather like the mace-wielding bishops of yore, no?

Which just leaves our eight pawns: Filbrick, Caryn, Dipper and Mabel's parents, one set of Dipper and Mabel's grandparents, Robbie, and Pacifica. The first six fit the role well: they are the 'front line' which made initial moves (had kids, raised kids, screwed said kids up something awful on occasion) and allowed the more powerful pieces to 'develop' long enough to get to Weirdmageddon/have the mental health issues that create their circumstances at that time. Pacifica's season two arc also makes her fit nicely into the role of Promoted Pawn: at first, she may compete for everything as the 'face' of the Northwest family, but she has so little real power of her own that she is cowered by a bell. Later, though, after fighting her way through Lilliputtians and aiding in the capture of a Category 10 ghost, she breaks the bell conditioning and saves the town. During the endgame, she is in the right place at the right time to first get the sweater Mabel made her and then to realize it meant she was part of the Destiny Circle. I'd say she made it to the other end of the board.

And then there's Robbie. Who I just stuck in here because he wasn't cool enough to be Knight II and nothing else fit at all. Sorry, Robbie.

#gravity falls #chess metaphors #extended metaphors #symbolism #having too much fun with faux symbolism #it's for a fic in progress #I should go to bed #did I once read this was a micro-blogging site...? #Pines family #stan twins #stanford pines #stan pines #dipper pines #mabel pines #soos ramirez #fiddleford mcgucket #gideon gleeful #wendy corduroy #pacifica northwest #robbie valentino #minor characters

[aethernightmare]

Here's the whole avatar design of my OC btw. Since I might one day be making a v-tuber model with similar features (albeit with redesigned clothes, and a few tweaks here and there).

A bit of history, yes, this was originally my Gaiaonline avatar. Since that's where I'd spend the majority of my teenage years. Especially as strict parental control around internet usage when I was growing up made traditional online messaging and hangouts with irl friends near impossible. And I was able to bypass a lot of parental monitoring with the site's (now-defunct) in-game chat features. Because just like other MMOs, when you log out, your chat log gets deleted.

To give Gaia some context, it was basically Fortnite for millennials back in the early 2000's. Complete with an entire free MMORPG (like a really basic FF14 in terms of combat), flash minigames, marketplaces for character customization, personal blog features (prior to Tumblr), hangout forums for all kinds of hobbies and discussions (prior to Reddit), and even a virtual town that would hold seasonal events (trick or treats, Easter egg hunts, etc.). Everyone also had their own in-game house with an actual virtual zip code that you could personalize and invite people over to.

It was simple compared to game hangout spaces we have today, in part because it was free, but at the time it felt like one of the only forms of personal freedom that was available to my teenage self. Especially when you were like me, and had parents monitoring every breath you took. In a household as strict as mine, where individuality and personal expression was a sin, it gave me an escape to be somewhere else. During a time where I was essentially locked to either my bedroom, school, or forced extracurriculars.

Because people with my kind of home life in that era, essentially had to be teenagers in secret. Having things like dates online, because relationships weren't allowed (usually on both sides), even if there was nothing odd about us. And every message you sent via either IM or SMS using traditional means could be read by parents or school staff. So the only way to hang out and just talk to people, including classmates, even if it was about the most mundane sfw things, was in a game space like this. It's actually really abusive and dystopian in hindsight, but it's a big part of how I even kept enough sanity to make it to adulthood. It was a loophole that give me the strength to hold out long enough to graduate and turn 18. To let me be something other than just...trapped and alone.

(Yes, Dot Hack as an anime franchise was extremely relatable during this time, especially the "offline" life portions. The kids in that series weren't just MMO addicts like most casual anime viewers think. If you read the books, they were literally micro-chipped and video monitored 24/7 by parents and the government until adulthood, so online spaces like "The World" were literally the only escapes they had).

Alas, now that Flash is discontinued, most of Gaia is defunct as well. The website remains, but most of the features I used to log in daily for either no longer exist or are obsolete. And the few that do are now rather different. So it unsurprisingly has a fraction of the user base it once started held. And since the email I used in the past to create my avatar is also long gone, alas so is my account and all the years I spent there.

However, I did still keep a couple of avatar screenshots as keepsakes. Since I originally used them for my old YouTube channel over 10 years ago. In part because I have zero methods of creating digital art (though I'd love to someday), and second because my avatar was actually kind of special? Not only it was incredibly rare due to the game having limited-time items with unlock conditions, but my OC also came to represent a lot of things about me personally. When you live your entire childhood as a fictional avatar, it's hard not to become attached, I suppose.

Case-in-point, immediately noticeable, but my character isn't exactly human. Unlike Final Fantasy 14, people only have access to starting out as humans in Gaia. But through either events or rare items, you can change yourself to something else. Vampires, Elves, Zombies, Fae, Centaurs, and a host of other things. The Padmavati Naga, which is what I am, was a rare form that was only released for a month. And even then, most people didn't take the anthropomorphic style with it that I did - opting instead for either half-snake or full garuda forms. (Eventually the item would get re-released years later as the website declined, but almost nobody played anymore).

Second major point is the "tattoos", which were also a rare weapon. Or rather, weapons. Notice how in some shots portions of the tattoo vanishes? That's because it morphs into the weapons themselves. I was disappointed to see that I only saved two screenshots of the item being activated, but in addition to the bow and lance pictured above, I distinctly also remember there being daggers, a sword, and a scythe. The weapon also allowed you to eventually take on a cloaked grim reaper form, or even fully transform into a Soulsborne-esque demon (eldritch gore included).

All of this is a major factor behind my au-ra design in Final Fantasy 14. I was surprised at how many parallels I could make right out of the gate. And while omni-classing is something I'm doing for LP purposes, it also draws similarities from my old Gaia avatar as well.

It's sad that I can't really get my account back, but I also know I wouldn't really use the website in the form it's in today. Especially not with full, unrestricted access to regular internet features. Nonetheless, it was a major part of my teenage years, and a much-needed sanctuary of sorts.

I still keep that OC close to my heart, and to this day enjoy bringing them to life in new spaces.

#bren plays final fantasy 14 #bren talks irl

[alexsfictionaddiction]

Review: Hate At First Sight by Lizzie O’Hagan

I was very happy to be invited onto Headline’s blog tour for this cute looking enemies-to-lovers office romance. Thank you to Isabelle for sending this very pretty physical copy my way!

Kate is very good at her job as a senior data analyst at aspirational fashion brand Poster but she has been there for five years and is very keen to clinch a promotion to director. However, costs are being cut and there’s a freeze on promotions for at least a year. Kate is ready to cut ties with the company but then she learns that she is needed to launch a new micro-site that might put her in good standing for that promotion once the freeze lifts. The only problem is that she’ll have to work alongside Harry, the handsome, creative guy who she had an embarrassing encounter with years before. On top of this, Kate is being kicked out of her apartment and having to move in with a stranger. Can she possibly make her way through it all?

I think a lot of frustrated millennials who live and work in expensive cities will be able to directly relate to Kate’s work situation. We all took jobs that we thought would stepping stones to the bigger, better things that were surely in our future, now that we had our shiny new degrees and a head bursting with fantastic, unique ideas. It is a narrative that has been told in contemporary women’s fiction and romance plenty of times before but there is a reason for that -these women are everywhere.

There is no doubt that Harry is very attractive and I definitely fancied him. However, I think I might have missed the point where Kate realised this. I get that she obviously thought he was handsome years ago, which is how the situation happened, but she has been angry with him and avoided him for years. A lot of their early conversations lacked flirting that I could pick up on and they really seemed like friends who bickered but still clearly cared for each other for most of the book to me. When the romance kicked in, I hadn’t registered any sexy sparks, so despite knowing it was going to happen (because it’s a romance), sadly it didn’t quite feel believable or natural.

One relationship that I loved was the one that Kate shared with her manager Amanda. Amanda is the definition of supportive girl boss and she really is Kate’s biggest cheerleader. I would have loved to see more interactions between them because Amanda seemed to disappear for a large chunk of the middle of the book. 

Hate At First Sight is a fun read with a heroine whose heart is in the right place. I loved the strong feminist message that was delivered at the end and the friendships that Kate cultivated with her female colleagues. Although I wasn’t a fan of the romance per se, I did like Kate and Harry as individuals, so I did have a good time with it!

Hate At First Sight by Lizzie O’Hagan will be published by Headline Review on 25th May 2023.

#hate at first sight #lizzie o'hagan #romance #contemporary fiction #book review #review #books #bookwork

[secret-rendezvous1d]

“don’t leave me”

hello, hi!

i definitely don’t think this is a one-off thing anymore and this blog may be on the way to merging into a harry styles + matthew gray gubler blog so i’d like to think that that is a new exciting venture people will . i’m really enjoying writing about a new scene, a new character and a new life to plan out and write about. the stories don’t essentially follow each other so they can be read anyhow and in any way but i’d like to think they all follow the same storyline/timeline so they link in that way.

like, reblog and give me some feedback. it’s greatly appreciated and it helps me work out what you want to see and what you are after.

thank you. enjoy.

-

“don’t leave me” spencer reid x female reader (reader insert imagine) word count; 2.1k.

* if you haven’t watched criminal minds then this does contain some spoilers to the show that you may want to dodge if you are thinking of starting the series up. *

summary; spencer struggles to come to terms with emily’s return and the betrayal of his friends.

-

“Spencer, look, we’ve got to talk about this.”

YN came to a stop with what she was doing when she saw her boyfriend and JJ starting a conversation in the station’s negotiation room, setting down the files she was sifting through so she could pay a little more attention to the conversation happening just a few feet away from the desk she was seated at, eyes still focused on the page with the bold name of a potential unsub printed at the top, accompanied by a picture of what they looked like. She tried to, at least, make herself seem busy without showing herself being nosey over a conversation that didn’t necessarily include her.

“What do you mean, talk about it?” Spencer questioned, looking at her in disbelief, “talk about what?”

YN hated how passive-aggressive he’d been, over the last two days, towards the two women who used to be considered a few of the only women close to him. He was never like that and, given what had happened, she understood his pain and his upset… she just hated how he wanted to push it, and them, away so he could carry on like an unexpected change hadn’t just sprung into his life.

“I get it, okay? You’re disappointed with the way we handled Emily,” JJ stated, hands on her hips as she stood around the opposite side of the table, watching intently at Spencer as he stood looking at the paper in his hands, eyes darting from the print to his scrawny handwriting on the board beside him, “I get that.”

The tension amongst the team was unbearable, to say the least.

As soon as Emily had entered the roundtable room a week prior to their case in Oklahoma, much to the surprise of everyone occupying the room who had stood waiting for the next plan of action to take down Ian Doyle and find his son, there was a sudden wave of uncertainty that seemed swallow the team whole and didn’t have plans on spitting them back out again anytime soon. No one could pick apart the emotions on one person’s face and state clearly how they were feeling. Confusion, shock, anger, happiness, joy, surprise… there were flecks of each emotion but never one clear facial expression that gave away how someone was truly feeling.

Now they were deep in Oklahoma, on a case and trying to find an unsub who had come to light in the recent murders of two young women prior to their touchdown, with Emily back in her regular place and trying her best to get back to normal as a BAU agent for the FBI. No longer under protection of the higher authority, no longer hiding behind an alias that took her identity away and stripped her of who she once was and she was finally able to go back to the Emily Prentiss whom she had been loved by many before life did a one-eighty flip. Almost as if nothing had changed, like the seven months she spent in witness protection hadn’t ever happened, like her death and her funeral and her burial were a fever dream that seemed to never leave the rest of them alone.

For most of the unit, having her back was something so wonderful and so great, to see her jumping back into a case with a mindset ready for justice and helping out with the mind she was graced with having, to have the same pair of eyes that were used to seeing case after case of young victims and unstable unsubs be considered a fresh pair of eyes now she was back. To work a case with someone you were comfortable with, that was what the most of them loved; the witty banter shared, the anger that bounced off from each sentence, the kind and caring charisma to get the best result of a case.  

But for some, it was difficult to adjust to something they had only just overcome.The grief they felt towards the situation of losing a beloved member of the unit, someone so loving and kind, a huge part of their team, it was unbearable and tore them down soon after they presumed they laid her to rest. Going back, visiting her burial site, resting flowers and almost keeping her updated with how everyone had been. They refused to believe she was gone yet denied her when she was found out to be healthy and alive and ready to start back where she left off.

“Well, I have a lot going on, alright?”

A lie, to say the least, but she wasn’t to know that.

“You know what I think it is?”

That caught his attention. And YN’s.

The one question that many profilers, specifically Spencer, hated to be personally asked was that question. They didn’t need to know what others thought when they could have the same thought pattern as each other, they didn’t need someone else telling them what they think they should be thinking and Spencer didn’t need a pity chat from someone who wronged him to find out what he was thinking.

Deep down, YN knew what the problem was and she was handling the situation as best as she could when she was alone with him in their hotel room, but she didn’t think it was as clear cut as people assumed. So how had JJ worked it out? If she was correct in what she thought was wrong with him, that is. He was hurt and he was upset and he was confused; he showed his grief towards missing a friend and he showed how much they meant to him by showing so much emotion yet he just couldn’t come to terms with how none of that was needed anymore. How he didn’t need to build his walls any higher because there wasn’t going to be any more heartache to deal with..

“What?”

“You’re mad that Hotch and I controlled our micro-expressions at the hospital and you weren’t able to detect our deception,” JJ suggested, a little more vigour in her voice as she spoke to him, frustration dripping from her words because she was desperate to get through to him. Absolutely desperate to find some way to resolve an issue that others had forgiven almost instantly, “you’re mad because you couldn’t catch us out on our lies.”

“You think this is about my profiling skills?” He scoffed and shook his head, looking back to the paper in his hands, ”Jennifer, listen, the only reason you were able to manage my perceptions was because I trusted you. I came to your house for ten weeks in a row, crying over losing a friend, and not once did you have the decency to tell me the truth,” he continued, disappointment laced through his words. And he so badly wanted to look up and catch the eyes of his girlfriend, the only one he felt truly supported him and his decision to act out, but he knew he needed to fight a battle of his own. Especially one that he caused but especially one that he was actively dragging out.

“I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t? Or you wouldn’t?”

It was the first time they made eye contact through the debacle. And, in that moment, JJ could see the pain behind his eyes. The deceit he felt. The grief that was nonsense because they were grieving over no one. The time wasted crying. The time wasted over nothing but false information and lies. She could see he looked vulnerable and naive and she felt guilty for even bringing her back to help on the mission they so direly needed her help with.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“What if I started taking Dilaudid again? Would you have let me?” YN’s eyes shot up at the question he bit towards his colleague; he never considered that, she was sure of it. YN would have known if he did. That time of his life was something she wished he would let go of, something she wished he forgot about so he could carry on with his life, something she wished he never considered again, “I thought about it.”  

YN couldn’t only feel her heart ache but she could feel the eyes of Hotch and Morgan resting upon her figure as she tried to occupy herself.

“You didn’t-”

“I did,” he hissed, placing the paper down on the desk below him and striding towards the doors, passed JJ as she pressed an apology upon him, hoping to get him to stay behind so she could hash it out until he fully understood their reasoning why they chose the plan that they did, “I did.”

“Spencer, I’m sorry-”

“It’s too late, alright?” He mumbled.

His legs took him out of the room and down from the floor they were situated on, ignoring the calls from Hotch as he stood with his arms folded in the corner of the room, everyone watching him as he left to go outside so he could catch a breath of fresh air and clear his mind of all the things rattling around inside his head. An alarming look from Morgan and a squeeze to her shoulder had YN up from her seat, case files left behind as she followed her boyfriend out of the station’s vicinity, catching him on a bench just a short walk away from the entrance of the building.

“If you’re coming here to tell me I need to focus on work rather than what’s happening then don’t, Morgan. I’m not-”

“What on earth gives you the impression I’m the big dude with muscles and a charming voice?” YN teased, his upper body twisting so he could catch the sweet stature of his smiling girlfriend, the slightest hint of a smile twitching his lips before he turned back to face forward. Hands clasped together and resting on his legs, thumbs tapping and rubbing at his skin in circles, feeling the presence of his girlfriend behind him, “mind telling me what that was all about?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He slipped to the other side of the bench so there was enough room for YN to sit down beside him, her hand reaching over to lace her fingers through his, squeezing his hand tightly as their conjoined palms rested upon his thigh, “I’m hurt and I’m angry, YN. I’m so angry. You saw how much I cried, how much I struggled, how much everyone had to adjust to life without Emily when she ‘died’. Yet they knew, they knew she was alive and they knew she was healthy and okay. They didn’t tell us and that’s- it’s sick,” he grappled, his voice full of passion; there was no way he was angry with them anymore and there was no way he would continue the trait up until someone said something to bring him back down to earth. He was glad she was home - he told her so many times in the last few days about just how great it was to have her home - but he never failed to drift back to the subject of how they dealt with the situation.

“They did it for her protection, Spence. They saved her and, essentially, saved us for truly having to say goodbye to her,” YN admitted, bringing their hands to her mouth so she could press a tacky kiss to the back of his hand, leaving a pink lipstick stain behind in her wake, “she’s safe now because of what they did. Doyle, he’s dead. Anyone who was after, they’re dead. She’s safer now than she was ever.”

“But they watched us grieve at a funeral. We buried something in that ground and were made to believe it was her,” Spencer sighed shakily, “they cried for her, too. They grieved. They said nothing was the same anymore. When they knew the truth all along. I cried with JJ, she helped me when you were working, she was denying it all but, in her head, she knew everything was a lie.”

“Emily left for a reason. To save everyone. She’s back now and you’ve got to remember how everything was before she left us,” YN’s hand gave his a gentle squeeze before she let go, bringing her hands to her lap and waiting for him to look up from the ground so she could see his eyes and so she could see his bright smile, “Spence, she’s not going anywhere.”

He nodded slowly and hesitantly lifted his head, his eyes a little raw around the rims and his lip a little chewed at, but the light in his face was still there. His body scooting closer to YN, wrapping an arm around her shoulder, pulling her into his side for a little bit of romance before they were caught and checked on by another agent.

“You won’t leave me like that, will you?” He wondered, “don’t, okay? Don’t leave me.”

“If I’m going anywhere, you’re coming with me, mister,” YN grinned, leaning up to press a kiss to his pink lips, “we do it together or we don’t do it at all.”

#spencer reid #spencer reid imagines #spencer reid x yn imagines #spencer reid x reader insert imagines #spencer reid x reader insert fic #matthew gray gubler #matthew gray gubler imagines #matthew gray gubler x yn imagines #matthew gray gubler x reader insert imagines #matthew gray gubler x reader insert fic #criminal minds imagines

[colorseeingchick]

Got tagged by a wonderful amazing goddess of a mutual so I decided to take a shot at this too hehe. 19 questions - feel free to read my answers if you'd like !

1. why did you choose your url?

so fun story, I'm a synesthete. I have a couple of forms of synesthesia (number form, auditory-tactile), but one allows to me to pick up on micro behaviors of people and perceive a color based off of it. Put simply- people have 'color' in my eyes. And I see them! Hence, colorseeingchick.

2. any side blogs?

no not yet. But I'm considering. I probably should.

3. how long have you been on tumblr?

like a year? I'm honestly new here. This site surprises me regularly.

4. do you have a queue tag?

No - I use #colorseeingchick recommends / loves for my major reposts, but not explicitly queued posts.

5. why did you start your blog in the first place?

I made a tumblr account to follow this one fic writer (who I won't mention bc idk if she'd want me to) and she inspired me. So I said f it! Let's write, too.

6. why did you choose your icon/pfp?

I wanted it to be me, so it is. Although there's not a moment I don't wanna make it one of my kins lol

7. why did you choose your header?

I wanted to drive the 'colorseeingchick' name home

8. what’s your post with the most notes?

a post I wrote in an hour HAHA. Special Cuddles w Midoriya, Bakugou, and Todoroki. why it blew up? I still don't know.

9. how many mutuals do you have?

I DON'T KNOW and it drives me insane. If you are my mutual please tELL ME I never know who wants to interact with me and I assume if you're my mutual you do so please lemme know.

The ones who I know are: @kirislut @katsushimaa @hoebirama7 @sasukelore @mnhorseowner @ruluxe @sugurus-princess @sugas-sweetheart @emperor-oikawa @doinmybesthere @jojowantstocry @justagirlwithblog @bozowrites @animatedarchives @joonzreina

I know for a FACT i have more. TELL ME WHO YOU ARE. PLEASE I BEG. And if you aren't my mutual already and we like similar stuff, let's be mutuals😘

10. how many followers do you have?

241 and i love them all 💕

11. how many people do you follow?

100! Which is low given I'm always looking for friends and content.

12. have you ever made a shitpost?

Nothing I've posted

13. how often do you use tumblr each day?

... too much. Im usually on.

14. did you have a fight/argument with another blog once?

No and God forbid it happen. Irl is enough drama for me.

15. how do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

I don't mind ones where they say "reblog if this is a safe space for___"

I ADORE ones that are informative and relavent to modern issues.

I do not like "reblog OR ELSE you're homophobic/racist/etc" bc they feel... performative to me. And they have the same vibes as those email chains "send to 3 friends or this demon will get u." IE i don't like threats to get reblogs.

16. do you like tag games?

Love them. They make me feel loved by my mutuals hehe

17. do you like ask games?

Even more so. I wish ppl sent me asks when I tried to do them 🥲 one day !

18. which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

Many. To me, if you have over 1k, your a star ✨although all of my mutuals are worthy of more hype and love

19. do you have a crush on a mutual?

Platonic crush on @kirislut cuz she's so PRETTY and a GREAT PERSON ily meg

Too all my moots and anyone else, feel free to do this too! But only if you want :)

#colorseeingchick chain games

[deardragonbook]

Editing and Levels of Editing

Before I begin, I wrote this whole thing out this morning, pressed save as draft and guess what post did not save as a draft? Yeah. So if it feels a bit more dry or to the point than my usual posts, I apologize. And if you prefer it like that, tell me, because I’m great at accidentally losing drafts! 

This post isn’t about how I edit (I’m sure I’ll do that eventually), it’s more about how much I edit and specifically how that changes depending on what I’m writing. 

So I measure how much I edit by drafts a lot of the time, but that isn’t entirely accurate because there are drafts and then are drafts. When I’m writing a book, I write a first draft, I write it carelessly and without looking back, then I start over for my second draft. That’s what I’m going to refer to as a solid draft, when I write the whole thing out again. 

For my third draft onwards I’ll usually be editing the second draft, editing could involve cutting out whole paragraphs and writing them again, but I’m not starting from zero. This is what I will call a soft draft. 

Now, organized from most to least drafts: 

1.- A to be sold book. At this time, that’s just Dear Dragon and the next books coming up in that series. People pay money to read this, so it has to be good. And what each person considers good can be relative, for me, it’s generally around seven to nine drafts. Two solid drafts and the rest soft drafts. My first book took me about twoooo yeeeears (voice full of hesitation), technically three but with long hiatuses in between and… it’s a mystery for the ages, I’ll be honest. The point is, lots of editing, lots of work. Obviously you aren’t going to put as much time into every work you do. 

2.- A not be sold book. So, because I’m one hundred per cent incapable of doing a single project at a time, sometime after my beta readers received Dear Dragon, I started to write another shorter novel, it was an idea I’d had running through my head for about two years or so, and I just wanted it out. 

I knew this wasn’t going to be anywhere near the quality of Dear Dragon, if only because I was nowhere near as in love with the idea. So as to not put pressure on myself I thought, I’ll upload it to Wattpad, it’s a social media site for writing, maybe I can get my writing noticed a bit before publishing my actual novel… 

I’ll do a post about the different social media sites and being an author on social media at a later date. Once I feel like I know what I have to say because… I have a lot to say. 

But anyway, it’s going to be free, but it’s still a proper little stand alone micro-novel. How many drafts? Three. In my case, three. It was a solid first draft, solid second and soft third draft. It took me about a year with long hiatuses in between because as said previously, it just wasn’t high on my priority list. 

It’s complete from today (if I’m doing the maths right because I don’t publish these on the same day I write them)! Check it out. 

I recommend binging it because that’s how you get the most out of the small details. 

3.- Chaptered stories that don’t stand alone. I actually have two stories that fit into this category: Oppida Institute for Reformation and Love, Coffee and Dragons. They are both prequel series to my main book series Dear Dragon. 

Now, I do less editing in these then I will a not for sale novel, BUT, I do a lot more plot related editing. What do I mean by that? I spent a lot of time double checking timelines, maps, general continuity. See, because this takes place before the main series, a lot of it affects the main series, so I have to be cautious not to make any mistakes. 

In both I do a solid first draft and a soft draft, in this soft draft I mainly work on catching any grammar mistake, touch up on fluidity and double check timelines and maps. 

For Love, Coffee and Dragons I write my first draft in word and then edit it another day in Hemingway. 

For Oppida Institute for Reformation I will export it from word to my iPad, edit it by hand and then go to Hemingway to pass those edits on. This means I read through my draft about three times instead of two. Mainly because the plot elements affect the main series more than Love, Coffee and dragons which is, what I call an emotional support story (I’ll probably do a post about what I mean by that… later). 

These both probably take me a couple of weeks for each Act, which will be somewhere between five and fifteen chapters. I upload each chapter once a week so. That works well. 

4.- One-Shots. I do plenty of quick one-shots, Market Day or Photos that follow my book’s main character as a child. Night Out which follows one of the old kings. And every article up on my web. 

Because everything I just mentioned is in the universe of Dear Dragon (beginning to think I need to branch out a bit) my editing is mostly double checking everything is properly placed on the timeline (guess I should do a post about how I write and keep track of the timelines, huh?). I revise grammar but don’t tend to go over fluidity as much as the other stories. 

Because there one-shots are usually low stakes and more just an exploration of something simple, such as the terrifying feeling of not knowing where your parents are at the market, they usually are written and edited the same day or not long after. 

5.- Blog Posts. So, this. Before here I used to do some writing tip posts on my site, I also have my personal tumblr where I usually ramble on about existentialism and whatever comes to mind. For these posts I write them (solid first draft) and then I read them over, add in links, make things bold and try to catch as many typos as possible. I probably don’t catch all of them and often click edit if I spot one. 

But that’s fine, because I’m trying to upload one a day, so it’s not supposed to be this high quality experience. It’s just me trying to share the most useful bits and bobs from my own experience. 

This takes me probably an hour or so depending a lot on the article. 

So, did you get anything out of this post? I’d not heard anybody talk about the difference in effort you put into different works and thought it might be interesting, but in retrospect maybe nobody talks about it because it’s precisely the opposite. You tell me! Feedback and criticism helps me know what I should be putting more time into. 

#writing advice #writers on tumblr #writing #how I write #writer #writing tips #writing tricks #tips #tricks #editing #selfpublished #author #authors #can someone tell me the kind of tags I should be using for these posts?

[vengefulcooking]

Today I picked up a cooking sauce, only because it was on discount, you know, please-buy-this-it's-one-step-above-free prices that tell you they're desperate to get rid of something before it hits its date, and I guess anyone who's shopping food in clearance has got to be so confident in their ability to clean out a bottle in under two weeks (or you know, not live alone,), and I am not anyone. I have zero confidence I'll be able to finish it, but I picked it up, even though I am so indifferent to the flavouring I picked up that it might not have existed on my radar at all: butter chicken. Mlehmlehmleh bland, boring, too few herbs and spices; it's just chicken in heavy cream, you've all been duped. Knew I'd be indifferent to it at best and mildly annoyed by its existence at worst, but I bought it. (Have I already made a post about the sheer number of possibilities you have in Indian cooking? Look at the possibilities, and it's not chicken in cream. That's overrated. It doesn't even taste good. I can and will willingly excuse a biriyani. The sheer number of flavours in it all at once; the layering, the way the spices are actually cooked into the rice (unless I'm wrong), or a good, simple, versatile paneer. Any vegetable, even. Oh, south Indian chillis. There's a lot you can do. But I repeat myself.)

Anyway, I tried it, and it's everything I expected. I checked the labellings properly later and noticed that it's a British import (literally why. There are Indians in this country. No wonder they were so desperate to get it off. Especially right now with the delay times, how long does shipping from the UK even take?), which immediately tells helps me sort out a few tastes. (Don't worry, the point of this post is flavours, and the target of this post is butter chicken. No Brits were harmed in the writing of this post.)

As much as the origin of a dish may be India, it changes when it leaves, as does any dish from another country. Based on which parts of India are better represented in another country (or smaller jurisdiction), the flavour of stuff will differ. I made a whole long post about the composition of garam masala, an Indian blend of spices that is used in like half the north Indian cooking you do, and it's sort of like that with most dishes. (Phew, the research I did for that post by the way! I put it up on my proper proper blog (not Tumblr, this site is hanging on to the tag of 'social media' for dear life. It's one rung below. Though, does anyone remember when social media platforms used to be called "micro-blogging sites"? Not one soul says that anymore, we've come a looong way from "the actor confirmed their role in a post on the microblogging site Twitter" to "SM".). Anyway I showed it to my mum and she was proud though she laughed. She'd laugh more if she knew I had a tumblr.)

Anyway, my verdict on this, less so Indian and more British, masala: too many cloves. Too. Maaaaaany. Cloves. for my liking! Cloves and ginger! Possibly cinnamon. Why does anybody like this?? (Fun fact, I don't know if you can look this up, but cinnamon's Hindi name is daalchini, which I guess taken apart would read pulse (general)-sugar. I know cinnamon is a spice but that fact always surprises me a little tbh, given how much I associate it with baking, coffees and all. It's literally in the name! —in at least one language)

My conclusion on this however? Hoo boy, Brits need to discover lemons someday ;)

Edit: It's going to bother me if I just left this post at that, I am here to spread lemon propaganda afterall, aren't I? I might as well teach you right. You don't need to cook with lemons. Lemons are part of the serving (etiquette?), you may in fact have seen them in restaurants if you've ordered Indian. The complete profile would be squeezed lemons along with sliced, salted onions, the salt can be omitted if you like. Do not drain!! Then you can go extra on the salad plating, and pile the lemony onions with chillis [ :) ], carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, sprouts, radish, beetroots; literally whatever you want, but it's gotta be raw/uncooked, and dipped in salty lemon. Then you pick up the wet onion slices and eat them with your main dish. That's how lemons are done, try it!

#curds are only optional in exceptional circumstances or we're having a Word btw #Letting you off if you are lactose intolerant though #Mum suspects I was lactose intolerant as a kid #she fed me; I threw up; it was the cycle of life #mum does suspect that vengeance might have played a part in this one-year old's motions cycle (and ya know not an allergy) #She surmises I grew out of it (a baby needs to survive) #so now you know that about me (I'm stronger than milk btw don't try me) #I don't know what to tag this #It's just mind dump #I'm not even cooking #it's just lemon propaganda #Indian cooking #(but I'm not doing it #I'm so bad at it #like I cannot make the intention sit in #my mind that I am going to cook Indian #the task. It is Herculean. Je refuse #cooking #vengefully tasting #goodie look we have a new tag category! #vengeful thoughts

[callipraxia]

The Unexpected Memoirs of Fiddleford H. McGucket: Prologue and Chapter One

I was going through my writing desk and found a notepad I had scrawled about seventy pages, I think, of an attempt at first-person narration on a while back. It was about Fiddleford, attempting to type his way into his own memory in the gap between "Society of the Blind Eye" and his flight from town at the beginning of "Not What He Seems." Figured I might as well type it up in a few installments here if only so I have an excuse to remove the notepad and make some storage space, and to help with wanting to write so bad when I know I have too much work going on to commit to a brand-new project.

For whatever it's worth, Chapter One *probably* isn't as dark as the tags might suggest. It just includes Fiddleford typing up a basic overview of his life before he met Ford, and since that period involved being poor and living in the Deep South in the fifties and sixties...Certain topics are inevitable, at least in passing. Religion gets most of his focus, but there's also brief mentions of racism, classism, homophobia...good ol' days, am I right?!

Prologue

My name is Fiddleford Hadron McGucket, and I wish to remember what I have seen.

Or at least, I want to be able to wish to remember what I have seen.

Or at least, I think I do.

Maybe I just know that I have to, now. I don’t know what I helped create, or why, but I know one thing: from what I saw of myself in those tapes in the museum basement, and from what I read in the Journal, I either went crazy a lot earlier than I thought, helped create something that could end the world, or both. If it’s just that first one, well, that's all right - but what if it's one of the other two?

I want to run, but there’s nowhere left to run. I want to hide, but too many folks know where I am, now. I’ve got no choices left, besides sitting here at this typewriter and letting my fingers lead me back thirty years, into a world I gave up everything to forget about. All I’ve got is a story.

My name is Fiddleford McGucket, and I need to remember what I have seen. Whether I want to or not.

Chapter One

I think I might have tried to forget everything, but if I did, I messed up at least twice. There's two things I've never forgot about. I've always known my name, and I've always known that I’ve got a son. It's from the time after my life starts up again that I also know that if I said I was a bad father to him, I’d owe all the bad fathers of the world an apology for comparing them to the likes of me. Even a bad father is one who’s around to be bad, I think, and I wasn’t. I'd forget that, if I could, but somehow, I ended up without the gun....

My son hates me, and I can’t rightly blame him for that. He’s ashamed to be related to me, too, and as much as I’d like to, I can’t blame him for that, either, not with the fool I’ve acted. He was little when I left. I know that in part from such memories as I already had, and for sure because there was a picture in that Journal-book Dipper showed me. For some reason, the Author drew a picture of a picture that used to sit on my desk – copied it just like it must have been in life. He even bothered drawing the way the light reflected off the frame and hid my wife’s face, so I still don’t know what she looked like. I reckon I ought to be annoyed about that – but all I can think is, oh, you. You would do that, wouldn’t you?

Who are you, you faceless son of a cornshuck? Why did you do this to me? Why did I do that to you? What did we do? What’s this? What’s that?

The boy doesn’t know much about it. He was so young, then, and his mama didn’t like to talk about me later. Or so he says, and I guess I got no choice other than to believe him, because who else can I ask? My wife’s dead – I remember when he told me about that, a few years ago – and there’s nobody else in town that knew me before I lost my mind and remembers it, at least as far as I know. Not that that means much, of course.

More to the point, the boy does remember a few things. I was born in Tennessee, where I lived up to the age of seventeen, and where I’d probably be today if not for two things. One of them things is that I can’t think of many things more boring than plants – I liked machinery before I even knew what it was. The other one, probably more important, is that I caught every virus known to Man, probably, or at least Tennessee Man, as a baby, up until I took the rheumatic fever when I was six. If that hadn’t happened, then I probably would have been expected to quit school – assuming I went at all – and help Papa on the farm until I was old enough to get married and start my own, but instead, I got sick.

Mama and Papa, though – they didn’t know what they were supposed to do with me, but they knew I was theirs and they had an obligation, and that it wasn’t my fault I was feeble for a long time and peculiar even after I got my strength back. They lost their tempers with me all the time, sure, because I was so peculiar, but once they were done yelling, they knew I couldn’t help it, being like that. Mama, who was born a Baptist, used to say it was God’s will and proof of His marvelous constancy from generation to generation – Hannah had prayed for her son, and when she got him, it was with conditions, specifically, that she’d have to return him to God. Mama had also prayed for a son, and she’d got...me, who was clearly not going to be of any use to anyone unless I got me some schooling. Well, that was all right; the best preachers didn’t go to school, of course, everybody knew that, but she’d hauled off and married a Catholic, and they expected their folks to have some book learning even though that didn’t make much sense for men of God. Sense or no sense, though - that was how my mama decided I was going to be a priest.

I can’t remember much about how I felt about this, no matter how hard I try. The one thing I remember is that I did have one sister, name of Gladiolus, and that she used to think it was funny. Fatherford, she’d call me, when she thought Mama couldn’t hear her, especially when she thought I was being stupid on the subject of our mutual religion.

I was scared of God – not possessed of a holy and proper fear of God, just plain scared, like you’d be of a monster under the bed. I’d heard since I was a baby that it was only through His mercy that I was living, and I remembered just enough about being sick to know how bad it had usually hurt. I don’t know how, but I took it into my head that this meant I was bad, somehow – worse than everyone else, that was, a sinner among sinners, mainly because sometimes I asked questions that made Mama tell me that I was questioning God Almighty and that she’d have Papa take a belt to me if I done it again. Every time the priest raised the Host and talked about the transubstantiation, I’d imagine God looking out at me from inside the monstrance and whispering: just you watch yourself, Fiddleford McGucket. You better get your crazy ass right with me, or I’ll send it right on to Hell. And I would have - if I'd had any idea how. How many times did I sit there and pray, crying on my knees to stop thinking wrong and wanting wrong and doing wrong? Pulling out my own hair, because that was the only thing that could calm me down on a real bad day? I’d learned by the time I was ten not to ask my family such questions – that me asking Mama how I was supposed to just not think things that went through my head when I knew it upset her so – but I thought surely, surely, if God cared about me at all, despite knowing all my wrong thoughts….

Well – maybe He will have mercy on me for my doubts and questions and pride. Maybe He will take me in even if I keep an inability to see why it’s supposed to be so wrong to marry someone who doesn't look enough like you, or happens to be another man, or whatever else folks down home would say today. Or maybe He won’t. I don’t know. That was one thing I could never take about Mama’s people – this “I know that I know” attitude. Arrogant, ain’t it, assuming you Know anything about what God’s going to do? The predestination people are mighty peculiar, too, but that doesn’t even seem as arrogant as this idea that you can know you’re right with something as alien as God -

Or that’s the theory, anyway. In practice, the predestinationists aren’t any better, as far as I can recall, but even though thoughts like that kept me from ever considering going Evangelical or Holiness or any of that stuff, I still didn’t become a priest. I never even applied to try to be a priest – heavens to Betsy, I didn’t even apply to no Catholic universities! Admittedly, that was in part because of money – Mama went to work after she decided I was gonna live after all, so we could afford enough shoes for me and Gladiolus both to go to school all year in, and the sewing plant was real generous in giving out scholarships to the best-performing employee kids in the high school. I’d have been the biggest ingrate in the state of Tennessee if I’d started quibbling over which college I was going to go to, even considering that I broke every record my high school and that sewing plant had ever seen. And that’s how I ended up at Backupsmore University.

*********

Had to take me a break from typing – got to going too fast and my hands locked up. But the boy says he always heard I went to Backupsmore University, so I reckon I did. Makes as much sense as anywhere else, though from what I came to understand, the degree to which my crazy ass went really wrong, at least by home standards, while I was there could have happened in any reputable college or university in this country just as well.

I try to think back to it, and I have just a – blur. Strings of colored lights, which I’d never seen before. The taste of beer, and later of stronger stuff – took me two months to work up the nerve to try the beer, of course, and then I reckoned it was nasty, but I was so tired of being the oddball hick by then that I figured it was the lesser of two evils, even knowing what my mama would have said about it. Not like she wouldn’t have said worse about other stuff, such as when I went to required classes and didn’t say a word in protest when they taught that the world was millions of years old, or when I was all right with the idea of the rules changing to allow for blue jeans in classes, or when I discovered my roommate didn’t go to Mass and stayed roommates with him anyway, or when I would occasionally kiss girls and a few times boys, or….

Well. Maybe I went a little wild my first year or two, but I know that I know I didn’t ever risk my scholarship. Partially, of course, this was because of how easy everything was to me, but I did my work, no matter how tedious it was. I knew within a week that I didn’t want to go back to where I come from, and I knew that doing real well in college was my best way out. So I did real well in college, though it probably helped that my roommate was so dang uptight that I was partially obliged to drop the wayward habits of my freshman year, because there was no questioning which of us would have won in a fight.

I was taller than him, though. I remember that. Didn’t seem to bother him much. Not much did, I reckon. He was there to work, not to deal with people no more than he could help. I had to drag him out of the room most every time he left it for anything except for class, after we became friends...because we didn’t do for a while after we moved in together, not right away. I remember that first day - how I introduced myself, trying to be friendly and polite, and how he acted like the idea of shaking hands offended him, even if he did finally do it. I remember, too, that I thought he seemed like he got mad about my name for some reason? Though how that makes any sense, I don’t know. I think he might have just been mad at everything, the whole world, even himself, but definitely most everybody else.

I’m starting to type too fast again. Got to put down everything I can remember – it feels like I might forget it again if I don’t get it down fast enough, and like I need to remember this man. Like he’s got something to do with what happened, though it might be just that I can’t remember his face, either -

That does seem strange, and not only because I lived with him for a right long time. There’s also the other things that come back to me, strange little things. He’d done some kind of athletics in high school, for instance – why do I know that, but not what the feller looked like? That makes about as much sense as this band-aid being on my beard!

I remember that, though. And I remember that time when it snowed a foot, real early in the year that year even for that far north, and even though I'm sure that he was funny about his hands for some reason – fancy-pants musician, maybe? But that don’t explain this – how he let me borrow a pair of gloves upon realizing I’d never had any cause to own such an item before – and by ‘borrow’, I mean ‘threw ‘em at me without comment before leaving the room.’ And the first time he unbent enough for us to have a real conversation, and what it felt like, realizing I was really talking to someone who was a little like me – someone else who worked just fine, but his circuits were just arranged different than most folks’. Never thought it could happen, but....

It all blurs, even now. I can’t see his face, however I try to think on it. But I remember another thing, too. I remember one day when I fell down because I was laughing so hard. I was in Gravity Falls already, then, and I started laughing till I ended up on my knees as I thought to myself – there was a time I’d have said that I would follow that man into Hell - but this ain't what this was supposed to be!

*********

In between them memories, I’ve got what the boy told me I did. He doesn’t know why I did it or when, but at some point, I did go back to Tennessee. That’s where I met his mama. She was a schoolteacher, one of the only other folks my age who’d been anywhere near a college, at least that I could find to talk to. So, for lack of anything better to do, I suppose, she became a Catholic and then we got married.

Emma-May Dixon. Couldn’t get a name more like where we come from than that if you tried, but Emmy wasn’t too much like Gladiolus or my girl cousins or most home folks. Well, if she’d been like most folks, she wouldn’t have got lonely enough to marry the likes of me, would she have? Emma-May. Emmy.‘Emmy’ is what I called her sometimes, I think. Just Em when she was annoying me, though, which she did sometimes, as everyone you ever live with or know especially well must. I’ve remembered that for a while, somehow – that, and how she didn’t like being called Em or Emmy very much. After we left Tennessee, she tried going by Emma, out in California. Like Jane Austen. She had a whole set of books by Jane Austen, and every house we ever lived in, she made sure they were as prominent as they could get in the living room.

They weren’t just for looks, though. She had read them. She read them every year over again, in fact. She had the darkest, curliest hair I’ve ever seen – when it came into fashion, she started putting permanents in it the same as everyone else, of course, but she could have saved herself some time and just left it as it was, because she got close to looking like she had one just in her natural state. She wore perfume – Evening in Paris, I think it was – which was the kind of thing that would have gotten a gal talked about back home even if she hadn’t had the audacity to go buy it for herself, long time before she ever met me. I didn’t mind it, though; I liked that she didn’t need me, because I might not have pulled my hair out over my fear of God as much anymore by then, but someone needing me – that I couldn’t stand. Which did make it mighty inconvenient that she got pregnant not too long after we got married, because you ain’t never known how Necessary you can be until you get stuck being responsible for a baby human.

These days, of course, I doubt that would have happened. For one thing, I’d have been on ten different pills time I left Backupsmore, so I probably never would have gone home in the first place. For another – well, back then, it just didn’t occur to us to do much of anything to not have babies, because that was what you did, wasn’t it? You got married, you had a bunch of kids. That was what the Church said was proper, but it wasn’t even just the Church – my mama was a Baptist and had ten brothers and sisters. You had ‘em to keep up the work on the farm with you; that was why everybody felt so sorry for Mama and Papa, only having two young’uns, and one of them being me.

I don’t know what would have happened had we stayed in Tennessee – but thing was, Tater was still a baby when I realized we was not staying in Tennessee. For one thing, Mama and Emma-May couldn’t get along at all after the baby was born, Mama being intense on the subject of her first and only grandbaby – and for another, we just couldn’t stay there. I would have gone crazy a lot sooner than I did if we had. After Tater was born, all I could think was – my God, I can’t have a young’un of mine grow up here. If this place isn’t dead, it’s definitely dying. What if he’s like me, but he doesn’t get sick enough? Of course, this wasn’t rational of me – by that time, going to school was not only mandatory in the law, but it was something that was actually enforced even for backwoods families – but I couldn’t even think about the likes of ration, not then. I scratched up my head so bad trying not to rip out my hair that I ended up getting some kind of skin infection for a while – and then, once I was over that, we got as far from everybody we knew as we possibly could.

*********

California. On a map, it was easy to say what California was; where I come from, it was a whole different question. To some, it meant everything you could ever want, everything that home wasn’t; to others, it was a neat bit of shorthand just for Hell on Earth, for all the sins of the world (I reckon home folks didn’t all know about Las Vegas?). To my mama and papa, and Em’s mama and daddy, it was the second one; to me and her, it was the first one.

I think we were happy there? It’s another blur – but the edges don’t hurt, wherever an object or an image floats to the surface and gets clear enough to see. I remember shoes in the hallway a lot. Some balls and bats, a lot of books. Tater was reading before he was three, and we made sure he had plenty to read, because as I told my wife – it was pretty clear, from early on, that the boy was indeed like me, so he might as well lean into it and get as smart as he could, so he’d have the best chance to find some way, some place in the world where he could be happy.

You say that like you aren’t happy where you're at, Fids, said she – she was the only one who called me that, I’m assuming as retaliation for the Em thing. What am I supposed to do with that?

But I think I was. That we both were, for a while anyway. In a way, I think we both felt about like young’uns ourselves, because of how odd we could be in California without anybody knowing or caring at all. It was 1975, baby! Every woman in America had a right to her own bank account, whether she was married or whether she was not, and Emma-May got one I reckon just for the hell of it. Or because she was the one with more to put into it, though she never once mentioned it, and she was a saint for that. Who ever heard of a woman with a baby going back to teaching school, and letting some fool of a man look after a baby? Nobody, but we weren’t in Tennessee, we were in California, and it was 1976, 1978 – the world was all on its head and it was going to keep spinning like that forever, up and up, freer and freer, no stops!

I know how wrong we was now – but even today, it makes me smile, when I think of this one picture in my head. It was Emmy, just outside the church – since she took it sort of serious, after having gone to all the trouble of converting, we still did go to church. She was standing on the stair, wearing this dark blue dress with little white polky-dots on it, and one of them big, wide lace collars – this thing was up to her throat, and the ends of it were on her two shoulders – and by standards of the time, she was looking sharp! But she had on these sensible shoes, you know, and little white gloves, because she had a habit of that from her mama, who had not been one bit amused by Jack Kennedy taking his presidential oaths with no hat on and thereby giving everyone permission to run around in their bathing suits in broad daylight. Jack Kennedy was dead, though, and Jackie had betrayed all of America, to my folks’ way of thinking, by marrying some foreigner instead of gracefully playing the queen dowager until John, Jr. could take his daddy’s place, and I had two suits, one for every other Sunday, and a pretty wife with more dresses than there were days in the week standing there with her rosary in one hand and Tate by the other one, and I imagine we looked at each other like – you believe all this? You believe we’re here acting like decent people, without a soul in this church knowing you’ve got your own bank and them new pills, or that I get what money I got by some combination of picking a banjo while I run around in floweredy shirts like a hoodlum and spend my days trying to build the machines of the future? This is the craziest thing I've ever heard of!

Of course, I don’t know that this memory is real. Even if I do remember it right, there ain’t no guarantee that Emma-May was thinking anything of the sort, about how we looked like everybody else and were yet living in ways that would have shocked out parents out of this life. I felt like a young’un lifting candy from the store, though, and I recollect I laughed – from her point of view, for no good reason – and gave her a kiss right there on the stair.

What was that for?

You just looked pretty.

You crazy fool.

She’d call me that again another time, and it wouldn’t sound anything like it did then. Another time, she was screaming at me, shaking me, telling me to snap out of it, to quit what I was doing, to look what I was doing to my own son, to quit it right now and be a man, be a father, for the love of God, Fiddleford! But that day, it wasn’t like that, and I never could have guessed how soon it would be.

*********

I don’t remember much about how it started, that day. Right now, I remember everything about that afternoon and evening – the afternoon that marked the beginning of the end of my life – but not so much about the beginning, not even what I was doing right before the phone started to ring. I assume it was all normal, though: that I’d got up like I most always did, got the kid off to school, got the wife some kind of lunch put together before she went off to school, and then it was out to the garage and another day of trying to scrape together a dream. Just like so many days before. There was no way, no way at all, I could have ever known what was going to happen.

It was getting late, I think, when the phone started to ring, but in July it’s hard to be sure. Only the sounds of Emma-May and the boy in the house gave away that we’d passed the hour where most folks called the day finished. Despite that, I wasn’t working on one of my own projects yet – was still working on something for a client, scraping together the money I needed to keep working on my prototypes. Well, to my way of thinking, I was working on a client project, anyway – to most folks’ eyes, it would have looked like I was just picking on my banjo, but that was what I did when I needed to think about a tricky problem with some wiring. I was chewing on some chewbacca, too, as I was accustomed to do, and I recall I gnawed on it some just about the time the ringing started.

Why do I remember that? Nothing that unusual about that moment. Nothing should have made that specific plug of tobacco brand itself into my neurons, but I remember it right now, as clear as I do anything else – I can taste it as if I was chewing on it this moment, practically feel it between my molars again, though unfortunately, just remembering the feel of getting a hit of nicotine doesn’t do much to sharpen me up and calm me down all at once the way an actual portion of the drug would. It was real that day, though, and hit my system as I picked up the phone, and, without a care in the world, said, “Hello! Fiddleford Computermajigs!”

Another man’s voice came through the other line, and for a few seconds, I didn’t even recognize it. It was the kind of landline connection you got back then, I reckon, along with me having not heard this particular man’s voice in...Lord, how long had it been? Going on five years, maybe. Even during those few seconds, though, before my life changed, I felt a sort of – ripple – go through the world, as though I had gotten a shock, as the voice spoke, getting straight to the point without any salutation or introduction of its owner. Guess he was already too close to the edge to care about such things by then – that is, unless he knew that, just from the sheer audacity of the proposition alone, I’d know exactly who it was by the time he got to the end of his sentence.

“What would you say,” he said in a low, almost conspiratorial tone, “if I told you that I’m building a trans-universal polydimensional meta-vortex?”

By the end of the sentence, I knew who I was talking to – but that was bizarre enough even for him that I had to repeat it back to myself to be sure I’d heard it right. “You...say you’re trying to build a trans-universal polydimensional meta-vortex?”

“Yes.”

And then I did it. Without even knowing I was doing it, I said the words that would near enough to damn us both, and my wife and son along with us, and who knows how many others, before it’s done.

“Well,” said I, and the numbers were running through my head – I hadn’t felt them like that since college, that was how quick I started on the problem, even before I had any confirmation that it was any of my business. “that’s...mathematically feasible, I reckon!” I spat to clear my mouth, just in case the next remark he came up with was somehow even more surprising than the one he’d used to barge back into my life without so much as a howdy-do, and then I added, “Stanford? That really you?”

Click here to proceed to chapter two!

#gravity falls #gravity falls fic #fanfiction #new fic #fiddleford mcgucket #first-person narrator #character journal #first draft #set in the early eighties #involves: religion #religious trauma #mental illness #regret #memory loss #did i once read this was a micro blogging site...?

[artcenterstories]

Experience Seeker: Meet Artist/Author Dominick Domingo

ArtCenter: What inspired your current creative project? Dominick Domingo (Illustration ‘91) arist/author/designer: A prolonged hospital stay and the proverbial brush with death. Being in touch with my mortality has lit a fire creatively and put legacy at the forefront. My latest IP, mythic fiction novel The Seeker is a parable of my recent trials and a portrait of all I’ve learned about the spiritual journey we are all on.

AC: What have been some of the most memorable twists and turns in your professional/creative journey after graduating ArtCenter? DD: A month after graduation, I began work at Disney Feature Animation on a small film to later known as Lion King. Having interned there between fourth and fifth terms, I visually developed the film during preproduction, then went on to paint production backgrounds. I continued on with Disney Feature for 11 years, in L.A. and Paris, painting backgrounds and creating visual development art for Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Little Match Girl and One By One.

I then attended New York Film Academy and began making independent live-action films as an auteur. My films won awards in the festival circuit and garnered distribution. Original screenplay credits on SAG/IMDB films led me to put my lifelong love of writing on the front-burner, while keeping one foot in animation by freelancing for major companies like Mirada, Blue Sky, Dreamworks TV, Nickelodeon, Disney Interactive, etc. The electives I offered for 20 years at my alma mater, ArtCenter, became the foundation of what has diverged into today’s Entertainment Arts and Entertainment Design tracks.

My essays and short stories have been included in anthologies and collections, some winning awards (most recently Writer’s Digest 2020 and Craft Literary 2020). My young adult trilogy, The Nameless Prince, launched in 2012 through Twilight Times Books. The Seeker marks my debut in the mythic fiction-meets-visionary fiction genre. I’ve had the good fortune of crafting a career that spans various formats and genres, all expressions of a drive I consider essential to the human condition: storytelling.

AC: What’s been the most unexpected or valuable takeaway from your ArtCenter education? DD: I am grateful for the ArtCenter legacy of excellence, and its stellar reputation in the fields of art and design; both have served me well. The demanding program and high expectations of instructors like Gary Meyer, David Mocarski, Jon Conrad, Harry Carmean and Burne Hogarth taught me to strive for excellence, believe in my potential, and push boundaries. At ArtCenter I learned nothing less than the art of alchemy and manifestation, to co-create with the universe and use my authentic gifts to contribute to our collective transformation.

AC: What’s the one tool you can’t do without? DD: My imagination. Like many artists, I consider myself a storyteller with different modes of expression. Whether editing a film in Final Cut, modeling in Maya or SketchUp during visual development or painting concepts in Photoshop, the common denominator is my imagination! My fingers come in pretty handy as well. And my eyeballs.

AC: What design cliché are you most tempted to use? DD: In my teaching, I've heard myself say, "Know the rules before you break them!" With regard to figurative and representational work, I am a big fan of buckling down and applying the discipline to master foundational principles at the outset. Whether Chevreul’s laws of color theory or Gestalt studies, internalizing theory with the faith it will become second nature is precisely what eventually allows one to take risks and explore. In developing one’s authentic voice, a framework of regiments and a clear vision can, in the end, free up the intuition to orchestrate magic that may not occur if one is struggling with technique or "finding one’s way…"

AC: What’s the first site you look at when you open your computer in the morning? DD: I tend to check e-mail and (UGH) Facebook first. But NEVER before putting caffeine in me and getting a change of scenery. As a long time freelancer/independent contractor, I like to get a walk in and listen to inspirational content (blogs or podcasts) before settling in front of the computer. Novelty is crucial for the ol’ dendrites and for brain plasticity!

AC: If you could trade jobs for a day with anyone, who would it be? DD: Pretty much anyone at Laika, as I would kill or die to get in there. I love their brand, its spirit, and the content they produce. As a kid who once knew every dinosaur that ever walked the earth and the period in which it lived (although they’ve changed them all), I'm often baffled I did not make every attempt to work with Stan Winston on Jurassic Park. I guess I was busy at Disney, but I often kick myself as that ship has clearly sailed… Also, Peter Jackson — he is living my dream!

AC: What books are on your bedside table? DD: Rather than imposing my recommendations (like "all artists should read Letters to a Young Poet or all humans should read The Alchemist,) I will give an honest answer: I don’t have a bedside table. However, on my coffee table currently: The Kybalion, Giant, 12 Years a Slave, and Jane Fonda’s autobiography, My Life So Far. Jane is an inspiration: the fact that she still gives a damn and gets up every morning and walks the walk. I also admire her tackling ageism head on, the societal ill I am most passionate about rectifying at over half-a-century. As a writer, I read a wide variety of genres. Neil Gaiman, Junot Díaz, Davy Rothbart, David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs are also huge influences.

AC: What is your prized possession? DD: I have two. One is an amazing painting titled The Three Muses painted by the formidable John Watkiss, with whom I worked on Disney’s Tarzan and who has since passed. The other is the traditional animation desk I had commissioned in the '90s using Disney’s patented design. There was one architect in the world with the Mouse’s blessing to use the patented design. But none of that is what makes it a prized possession — the reason is this: I nearly lost it in a fire. But unbeknownst to me, rather than taking the charred thing to the dump as discussed, my father secretly took it home and brought it back from the dead. Refurbished every bit of charred wood, every molding, right down to the laminate and the proper finish. Like new.

AC: What’s your best piece of advice for an ArtCenter student who’s interested in following your career path?​ DD: Remember why you do what you do. There are plenty of times in life when we must keep our noses to the grindstone and work can feel like drudgery. But inspired work energizes — the opposite of drudgery. Whatever is paying the bills, I would be sure it’s something that contributes to your personal transformation on the micro level and to our collective evolution on the macro. The artistic journey is lifelong: We may find our authentic voice, but it’s ever-evolving. I would encourage all artists to take stock now and then, and assess whether that voice has been married with a sense of purpose. And whether that purpose contributes to the dialectic of our human potential!

#artcenter #entertainment desgin #entertainment #design #dominick domingo

[shitihaveheardatwork]

See You In Hell, Bratz Passion 4 Fashion: Diamondz!

Contrary to the opinions of many of my peers, I think weeding is awesome and I love it. There’s little I find more satisfying than an item of obviously low quality with no demand whatsoever coming into my attention and having the privilege of removing it from circulation.

Just to be entirely clear, we’re not talking about “extreme” or “controversial” content. I’ve had that conversation done to death a thousand classroom-polarizing times before. We’re talking about cheap. We’re talking about cash-grab. We’re talking about no artistic, cultural, spiritual, or even material value.

We’re talking about Bratz Passion 4 Fashion; Diamondz.

Some personal history first: I’m old enough that my last big toy phase before I reached the special level of adolescence where you have to openly condemn everything you once held dear as a child was Bionicles. I had the black bionicle from every generation up until that point, as well as a complete set of those little rolly-polly guys with the stretchy necks. I don’t know what they were called and I couldn’t be bothered to look it up for this lil micro-essay here.

What’s important is that they were cool. They did action-y stuff, I felt smart putting them together.

Waaaay Cooler, Smarter, Action-y, and REAL than my sister’s interests! Polly Pocket? Dumb! Pre-bronification MLP? Barf! Bratz? How fake can you get? Those were just shallow pieces of plastic made by toy companies. Not like my precious bionicles. So cool. So adult. So smart.

Then I watched the first Bionicle movie when it was on TV and realized I too was a cog in an elaborate toy commercial scheme. Something clicked in my horny mushy pre-teen brain, and I put away all my old favorite toys forever. It was now time to be shitty and elitist about intangible concepts instead, a hobby I’d keep until my early 20′s. But in addition to a change in hobbies, I also started to be a little bit less shit to my sister about her toys.

This confession out of the way, I don’t think my sister would have stopped me from throwing this DVD directly into the trash. My sister didn’t become a high-fallutin’ working-class intelligentsia asshole like her big brother, and we have nothing comparable in terms of media taste, but I think she would support me 100% if I told her I sent this DVD straight to hell. In fact I might call her later just to confirm. This disk was bad, is the moral of my story.

It took six paragraphs, but let’s talk about Day 3 on the job!

It was just me and Lisa today. I’ve upgraded from liking Lisa to absolutely loving working with Lisa. We talked everything from how her kids are doing to politics (she brought up Tr#mps latest satire-destroying phone call) to video-gaming to the history of animation. I genuinely like talking to her and it’s a shame she’s just filling in. If a job opens up at her branch, I’d apply for it, no question.

My boss Wallace, “Yer dad”-level queerphobe and Ron Swanson-esque libertarian, was putting out a metaphorical fire at another branch and I didn’t have to deal with him at all.

I did my opening routine. Checking the drop box, collecting the pull list, putting together holds, refiling returned materials, preparing ILL material, checking my work email, and the like. I was done with it all in about 90 minutes, with 4 hours left to go on my shift.

Wallace had told me to fill the time with anything I can qualify as “professional development” the week before, so I spent some time reading articles on the ALA website and googling “anarcho-librarianism” just to see what would happen. I found an abandoned blog and a twitter.

Then I remembered oh shit. I have to make a twitter don’t I

I don’t like twitter. I’ve tried to use it. I don’t get it. I’m too old to learn a new app. It’s impossible.

And yet I must. That’s where The Discourse is happening. That’s where the minds in my field are saying things. If I’m taking my career seriously, if I want to get a grip on the currents in my profession, I have to bite that checkmarked bullet. Stand by for updates on my professional twitter.

I got bored of being on the ALA site and ran out of productive things to google, and decided to look around the building for abandoned projects and mysteries to solve. It didn’t take long to find one, when I found a cart in the work room with a pile of DVDs in paper sleeves.

“Scratched” a post-it note on top said.

I asked Lisa if she knew how long these had been here, and she confirmed that they were in fact a hold-over from the previous staff that had left in a mass exodus some months before.

Well cool, I thought. I’ll see if these are too fucked up to play.

Commence with an hour of consuming children’s media, a few seconds of a minute at a time. I was fortunate that the work computers both had CD drives AND VLC media player! Thank you, past cool supervisor who put VLC on the work machines! Good call!

So I “watched” a few Dora The Explorers, a Care Bears film, that Trolls movie, Hotel Transylvania, and a Barbie horse adventure film, watching a few seconds before skipping a minute ahead to see if it would choke and skip.

See here’s the thing about scratched CDs. They’re weird. You can have a CD that’s fucked up completely (looking at you, my copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1) that still somehow plays fine like it just came out of the box. Sometimes scratches will seem totally superficial but goof up just enough microscopic binary that no machine will touch it. All these DVDs were ugly as sin, but that didn’t mean they were broken did it?

And it turns out a lot of them worked fine. That’s how I ended up watching Bratz Passion 4 Fashion: Diamondz which, unfortunately, played fine.

As I put the disk into the drive I remembered my sister’s participation in the Bratz toy craze. As an adult, a real one not the one I told myself I was at 13, I told myself that I might have a bias against this content, to just check the disk and not get judgy about what might be a kids favorite movie.

I uh... I failed to do that. BUT IT’S OK BECAUSE MY BIAS IS TOTALLY JUSTIFIED AND MY JUSTIFICATION IS RIGHT HERE

If you didn’t or don’t want to click the link, it’s a scene where the Bratz Diamonds are about to head out on some sort of fashion trucking marathon/race. Like any proper racer, the blonde at the wheel has a white-knuckle grip on the wheel, has just put their rig in gear, and in proper high-octane fashion, puts on a knowing smirk.

Except the smirk is, well... the animators just stretched the lips across the face further. I can’t do it justice, you just have to watch it, but I’ve done better animating just by pan-and-scanning around Windows Movie Maker.

This... isn’t content anybody needs. But I’m a librarian. I’m sworn to access. So the question becomes, does anyone want it?

I had to know, I had to know, how much circulation has this gotten? When was the last time this disk was in the hands of anybody at all besides me?

I popped it into Evergreen and behold: 15 check-outs since 2006 when it was released. No checkouts in the last 2 years.

I asked Lisa the proper procedure for removing something from the catalog, and in only a moment the deed was done. The case was repurposed, the disk trashed, the DVD cover recycled. It was time to go. I’d spent my remaining hours quasi-consuming children’s media.

I placed most of what I’d watched in a new pile, which I labeled “SCRATCHED BUT WORK FINE.” I placed one lone Barbie horse movie in a different pile labeled “SCRATCHED AND DOES NOT WORK.”

I felt like I’d accomplished something. I turned off the lights and I went home.

#adventures in librarianship #thisisme #work journal

[muhyousafsalfi]

18 Ways to Earn Money Online

Did you try to make money online before but did not get success? Then no need to worry anymore!

Because of we have already trained more than 7,00,000 people across the world & they are successfully making $300 to $2000 (INR 20,000+) per month.

We are showing you below some of the best ways to earn money online. You can also download our training package which will help you to grow your income very fast.

And yes, everything on this website is Absolutely Free & Without Investment.

18 Ways to Earn Money Online

Check some of the best ways below & start immediately-

1. Make Money with Online Surveys

Here you can make money by completing small surveys which take 5 minutes to 20 minutes depending on the requirement of a particular company.

You need to write your feedback & opinion in a survey. You just have to select your choice from the question & there is no need to write anything.

You can make $1 to $20 depending on the length of the survey, your profile & the country you are living in.

2. Earn Money with Blogging

I have been making money with blogging from the last 7-8 years. I have made more than 1 million dollars (almost Rs. 7 Crore+) with blogging. I was so confused when I started blogging.

I had absolutely no idea about blogging when I started in 2010. I worked very hard but made no money with blogging for almost 1 year.

But I never gave up! I was doing my research on topics like, ‘how to create a blog', ‘how to write on your blog' and ‘how to promote your blog'.

And things started in my favor after 1 year. I made my first $100 from blogging in 2011. Then there was no looking back. Today I am earning $25,000 (Rs 15 Lacs+) per month from blogging.

3. Become a Captcha Solver

If you have more free time (2 hours a day) then you can add further income in your pocket by working as a captcha solver.

This is one of the easiest way to earn money online. As a captcha solver, you need to read the captcha images & type the exact characters.

You need to be very fast in order to earn a better income. You can get paid up to $2 for every 1000 captchas you solve.

4. Earn with Affiliate Marketing

If you are serious about earning money online & you are a hard-working guy who wants to make big income then affiliate marketing is for you.

There is more scope for affiliate marketing than before because of the high growth of online shopping.

There are hundreds of online merchants like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Clickbank, CJ, etc. where you can signup & promote their products.

In affiliate marketing, you are simply helping customers to buy the right product by creating a simple website & in return, you can earn 4% to 20% commission.

5. Become a freelancer

Freelancing is another popular way to make money after blogging & affiliate marketing. As a freelancer, you can work with small or big companies on a temporary basis & provide them your services.

Freelancers can make $500 to $2000+ per month depending on the type of freelance jobs you will do for your client.

You can work as a content writer, web designer, graphics designer or provide services like SEO, data entry, video testimonials, digital marketing, etc.

There are dozens of popular websites like UpWork, Freelancer.in, WorkNHire, and many more freelance sites that can give you the ready platform with ready clients.

6. Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is like a personal assistant who can earn money by working online for someone without being physically present.

He can do variety of tasks like taking care of websites, counseling, writing & proofreading, publishing content, marketing, coding, website & app development, research, etc.

There are dozens of companies like HireMyMom, MyTasker, Zirtual, uAssistMe, 123Employee where you can signup for virtual assistant work.

7. Writing Job

Writing is another better way to earn money on the internet through writing different types of content.

You can write for blogs, companies, institutions, individual people, etc. Different types of writers get paid differently.

Normally people get paid $5 to $20+ for writing 500 words content.

You can go to the sites like UpWork, iWriter, WriterBay, FreelanceWriting, TextBroker, ExpressWriters.com, FreelanceWritingGigs.com to find the content writing jobs.

8. Micro-working

There are more ways that can help you to make extra income by working part-time. You can easily make $200-$300 per month by doing simple tasks on different sites.

Here you can work on a variety of different tasks like identifying an object, rating & commenting on different sites, visiting some websites, finding contact details, doing small research, writing small articles, etc.

There are many websites like mTurk, MicroWorker, SEOClerk, ClickWorker, GigWalk where you can work as a micro worker & earn extra income. After signup, we will show you how to work as Micro-worker and make money.

9. Become a YouTuber

YouTube is one of the hottest trends in earning money online. You can start your YouTube channel, upload some quality videos and then become a YouTube partner to make money online on YouTube.

You can create a different kind of videos like prank videos, comedy videos, kitchen recipes, how-to-do videos, travel tips, or anything you think, is useful for people.

Once you get the videos views and subscribers for your channel then you can apply for YouTube partner program.

Once you get the approval, people will see the ads along with ads in your videos. You will make money for each views your video receive.

You can shoot videos from your smartphone or any DSLR camera.

10. Become an online seller

Online selling is not like traditional selling. You don’t have much scope of selling your items outside your local market but in online selling, you can sell your product all over the country.

There are 2 ways to sell anything online.

Either, you can create your own website and sell your products from your website OR become a seller on any famous shopping portal like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Snapdeal etc.

Second, an option is much better you will get existing customers of these popular portals.

Now you must be thinking that what can I sell when I don’t have any product?

I have seen many Amazon and Flipkart sellers who don’t have any product but still they are selling the number of products on these sites.

What you can do is, roam around your city & check for the best products you can sell on these sites. You can find the wholesalers and distributors who can sell you these products at highly discounted rates.

You can list these products on Amazon, eBay, etc. and make money by selling at a higher price.

You need to try the best products that you can sell at lower than market price. Trust me, it is easier than you thought. The only thing you need to do is take action.

11. Domain Trader

Domain trading is another high-profit business you can do online. But here you need some investment in buying the domain.’

You must be an expert OR you should get detailed knowledge before you start this business.

You can buy domains from GoDaddy or other domain registrars for less than $10 & sell in the future to the needy person for hundreds of dollars. Your skill here is to identify great domains that are not booked yet & companies in the future can try to buy that domain.

When companies don’t find the domain of their choice, they contact the domain owner for the deal & it’s in your control to fix the price. You can even put your domains on auction so that people can buy directly at your desired price.

12. Website flipping

Like domain trading, website flipping is also a hot business to earn money online. Here you don’t deal with domains but websites.

You have to create a website, work on it for 3-6 months or more so that you can start making money from the websites.

After earning for 2-3 months, you can put that site on auction on Flippa, EmpireFlippers, etc. You can easily get 15-20 times the price of your monthly earning from that website.

It’s much easier to grow old sites than creating a new site and the growth of this new site.

Many experienced people buy websites from Flippa, work for 3-4 months on these sites and make double or triple income.

13. Provide training & consultancy

There is a big scope of earning money online if you have some good skills that people need. Like you can provide training on spoken English, computer courses, any technical course, Feng shui, medical treatment, and any other things.

You can promote your business through a website or a Facebook business page.

You need to promote your website or Facebook page in order to get the potential leads.

You can get many customers through good follow-ups.

14. Stock & Forex Trading

Stock trading & forex trading is a very lucrative way to make money for those who has a good idea of the market.

There are number of free or paid courses available on the internet that can train you for online trading.

You can even read newspaper like Economic times or watch TV channels like CNBC to become more experts in the field. It's risky to enter into this market without sufficient knowledge.

15. Earn money from your smartphone

There are various smartphone apps that can pay you some extra income by completing some simple tasks on your Smartphone.

There are at least 20 money-making apps that if you install in your smartphone, can give an extra income of $200-$300.

You have to take simple surveys, complete offers by signup on other websites, play games, watch videos etc.

You don’t need to take any extra time to earn from this as you can make money on the go.

16. Sell photos online

This is another use of your smartphone. You can take high-quality images of nature, places, people, things, dishes, homes, etc. & sell them online.

There are number of big sites like Shutterstock, Fotolia,, iStockPhoto, Photobucket where you can submit your photos. Whenever some customer wants to purchase your photos, you will get paid as per the price you fix.

17. Sell old stuff on OLX or Quikr

I am sure there may be a number of things in your home that are lying unused for months & if you take little effort, you can earn some good money.

You just need to do 2 things, i.e. find out all the items that you are no longer using, take high-quality photos of these items from different angles & list these items on OLX & Quikr for sale.

Not only this, you can also ask your friends & relatives for selling their old stuff. You can help them selling these items & make some commission.

So these 18 ways can provide a perfect answer for your query ‘how to earn money online” & yes, you can shoot an email to us in case of assistance.

#earn money #earn money on youtube #earn money online #earn money online free #ways to earn money #how to earn bitcoin #how to earn money #how to earn from home #how to earn online

[kaycmoney]

33 Legit Online Jobs That Pay $50,000+ From Home

Working remotely doesn’t have to mean taking a pay cut. There are more legit online jobs than ever. All it takes is being aware of the possibilities.

Below are 33 legitimate online jobs where you can earn over $50,000 a year — and most of them allow you to make your own schedule.

Plus, included are a number of valuable tips and resources that will help you land and succeed in your ideal online job.

Best Online Jobs

These top online jobs have the ideal mix of high demand, a low supply of talented individuals, and the ability to start earning fast. All you need is an internet connection and the motivation to get started.

#1. Proofreading

Quick summary: Earn money by proofreading books, academic papers, website content, audio transcripts and more.

Average pay: $17.50 per hour.

Pros: With no certification requirements, you can start earning fast.

Cons: Limited upside unless you decide to transition to a related high-paying field (such as editing).

If you’re the type of person that spots every typo and grammar mistake in the articles you read, consider a career as a proofreader. This is a great example of a job that needs no certification, and you can use your set of eagle eyes to make solid money.

With the explosion of web content that has occurred in recent years, it’s a job that’s in super-high demand. That means you can land your first client today, if you’re ready to start.

#2. Bookkeeping

Quick summary: Record and continuously update financial transactions for small businesses.

Average pay: $17.50 to $40+ per hour.

Pros: You’ll typically work with clients on a retainer basis, allowing you to earn a steady base of income.

Cons: Will need basic training to earn your first client.

At the top of most business owners’ list of “Least Favorite Work Activities” is bookkeeping. Of course, it’s a critical task for ensuring that a business runs smoothly and survives into the future.

If you’re someone who loves to work with numbers, you can earn very good money in the field. There are also a lot of opportunities to charge higher hourly wages the more you specialize.

And, just like proofreading, bookkeeping doesn’t require a certification.

#3. Start A Blog And Become An Influencer

Quick summary: Create a website that provides valuable information about a topic you care about.

Average pay: $0 to $10k+ per month.

Pros: High income potential.

Cons: Even experienced bloggers take nearly a year to earn a full-time living.

I started my first blog in 2009 and sold it two years later.

I launched this blog in August of 2016. Just over a year later, it was generating enough revenue that I felt comfortable leaving a job I’d held for over 10 years.

The great thing about a blog is that you’re building a sellable asset. A quality website sells for around 30X its monthly revenue. Therefore, if you’re able to make $1,333 per month, you have a $40,000 asset.

As for how to make money blogging, there are a number of ways.

These include:

Advertising — earn money by placing ads on your website.

Affiliate marketing — make money promoting other businesses.

Products and services — sell your own products and services to others.

Sponsored content — you can get paid for partnering with brands

One big upside to blogging is that it can be a great source of passive income. On the other hand, one downside is that it can take time to get up and running. As such, if you need money today, you might want to consider a different online job instead.

#4. Online Tutoring

Quick summary: Tutor students worldwide in English or other subjects.

Average pay: $18 per hour.

Pros: The ability to start earning in as little as a few weeks.

Cons: Limited upside.

One high-growth business industry right now is online education. And one of the fastest-growing niches within online education is online tutoring jobs.

There are now multiple websites that connect you with students all over the world who are looking to be tutored in a range of subjects.

When we ranked the best online tutoring sites, one of the top options was Education First.

EF is a U.S.-based company that pays as much as $20 per hour to start and offers cash bonuses for reaching certain teaching milestones.

Here are just a few of the benefits of working for EF:

The lesson plans and course materials are provided.

You can start teaching classes as quickly as two weeks after applying.

You can work when you want, where you want, with no need to worry about marketing your services.

No teaching experience is required, as EF considers your entire professional background and resume.

Apply with Education First.

VIPKid is another great online tutoring opportunity, although they get a lot more applications. As such, it’s better suited for those with more teaching experience.

You’ll need a bachelor’s degree to work for either company, but it doesn’t have to be in education and you don’t need an active teaching certification.

Apply with VIPKid.

Best Legit Part-Time Online Jobs (With No Fees Or Startup Costs)

What makes a great part-time online job?

Flexibility, fulfilling work, and the chance to earn as much by working part-time as others do from working full-time.

Here are the top part-time online jobs that meet these criteria.

#5. Social Media Marketing

Quick summary: Handle all social media tasks for small business owners.

Average pay: $20 to $100+ per hour.

Pros: Most social media clients are on a retainer basis.

Cons: Limited upside unless you’re willing to learn paid advertising, which can take time.

Many business owners don’t have the time to make consistent updates to their social media platforms, or to respond promptly to customer requests made via social media.

That’s why so many businesses today are looking to hire social media managers. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an 8% job growth rate is expected for social media marketing managers through 2028.

As long as you have the ability to post, curate and manage content on social media channels, you can start taking on clients today.

But the big money is in learning how to effectively deploy paid advertising, such as Facebook ads. Businesses need new customer leads, and you can earn premium wages if you know how to use things like micro-targeting to deliver ads to just the right audience.

This can be a great opportunity for college students, because the amount of time you need to spend on a project each week can be quite small (especially if you utilize automation), and the required schedule tends to be extremely flexible.

#6. Virtual Assistant

Quick summary: Work as a remote executive assistant doing a range of tasks.

Average pay: $18 to $35 per hour, according to Upwork.

Pros: The more efficient you become, the more clients you can add (and the more money you can make).

Cons: Most employers will want you to work certain hours of the day.

For years, most people thought of virtual assistants as low-paid overseas workers that could be trusted to handle basic administrative tasks.

But now the trend isn’t to hire a VA for $5 an hour. It’s to find the highest-quality VA possible. Someone who will really add value to your business.

And because of that, people are willing to pay significantly higher wages to the right person with the right skills and work experience.

So instead of just doing boring, repetitive tasks, you’ll be working for a successful business owner as a remote executive assistant.

Common tasks carried out by VAs include:

Answering email

Booking travel

Managing social media

Scheduling appointments

And more, depending on the field

Some VAs take on multiple clients, allowing them to earn over six figures a year from home. This means it can be one of the most lucrative remote jobs you’ll come across.

#7. Freelance Writing

Quick summary: Online writing jobs include things like drafting blog posts, articles, advertisements and more for clients.

Average pay: $15 to $40 per hour for beginners.

Pros: It’s a field that’s exploding in demand due to the growth of online publishing.

Cons: Standing out when you don’t have a lot of experience is difficult.

Freelance writing is one of the more lucrative side hustles I’ve tried. I started small, but in a year I was earning over $100 an hour.

Thanks to the growth of content marketing, it’s also a skill that’s more in-demand than ever.

#8. Photography

Quick summary: Supply stock photos that will be purchased and used by businesses.

Average pay: 20 to 50 cents per image sold.

Pros: A fun, fulfilling hobby that can double as a business.

Cons: Will take time to build up your inventory of photos available for sale.

One of the fasting-growing online markets is stock photography.

Businesses need quality stock photos for their websites, client presentations and more. If you love being behind a camera — even the one on your smartphone — you can get paid for uploading quality photos to stock photo sites.

You’ll earn anywhere between 20 and 50 cents per image sold. So, the goal is to have dozens of photos for sale, each generating daily commissions. This makes selling stock photography a great source of passive income, because you can get paid over and over again for work you only did once.

#9. Search Engine Optimization

Quick summary: Help small business owners get found online.

Average pay: $25 to $40 per hour for beginners.

Pros: Quality SEO specialists are in high demand.

Cons: Proving your value comes down to showing proof that past projects have worked — which makes it hard for beginners to land a job.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of helping businesses get found online — primarily on Google.

In fact, a recent study by Microsoft listed SEO as the most important hard skill for marketers to learn going forward in 2020.

In my experience, having managed local SEO campaigns in the past, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. That means you can drive a lot of revenue to a business just by implementing a basic set of SEO “best practices.” Therefore, you can charge a high hourly or project rate, knowing you’ll deliver results.

The best way to learn SEO is with hands-on experience. Personally, I learned SEO by starting a blog and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

With real proof of results on my resume, I was then able to obtain clients and earn a high rate for my work.

#10. Scoping

Quick summary: Edit transcripts for court reporters.

Average pay: $20 to $30 per hour.

Pros: Very flexible hours, as often you’ll be working off recordings.

Cons: Contracts can come and go based on your client’s hours.

Scoping is a little-known work-from-home job that’s been around for 30+ years.

A court reporter’s job is transcribing what’s said in the courtroom into written form, using a special system of shorthand so that they can keep up with the fast-moving proceedings. Court reporters then hire scopists to edit their transcripts.

Court reporters make money per page, not per hour. That’s why outsourcing the editing allows them to increase their earning potential.

Similar to proofreading and bookkeeping, no certification is required, there are very minimal start-up costs, and the earning potential is high.

#11. Graphic Design

Quick summary: Design engaging graphics.

Average pay: $25 to $40 per hour for beginners.

Pros: Pick your own clients and work in niches that interest you.

Cons: Will be a lot of project-based work, which can vary your income.

For the artists out there, graphic design is a great way to monetize your hobby. The web is becoming more and more visual — especially as mobile devices become the primary method of browsing.

The highest-paid graphic designers combine multiple skills into their designs. Knowledge in branding, sales and direct response marketing allows many graphic designers to charge over $100 per hour.

#12. Video Editing

Quick summary: Create engaging videos for social media, YouTube and websites.

Average pay: $25 to $35 per hour for beginners.

Pros: Growing in demand as the popularity of YouTube, Instagram and other video platforms increases.

Cons: Video editing requires a lot of focus, so it’s important you have the work environment and discipline to log longer hours.

Another online trend that’s picking up more steam year-by-year is video editing. Video editors with prior experience are in high demand today, with the potential to earn over $50 per hour the more you specialize.

#13. Marketing Automation Specialist

Quick summary: Design and implement automated digital marketing systems.

Average pay: $40+ per hour for beginners.

Pros: High income potential, with the ability to scale into an agency.

Cons: The best in the field have a range of skills, from copywriting to understanding the technical aspects of a particular software. These skills tend to have a longer learning curve.

I’m in a mastermind group that’s been meeting since 2009. We all do some type of marketing work as independent contractors for a range of businesses. We’ve each had our ups and downs. Yet, as I write this, things are going well for everyone.

Connecting the dots, we realized that once we committed to specializing in a growing digital marketing platform, we had to actually start turning clients away.

One of the fastest-growing segments is marketing automation, on platforms such as Ontraport and HubSpot. These platforms are experiencing explosive growth, and more are emerging all the time. Some other examples are Aweber, Convert Kit and MailChimp.

Taking a certification course to become a specialist can often land you in the $60 to $100 per hour range fast.

#14. Medical Transcriptionist

Quick summary: Edit medical transcriptions for local healthcare providers.

Average pay: Transcription jobs typically pay $10 to $25 per hour.

Pros: Steady source of income.

Cons: High startup costs to earn a credential.

There are dozens of data entry jobs online. Sites like Clickworker and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provide typists with a lot of work opportunities, but they’re often micro jobs — quick tasks that pay almost nothing.

In order to make over $50,000 per year with data entry jobs, you’ll need to specialize. And beyond scoping, one of the best ways to specialize in data entry is by focusing on medical transcription.

The first thing to know about medical transcription is that it requires a certification, which you can get through a company like CareerStep. CareerStep offers a range of certifications in multiple work-at-home opportunities within the medical field.

With their medical transcription certification, which is approved by the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity, you’ll prepare yourself to land an online job as a transcriptionist in an industry that’s hungry for qualified talent. CareerStep courses are not cheap (they start at $2,999), but they do offer both payment plans and discounts for military spouses.

If you’re not looking for a career and just want to make some extra income, there are a number of websites where you can get started with transcription jobs on a more casual basis.

The most popular sites are:

Rev — make 36 to 65 cents per minute of audio transcribed.

Go Transcript — earn up to 60 cents per minute of audio transcribed.

Scribie — pay starts at $5 to $25 per hour of audio transcribed.

DionData Solutions – hires only U.S.-based workers.

One thing worth noting about medical transcriptionists is that they’re seldom out of work for long, as more and more healthcare companies are looking to outsource tasks to keep overhead costs as low as possible.

#15. Voiceover Artist

Quick summary: Provide vocal recordings to be used in audiobooks, videos, films and more.

Average pay: $20 pay per hour.

Pros: Flexibility and freedom to work your own schedule.

Cons: As most work is contract-based, your income can vary drastically from month-to-month.

Voice acting is the art of reading a script and using your voice to bring that script to life. Quality voice actors are in especially high demand in the marketing field, as video marketing has exploded in popularity in recent years.

A good site to get started on is Upwork. There, you can gain experience working as a voiceover artist (and ideally find your niche).

#16. Technical Writing

Quick summary: Synthesize complex, high-level information for a specific audience to understand.

Average pay: $20 per hour for beginners.

Pros: One of the higher-paying freelance writing niches.

Cons: The work isn’t very creative compared to most traditional writing jobs.

For those who like to dive deep into learning new things — and aren’t afraid of tackling super-complicated topics — technical writing can be a great way to generate extra income.

As a technical writer, you’ll be responsible for writing user guides and other documentation.

Aside from being interesting work for those who love to research, it’s also widely recognized as one of the best-paying writing jobs available. Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects growth at 8% per year through 2028.

#17. Customer Service Representative

Quick summary: Provide service to a businesses’ existing customers.

Average pay: $12 to $25 per hour.

Pros: Opportunities with Fortune 500 companies, which may provide benefits such as health insurance, 401(k), and paid time off.

Cons: You may have to work irregular hours (especially when just starting out).

Most customer service jobs will not pay you $50,000. In fact, according to Payscale, the average hourly wage for work-at-home customer service jobs is $13.92.

However, if you’re smart about where to look and the skillsets to master, there is a path to becoming a high-earner in the field.

For starters, because there’s a large supply of customer service jobs, I’d avoid looking for jobs under the name “Customer Service Representative.” Research by TheJobNetwork showed that terms like “Customer Experience Associate,” “Customer Engagement Representative,” and “Customer Service Advisor” actually paid $18 or more per hour — well more than your average customer service job.

Two fields with a lot of overlap (and higher pay than customer service) are “Account Management” and “Customer Success Manager.” In these fields, you’ll be doing a lot of customer service work but other skills — such as cross-selling and retention —  are required. As such, if you’re looking to become a high earner long-term, finding an entry-level position in account management or customer success might be your best bet.

Online Jobs That Pay Well For Entrepreneurs

The goal of a freelancer is to get good clients, do great work, and increase their value over time.

The goal of an entrepreneur is to build a repeatable system that provides value with or without the owner.

As an entrepreneur, you’re no longer working on projects for a set rate (or by the hour). Instead, your income correlates with the amount of value you can provide.

There are no limits to what you can and can’t do. But to narrow down your choices and help you figure out where to start, here are 10 ideas.

#18. Authority Sites

Quick summary: Build an informational website that helps people make purchasing decisions.

Pros: While working to build your authority site, you’ll learn very valuable, in-demand skills that can be transferred to your existing career.

Cons: Similar to a blog, it often takes a year or more to see a significant source of income.

A popular, highly-profitable and low-cost online business idea is building authority sites.

Authority sites are content-driven websites on a specific topic. They most often exist to help people like you and me make purchasing decisions.

Authority sites are a lot like blogs. Actually, if you were to build an authority site, a lot of the work is the same. The big difference is that blogs are more personal in nature. With a blog, you’re looking to build long-term relationships with visitors. Authority sites are much more transactional.

To best understand the idea, think back to the last time you searched for a review of a product. When you visited a website that had the review, that was likely an authority site.

As an example, I’m in the market for a sauna. So, I’ve visited different authority sites in the sauna niche, reading buyer guides and reviews.

The most popular way authority sites make money is through affiliate partnerships. With our sauna example, if I were to buy a sauna recommended by a particular site, that site would earn a commission.

And therein lies one of the big benefits to an authority site: since the owner doesn’t need to be present to make money, and they often drive traffic through passive sources like Google, such sites can be a source of passive income.

#19. Dropshipping

Quick summary: Sell items via a website and have them shipped directly from the manufacturer or wholesaler to the customer.

Pros: Can test the business model with very little money.

Cons: The dropshipping field is loaded with spammy marketing, so stick with learning the ropes from reputable sites like Shopify.

Shopify has created hundreds of opportunities for online entrepreneurs. Why? They made the process of selling online easy. From products and digital downloads to consulting services, over 1 million people use Shopify to run an online store.

One of the most common ways people get started is through dropshipping. The benefit of starting a dropshipping store is that orders are sent right to the customer. That means the store owners (like yourself) don’t have to hold inventory or deal with shipping.

And since you only need to order a product after a customer has bought it from your store, it’s a very low-cost business to start.

#20. Retail Arbitrage

Quick summary: Buy low and sell high.

Pros: A way for hobbyist and collectors to use their knowledge of a particular niche to make money.

Cons: Takes time and skill to find the best deals.

Do you love going to flea markets and garage sales, and browsing thrift stores? If so, you can make money online by flipping items for profit.

Think of this online business idea as buying an asset and selling it for a higher price. Your inventory can be anything you find at a garage sale or on a clearance rack.

The goal — and the key to making retail arbitrage work — is having an information advantage. This means understanding the market for what you’re buying better than the person who is selling that item.

Remember, the concept of arbitrage is based on the principle that a particular good has a higher price in one place than it does in another. That might mean it sells for more in California than it does in New York. But it might also mean that it sells for more online than it does in a brick-and-mortar store.

Winning at arbitrage means knowing how to figure out which items to buy and which ones to walk away from.

#21. E-Commerce Store And/Or Amazon FBA

Quick summary: Create your own online store or use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to sell physical products online.

Pros: Very high potential in a fast-growing field.

Cons: Higher startup costs. Money often has to be reinvested in the business.

Amazon FBA is a business idea that’s getting a lot of attention lately.

The idea is to buy products directly from a manufacturer or wholesaler, then sell them online via Amazon. The most popular option is to use Amazon FBA, which handles all the warehousing and shipping (the “fulfillment”) for you. In fact, you can even have the manufacturer or distributor ship the products directly to Amazon, so that you never have to physically touch the items.

But you don’t have to limit your selling to Amazon. You can also use FBA to ship products you sell on eBay or your own website. It’s much easier than packing and shipping everything yourself, and the shipping rates Amazon charges you are much lower than you’d pay to UPS or FedEx.

#22. Etsy Store Owner

Quick summary: Create and sell homemade crafts and digital products on the world’s largest creative marketplace.

Pros: You’re taking advantage of a fast-growing platform.

Cons: As Etsy has grown it’s become more competitive, with large companies creating stores on the marketplace.

When it comes to legit work-from-home jobs for moms, Etsy is near the top of the list.

Think of Etsy like eBay for creative people, as some of the most popular products on the platform include arts, crafts and jewelry.

You can either do Etsy as a business (there are many full-time sellers) or use it as a way to make extra money in your spare time.

#23. Create A Course

Quick summary: Create an online education course.

Pros: Can test demand for ideas fast by utilizing online teaching websites.

Cons: The below sites, which have an audience looking for courses, often take a large cut of your profits. The best long-term business model is building your own audience, but that can take time.

If you have expertise others may find valuable, you can create a course online and sell it. This used to be very hard, as you had to build your audience from scratch.

But two websites, Udemy and Skillshare, now provide access to an audience of people who are eager to learn about almost everything under the sun.

There are all types of courses available, so it’s a great way to create a legit online job of your own.

#24. Home Health Agency

Quick summary: Manage a local team of home healthcare providers.

Pros: Demographic trends, specifically the aging of the baby boom generation, have increased demand.

Cons: High startup costs, including licensure.

A major trend in our economy is the need for qualified home healthcare. The aging population of the United States, as well as seniors’ increasing desire for care inside their home, is driving this trend.

A big benefactor of this trend has been local home health agencies.

A home healthcare agency provides qualified care to local residents. As employees are working at client’s houses, an office isn’t required.

This is by no means an easy business to start. To begin, you’ll need certain licenses and certifications. These vary by state, as well as by the type of care you offer.

Non-medical care agencies have the lowest startup costs and barriers to entry. This type of agency provides day-to-day living help, such as meal-prep and housekeeping. In contrast, medical care agencies work with Medicare/Medicaid and have more complex responsibilities.

#25. Virtual Recruiter

Quick summary: Find talented employees for businesses.

Pros: High income potential for those with large existing networks.

Cons: If working for yourself, income can vary widely as you’re only paid when someone lands a job.

If you love to network, this is a great low-cost business to start. What you’re doing here is finding talent for employers. Payouts can be quite large, as some placement firms charge upwards of 25% (or more) of the employee’s annual salary.

#26. Insurance Agent

Quick summary: Sell property, casualty or life insurance from a home office.

Pros: Some insurance income is recurring, making for a quality source of passive income.

Cons: Competitive field, often competing with companies with billion-dollar ad budgets.

Having been in this field myself for over 10 years, I’ve seen a lot of growth from individuals starting their own insurance agencies from home. Startup costs are low, the hours are flexible, and the commissions can be quite high.

If I were to start an insurance agency from home, I’d focus on selling small business insurance. The premiums tend to be higher than those of auto and home policies, and there’s much less competition.

#27. Travel Agent

Quick summary: Book and coordinate travel for individuals or businesses.

Pros: Fulfilling way to earn more for those who love to travel.

Cons: Income can vary, as travel tends to spike at certain times of year.

Believe it or not, travel agents are still in demand. It just depends on finding the right niche. This is an especially good business for you if you have personal or professional travel experience, because you can provide your clients with insights they can’t get from a website.

Legit Online Jobs: Growing Industries Hiring Online

Below are examples of legit online job opportunities in specific industries that are increasingly moving towards remote workers. Here you’ll find jobs available for both entry-level workers and for those with experience (both in the U.S. and Canada).

#28. Healthcare

Popular online healthcare jobs include billing, coding, the handling of insurance claims and general customer service work.

#29. Sales And Business Development

Sales is one of the most in-demand and legitimate work-at-home jobs. If you produce results, you can get paid big money. Just about every industry needs quality salespeople.

#30. Accounting And Finance

A field open to both entry-level and experienced professionals, common roles in accounting and finance include bookkeeping, managing payables and receivables, collections and analysis.

#31. Communications

Work with PR and marketing departments to deliver communications within and to prospects and customers of a company.

#32. Insurance

The insurance field is one of the largest sectors of the economy, employing over 2.66 million people in the United States. Entry-level jobs include call center roles, customer service reps, sales, and communications.

#33. Legal

There’s a wide range of jobs in the legal field. Opportunities for entry-level workers include administrative assistant and records assistant positions.

Online Job FAQ

How much do online work from home jobs pay per year?

When you work from home, you’ll usually (but not always) be classified as an independent contractor. That means you’re working on a per-hour or per-project basis, rather than for a set annual salary. As a result, your annual earnings can vary widely based on a number of factors. If you’re organized, motivated and efficient, you can often earn more money for the same amount of work as compared to a more traditional environment. But on the flip side, if you’re someone who finds it difficult to stay focused and has a tendency to coast through the day, you might end up making significantly less. That’s because as a freelancer or contractor, you’re only getting paid for the work you actually do. Being at home can be distracting, and it’s easy to end up with only four billable hours after an eight-hour workday. Your take-home pay will also depend on the types of contracts you’re able to win. You’ll make a lot more money as a paid social media manager than you will by doing online data entry jobs.

Where should I look for online jobs?

If you’re trying to get hired for a full-time position at a company, start your job search at FlexJobs — a great job board for finding remote work. As mentioned above, FlexJobs screens each listing before making it available to applicants. That’s a good thing, because the company’s research has shown that there are 53 scam job listings for every legit online job! Beyond FlexJobs, Indeed is another job board that’s worth checking out, as it has the most powerful search engine among job listing websites. If you’re looking for independent contractor or freelance work, sites like Upwork and Fiverr feature a bevy of legitimate online jobs.

How do I avoid work at home scams?

There are many scams when it comes to the advertising of work at home opportunities. That’s why, before applying for any job, you should research the company on Glassdoor, a site that allows former employees to leave reviews of the employer. You’ll find details such as average pay, growth opportunities, benefits, and more. A good rule of thumb is that if the company you’re looking to work for isn’t on Glassdoor, it’s not worth applying. If you’re searching for independent contractor jobs on Fiverr or Upwork, make sure to view the company profile before applying. On Upwork, you can even see how much the company has spent on freelancers, where it’s located, the average hourly rate they pay, and reviews from previous freelancers.

What are the qualifications to get an online work-from-home job?

As with any job, the necessary qualifications depend on the type of work you’re seeking. In general, if you need a certification to do the work in person, you’ll also need one to do it online. However, some jobs — such as freelancing writing and editing jobs — can be easier to get online if you have limited work experience. For example, while few newspapers will hire a journalist who has zero training, it’s fairly easy to gain a foothold as a content writer for a blog or website.

Legit Online Jobs With No Upfront Investment

The internet has made it much easier to make money from home. While many people are just looking for opportunities to make a few bucks here and there by taking online surveys or maximizing their cash-back shopping, you can also find legitimate work that pays just as much as — and often more than — offline options.

Whether your goal is to work full-time, part-time or run your own business, there’s no shortage of work-at-home jobs.

So get started today. Take at least one action: sign up for a free resource, update your resume, or even send that resume in. There’s a good chance you’ll be earning money online faster than you think.

Good luck!

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#AFFILIATE MARKETINGHOW TO MAKE MONEYWORK FROM HOMEMONEYMAKERENTREPRENEUREARN MONEY

[sirianni581-blog]

Are Investment Costs of Business Internet Marketing Higher Than You Might Think?

Having just started to use internet marketing in our own business and trying to bring together all the different components to deliver a set of desired outcomes, we have discovered it is not a simple task. We have created a huge amount of online content from websites, blog sites, micro-blogging, and social media network participation. But and it is a big but, how do you convert all this activity (or lack of it) into a coherent message that brings visitors to your target online content and transcends to registrations and / or sales?

To be honest we have been merrily creating web content, accounts on twitter, Facebook pages, blogs and regularly posting but without paying specific attention to the direction or the message. This has been a conscious choice on our part as we were not ready to join everything up yet, so we just started by increasing our online profile until we were set to go. I think this is one of the big hurdles for most people entering Internet Marketing at any level is... why am I doing this? Why am I posting content onto Blogs, twittering, when no one is visiting anyway? I'm not reading my other 1000 followers tweets, so I am sure they are not reading mine! If I'm the only one ready what I'm writing I'd sooner not bother! 2 Blog posts a day, why? for what? What am I going to say? What difference will it make?

We expect those new to Internet Marketing to blindly accept that 'you should get a blog, you should use Twitter and join Facebook... trust me... you will see the benefit, later on everything will be much clearer...'

Here then is the issue... of course signing up to these services, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linked in or any other social media platform is not in itself going to make any difference to a business. Just the same as printing some leaflets for a mailshot and leaving them in the garage, or attending networking meetings and not talking to anyone, these won't make much impact either dropshipping .

The facts are that Internet Marketing is a complex business. It performs the functions of building individual's profiles and credibility, Brand awareness and product / service sales via one medium. Each of these areas requires different techniques, services and strategies online, but you can't go about this in a half baked, apathetic manner. Internet Marketing has the ability to transform businesses, enable small companies to compete with the 'big boys' and build new enterprises from nothing but not by making one blog post a week, the odd twitter tweet now and then and complaining that sales haven't increased yet!

So what is the reality? The reality is this, that Internet marketing provides the ability to reach 100,000's of people and quickly, but it won't happen without effort... A LOT OF IT!

Most Small Business's are owned privately, very often by the entrepreneur who found a niche, designed a new product or took advantage of an opportunity. These individuals are often technical people and suffer from the old 'Feast and Famine' syndrome that finds refuge in Micro and small businesses. When we're in Sales mode we are extremely busy, when servicing customers, prospects dry up... then we're found scratching around for business again which happens, eventually, months after we needed it.

Now typical business owners don't think of themselves as sales people and will readily admit they don't like this part of the business and yet without it the business can't survive. I've heard many a business owner admit they are not sales people, 'I'm basically too honest to be a sales person' as if a sales person's role was to somehow convince someone to buy a product they don't need and don't want. Well, let us now separate Marketing from Sales.

Marketing is encouraging people to consider your products and services... visitors if you like, whereas Sales is the matching of the customers requirements to your offerings. At no point in this is there any persuasion or manipulation... better still, much of this sales process can be automated with Internet Marketing. Marketing requires an audience to market too... sales requires us to provide information, substantiate our offering and provide a method to engage with us.

You will hear this time and time again with the Internet Marketing crowd... 'the money is in the list!' and if we are to market successfully then having a list to inform on a regular basis is absolutely essential. If we apply this to offline marketing, most of the hard work in sending out a mailshot was creating a quality list of people in the first place... our target audience! If we are to engage the services of a Direct Marketing company for a telephone campaign... at some point before this a list must be found, either from an existing database or bought from an organisation specialising in such Lists, the higher the quality the better.

So let us now see what relevance our Online - Internet Marketing activities have in identifying a target market. Consider Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, Blog subscribers and Registrations for an ezine or other regular communication... what are these?

They are lists of course! lists of people who in some way have connected with you and are probably comfortable to receive correspondence from you or your business. Herein lies the secret then behind why we should bother at all to seek people out, follow and be followed. List building... and the good news is that it can be quite good fun too!

Now in our business we have 5 main products offerings... some of these products have an overlapping potential audience, others do not. It may be necessary therefore to have multiple accounts for Twitter and / or a separate Facebook page for the different audience. Already you can see that if we are to manage, maintain and post for each product on a regular basis (desirable) then this is a substantial amount of work.

One of the difficulties that some of my colleagues have with building a large list of friends or followers is, 'How can you possibly keep in touch with all these people?, I struggle to stay in touch with my immediate relatives' and for sure, personally corresponding with 60,000 people is not viable... but this is not the point.

These social sites represent a massive network of interconnected people, you are not necessarily communicating on a 1-2-1 basis (although you can do this) but rather are broadcasting what you want to say to everyone who is connected and often to their immediate connections as well!! Suddenly we have the ability to get a message to a very large audience with a single post.

Now... most people certainly with Twitter won't see your post, and a good many won't in Facebook or Linked-In either, however this is not an issue. It is not our problem to worry about who will see our posting or not, that is not our responsibility and we should avoid getting attached to the outcome. Our role is to provide the information (post), that is it... Now there is a magic number in marketing and sales this is 3%. This little number is very important. It is the recognised average response rate in a cold market... sometimes it can be more, often less. If we sent out 1000 mailshots then it would be acceptable to set a benchmark of 30 as the number of positive responses. This is about the same % that I have experienced in responses to click-through's on Tweets and Facebook postings. Taking these numbers if we tweeted with a follower list of 30,000 then we could expect around 900 visits. We have absolutely no idea which ones will click the link... or tell a friend or retweet, however the figures can be quite staggering... Imagine if you worked with other 'Big List' owners and offered a percentage to tweet to their lists... and you did this 3 times per day... the number of visits could become very large indeed.

The lists provide us with a 'potential market' for our products and the purpose of this article is not to go into the detailed techniques for building lists, only that it should be very high up on the list of priorities. So how much time, money and effort should be put into this exercise?

The answer to this question depends on the nature of a business, the ideal customer profile and many other factors, clearly a restaurant has a different set of requirements to someone selling a digital product (such as an ebook) globally. The first thing is to decide an Internet Marketing strategy which is complimentary to the business, once this is defined then the activities required become much clearer.

Once the basic Architecture of the marketing is defined then comes the work and the Investment. If I look at our business as an example, we have invested in three key areas, Colateral, People and services. Lets look at what is involved in each of these -:

Collateral

We have 5 blogs, 6 websites (some complex, some a single page), 7 Twitter accounts, Facebook (4 Business Pages), Linked-In, Ecademy, Hub Pages, StumbleUpon, Squidoo and other online social networking accounts, all these had to be set up, populated, and now managed on an ongoing basis. This is not something which can be done in 20 minutes per day. We have to work all of these resources on a regular basis to keep ourselves in the 'Public eye'.

People

We have invested in 1 full time person, plus both myself and another member of staff allocate 3 or 4 hours per day to Internet Marketing activities. Firstly staff require training to use the tools that enable us to work our internet marketing, including analyze results. These resources manage our social networking sites, engage with our contacts frequently, update profiles as things change and post new content constantly. This cost alone is over $3000 per calendar month, developing and building our online presence.

Services

We utilise a number of 'helper' services which are online and rented monthly, these include subscriptions to some Business Networks, Shopping cart and checkout services, Databases that contain sign-ups for ezines and regular communication, Membership platforms, Blogging services and many many more. None of these services are hugely expensive month on month but vital to continue our Online Marketing activities.

In Conclusion

Business Internet Marketing - Taking an offline business and using Internet Marketing techniques to increase sales utilises many of the techniques and tools that conventional Internet Marketing has developed and built over the past 8-10 years. We have all heard the stories of individuals with no overheads generating large monthly incomes without setting foot outside their door, but Internet Marketing is moving into a new phase, one where Offline Businesses will seek to engage the Internet to work for them.

I speak with many Micro and Small businesses on a regular basis and most are oblivious to Internet Marketing and what it could do for them, whether this is because no one has yet bothered to show them, or there is a fear and reluctance to dance with the unknown, or a bit of both perhaps. One thing is for sure, Business Internet Marketing will be deployed by every business over the coming 10-20 years and it is set to be one of the largest markets worldwide.

As we saw with offline marketing in the past where we had PR, Advertising and Marketing agencies, so we shall see the emergence of similar businesses offering Business Internet Marketing services. Traditional companies in this marketing space will need to evolve and offer a completely new range of services The print industry went through a similar metamorphosis some years back, when pre-press production moved entirely to computers and revolutionized the marketplace.

As the Internet Marketing industry matures and the 'Get Rich Quick' mentality fades, successful Internet Marketers will bring a wealth of experience and begin to offer professional Business Internet Marketing solutions to Small and Medium sized businesses. Not shackled with the conventional trappings of offices the Business Internet Marketers will manage a network of global outsourced resources to deliver high quality, low cost Internet Market solutions. The services will include the whole range of activities from setting up infrastructure services such as Blogs or Shopping carts to transactional activities such as managing Twitter accounts, searching and posting tweets, finding / posting suitable blog posts, even writing articles and sending email campaigns.

Without doubt we are on the edge of yet another evolution with the Internet. Some larger companies, such as IBM and Dell have already woken up to the power of using the Internet and Social networking to engage with a global audience, small businesses have been busy surviving the recession... but as the recovery gathers pace, I am sure that Business Internet Marketing will become an attractive proposition for many.

Chris Ogle is Managing Director of Internet Power Systems Ltd. and is author of his best selling book, In 2 The Clouds. Chris has lived in Watford, England for the majority of his life and is a keen Table Tennis player.

In a career spanning 30 years in the computer industry Chris has worked with 000's of businesses from small Micro companies through to large multinationals such as Laing O'Rourke. With the exposure to such a diverse range of businesses and their operating processes coupled with his technical background Chris was well placed to design and create one of the first completely web based business platforms for SME's.

Drawing on 7 years of providing Cloud computing solutions to the SME marketplace coupled with a detailed understanding of Internet Marketing has culminated in SME7 - 7 Steps to getting the Business that you really want - more Profit, more time and more Choices! Chris's book 'In 2 The Clouds' takes us through these 7 Steps and removes the mystery of escaping the rat race 'no time and no money' to the more desirable 'More money and more time to enjoy it'!.

[freestudyworld]

18 Ways to Earn Money Online

Did you try to make money online before but did not get success? Then no need to worry anymore!

Because of we have already trained more than 7,00,000 people across the world & they are successfully making $300 to $2000 (INR 20,000+) per month.

We are showing you below some of the best ways to earn money online. You can also download our training package which will help you to grow your income very fast.

And yes, everything on this website is Absolutely Free & Without Investment.

18 Ways to Earn Money Online

Check some of the best ways below & start immediately-

1. Make Money with Online Surveys

Here you can make money by completing small surveys which take 5 minutes to 20 minutes depending on the requirement of a particular company.

You need to write your feedback & opinion in a survey. You just have to select your choice from the question & there is no need to write anything.

You can make $1 to $20 depending on the length of the survey, your profile & the country you are living in.

2. Earn Money with Blogging

I have been making money with blogging from the last 7-8 years. I have made more than 1 million dollars (almost Rs. 7 Crore+) with blogging. I was so confused when I started blogging.

I had absolutely no idea about blogging when I started in 2010. I worked very hard but made no money with blogging for almost 1 year.

But I never gave up! I was doing my research on topics like, ‘how to create a blog’, ‘how to write on your blog’ and ‘how to promote your blog’.

And things started in my favor after 1 year. I made my first $100 from blogging in 2011. Then there was no looking back. Today I am earning $25,000 (Rs 15 Lacs+) per month from blogging.

3. Become a Captcha Solver

If you have more free time (2 hours a day) then you can add further income in your pocket by working as a captcha solver.

This is one of the easiest way to earn money online. As a captcha solver, you need to read the captcha images & type the exact characters.

You need to be very fast in order to earn a better income. You can get paid up to $2 for every 1000 captchas you solve.

4. Earn with Affiliate Marketing

If you are serious about earning money online & you are a hard-working guy who wants to make big income then affiliate marketing is for you.

There is more scope for affiliate marketing than before because of the high growth of online shopping.

There are hundreds of online merchants like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Clickbank, CJ, etc. where you can signup & promote their products.

In affiliate marketing, you are simply helping customers to buy the right product by creating a simple website & in return, you can earn 4% to 20% commission.

5. Become a freelancer

Freelancing is another popular way to make money after blogging & affiliate marketing. As a freelancer, you can work with small or big companies on a temporary basis & provide them your services.

Freelancers can make $500 to $2000+ per month depending on the type of freelance jobs you will do for your client.

You can work as a content writer, web designer, graphics designer or provide services like SEO, data entry, video testimonials, digital marketing, etc.

There are dozens of popular websites like UpWork, Freelancer.in, WorkNHire, and many more freelance sites that can give you the ready platform with ready clients.

6. Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is like a personal assistant who can earn money by working online for someone without being physically present.

He can do variety of tasks like taking care of websites, counseling, writing & proofreading, publishing content, marketing, coding, website & app development, research, etc.

There are dozens of companies like HireMyMom, MyTasker, Zirtual, uAssistMe, 123Employee where you can signup for virtual assistant work.

7. Writing Job

Writing is another better way to earn money on the internet through writing different types of content.

You can write for blogs, companies, institutions, individual people, etc. Different types of writers get paid differently.

Normally people get paid $5 to $20+ for writing 500 words content.

You can go to the sites like UpWork, iWriter, WriterBay, FreelanceWriting, TextBroker, ExpressWriters.com, FreelanceWritingGigs.com to find the content writing jobs.

8. Micro-working

There are more ways that can help you to make extra income by working part-time. You can easily make $200-$300 per month by doing simple tasks on different sites.

Here you can work on a variety of different tasks like identifying an object, rating & commenting on different sites, visiting some websites, finding contact details, doing small research, writing small articles, etc.

There are many websites like mTurk, MicroWorker, SEOClerk, ClickWorker, GigWalk where you can work as a micro worker & earn extra income. After signup, we will show you how to work as Micro-worker and make money.

9. Become a YouTuber

YouTube is one of the hottest trends in earning money online. You can start your YouTube channel, upload some quality videos and then become a YouTube partner to make money online on YouTube.

You can create a different kind of videos like prank videos, comedy videos, kitchen recipes, how-to-do videos, travel tips, or anything you think, is useful for people.

Once you get the videos views and subscribers for your channel then you can apply for YouTube partner program.

Once you get the approval, people will see the ads along with ads in your videos. You will make money for each views your video receive.

You can shoot videos from your smartphone or any DSLR camera.

10. Become an online seller

Online selling is not like traditional selling. You don’t have much scope of selling your items outside your local market but in online selling, you can sell your product all over the country.

There are 2 ways to sell anything online.

Either, you can create your own website and sell your products from your website OR become a seller on any famous shopping portal like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Snapdeal etc.

Second, an option is much better you will get existing customers of these popular portals.

Now you must be thinking that what can I sell when I don’t have any product?

I have seen many Amazon and Flipkart sellers who don’t have any product but still they are selling the number of products on these sites.

What you can do is, roam around your city & check for the best products you can sell on these sites. You can find the wholesalers and distributors who can sell you these products at highly discounted rates.

You can list these products on Amazon, eBay, etc. and make money by selling at a higher price.

You need to try the best products that you can sell at lower than market price. Trust me, it is easier than you thought. The only thing you need to do is take action.

11. Domain Trader

Domain trading is another high-profit business you can do online. But here you need some investment in buying the domain.’

You must be an expert OR you should get detailed knowledge before you start this business.

You can buy domains from GoDaddy or other domain registrars for less than $10 & sell in the future to the needy person for hundreds of dollars. Your skill here is to identify great domains that are not booked yet & companies in the future can try to buy that domain.

When companies don’t find the domain of their choice, they contact the domain owner for the deal & it’s in your control to fix the price. You can even put your domains on auction so that people can buy directly at your desired price.

12. Website flipping

Like domain trading, website flipping is also a hot business to earn money online. Here you don’t deal with domains but websites.

You have to create a website, work on it for 3-6 months or more so that you can start making money from the websites.

After earning for 2-3 months, you can put that site on auction on Flippa, EmpireFlippers, etc. You can easily get 15-20 times the price of your monthly earning from that website.

It’s much easier to grow old sites than creating a new site and the growth of this new site.

Many experienced people buy websites from Flippa, work for 3-4 months on these sites and make double or triple income.

13. Provide training & consultancy

There is a big scope of earning money online if you have some good skills that people need. Like you can provide training on spoken English, computer courses, any technical course, Feng shui, medical treatment, and any other things.

You can promote your business through a website or a Facebook business page.

You need to promote your website or Facebook page in order to get the potential leads.

You can get many customers through good follow-ups.

14. Stock & Forex Trading

Stock trading & forex trading is a very lucrative way to make money for those who has a good idea of the market.

There are number of free or paid courses available on the internet that can train you for online trading.

You can even read newspaper like Economic times or watch TV channels like CNBC to become more experts in the field. It’s risky to enter into this market without sufficient knowledge.

15. Earn money from your smartphone

There are various smartphone apps that can pay you some extra income by completing some simple tasks on your Smartphone.

There are at least 20 money-making apps that if you install in your smartphone, can give an extra income of $200-$300.

You have to take simple surveys, complete offers by signup on other websites, play games, watch videos etc.

You don’t need to take any extra time to earn from this as you can make money on the go.

16. Sell photos online

This is another use of your smartphone. You can take high-quality images of nature, places, people, things, dishes, homes, etc. & sell them online.

There are number of big sites like Shutterstock, Fotolia,, iStockPhoto, Photobucket where you can submit your photos. Whenever some customer wants to purchase your photos, you will get paid as per the price you fix.

17. Sell old stuff on OLX or Quikr

I am sure there may be a number of things in your home that are lying unused for months & if you take little effort, you can earn some good money.

You just need to do 2 things, i.e. find out all the items that you are no longer using, take high-quality photos of these items from different angles & list these items on OLX & Quikr for sale.

Not only this, you can also ask your friends & relatives for selling their old stuff. You can help them selling these items & make some commission.

So these 18 ways can provide a perfect answer for your query ‘how to earn money online” & yes, you can shoot an email to us in case of assistance.

#studying #writing #studyblr #quote #quoteoftheday #lovequote #vintage #lol #DIY #illustrations #phot

[sojournlist]

If you’re a blogger or writer or aspiring writer and have low page views and a bit of flexibility in your time. Read this. It’s long but I also wanted to get my backstory in to describe why I’m doing this.

I started out adulthood pretty clueless. Like a lot of clueless 18 year olds, I figured I’d join the Army. I spent 5 years as a Photojournalist in the Army.

While in, I traveled the world, met famous journalists and celebrities, received a letter of commendation from the president. I was pretty confident things were going to turn out okay.

I got out and failed miserably at becoming a freelance writer, so miserably in fact, I lost my truck, my apartment, my girlfriend and became homeless for a short time.

A friends mom put me back on my feet, and I worked in a factory that produced pipelines for oil rigs making 6 dollars an hour. I was the only white guy and 6 months later I found out I outlasted the betting pool that all the immigrant workers had put together on how long I would last.

I never wanted to sleep on the streets again.

I eventually went to college, figuring if I couldn’t make a living in Journalism and English, I’d make a living in Math. I started out planning on majoring in finance, buying into the whole Gordon Gecko greed is good mentality. But wound up switching to accounting. There were ethics that appealed to me. We were protecting the investor and it paid good.

I had been diagnosed with ADHD years before and college was a struggle, not because I didn’t understand the material, but because I hated the length and work of it all. I graduated, became an auditor, I worked for large CPA firms and small ones, primarily in governmental accounting, but specializing in low income housing audits.

Bored yet? I was.

One day a recruiter came knocking and said that he had a CFO position at a small magazine publisher. I was excited. I took the job, and dove super deep into it. I learned as much as I could. I redesigned the books, I got involved in analytics projects regarding sales and projections and budgets, was introduced to how Advertising sales works, and all of that. I also learned I had high functioning autism. I kept that a secret. I also learned exactly why journalists get paid so low and who benefits.

I also had a pretty volatile boss. He would yell and scream and throw fits. We actually got along fine. But because I mostly towed the line.

Then he hired a new sales manager, felt he needed to impress her or something by flexing his power and in a meeting loudly demanded that I collect 50k in A/R or he would withhold my paycheck. He looked smug and asked “How do you feel about that.”

I replied, “I feel like that would be the last day I work here.”

He flipped the fuck out and disappeared for a few days. I usually let stuff fall of my back, but I was pretty angry. The next week, he had me talk to his consultant. It was a good meeting, It was supposed to be confidential. I told her about the autism diagnosis. She immediately told my boss.

The next day, we had a closed door meeting to go over our conversation. Then he got mad at something and the argument renewed and he brought up my diagnosis. I was a bit shocked that the consultant told him despite the promise of confidentiality.

He then told me, “I knew you had a low emotional intelligence when you brought donuts to work and didn’t clean up after everyone. When you bring stuff into the office, it’s your responsibility to clean up after yourself.”

I replied, “I didn’t eat any of the donuts. I brought them in for everyone else.”

“Yeah, and a person who has emotional intelligence would know that they need to clean up after them.”

I was also under the impression that at work you clean up after yourself. Plenty of signs at plenty of workplaces illuminated that for me.

He also got mad, that an IT project of setting up a better WiFi system that I was halfway through resulted in a box filled with half the stuff I hadn’t finished setting up the day prior on a table.

“I don’t need some fucking autistic guy fucking up my office,” he shouted. “You have two weeks to help me find your replacement.”

I told him I’m not helping find my replacement. Packed up my stuff and left. It was April 12, 2019.

Stewing over it for the next few days I devised a plan. I was going to mix the low income housing business model with publishing. A model where by separate entities sharing responsibilities risk is reduced, expenses are decreased and profit is maximized for everyone involved from the reader to the writer to the advertiser and to us.

Why? My boss had regularly mentioned that publishing has a low cost of entry. I also had shitty bosses at small firms in Public Accounting. I never understood why bosses in industries, where their employees could easily up and become competition would be cheap with their employees pay and treat them like shit. Especially since they could walk out the door and become competition.

My boss would often tell me that our magazine didn’t really have any competitors.

I wasn’t eager to go back to working for someone else and I really wasn’t eager to go back to accounting.

So I decided I would try and become a competitor. The business did have a low cost of entry, however, I had 18 dollars to my name on April 12th.

A few days later, I told my wife my plan, she was impressed and thought it was a good idea.

I told a buddy I was in the Army with my plan. He left Army Photojournalism and remained in communications. He thought it was genius. He’s now our editor.

I threw together a rough business plan, told a friend and he entered us into a University of Washington business plan competition.

We didn’t win, I had lots of positive feedback. A guy who informed me he was an angel investor and his wife was formerly a journalist loved the idea. A developer looked at me like I was an idiot and told me my idea was impossible.

I pushed ahead anyways. Another friend from high school who is a website developer offered to help, and the website started and went live on July 15th.

A month later, we had racked up 10k visits and 50 or so profiles, 15 writers submitted material.

The site was slow and it was bothering me. I had also been practicing building websites on the side.

So I hired a guy from Fiverr to optimize the site, he did, but he also destroyed our log in process, which is kind of necessary. I broke the site in an effort to fix it.

So I took it down. Spent a month rebuilding it by myself, and it returned live a month later.

I spent pretty much next to nothing on the site. Maybe a few thousand. But I wound up building a travel and tourism blog / social media site that does a 75 percent revenue share and profit share with content contributors. We have an ad server where advertisers can go in order, schedule, manage and track their ads.

We have close to thirty writers now, nearly 70 submissions from amateurs and professional writers, a unique bucket list feature, basically a system that is designed to help writers make a better living, keeps our costs low, allows us to charge less for advertising, and has the potential to get readers free stuff for simply being members and interacting and reading material.

The site is 95 percent complete. Just need to make a few more additions to the bucket list, update our achievement images and make them shareable and once again fix the speed issues. It’s an impressive piece of work and we’re proud of it.

This last month, we’ve cleared 12k page views and now have over 130 profiles.

I accomplished this with no website building experience, no marketing experience, no SEO, no backlinks, and I think our DA score is zero.

I did it by taking research on the effectiveness of micro influencers and reversing it and applying it to small Facebook groups and it’s been rather successful.

We’ve even gotten some interest in our first hosted ad sales. 3 1/2 months in.

So please, join the site. We are strictly geared and dedicated to helping writers.

http://sojournlist.com

#blogger #bloglife #sahmlife #sahd #workfromhome #workfromeverywhere #disrupt #socialentrepreneurship #social media #cooperative #media #travel #tourism #destination #cvb #advertising #autism

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, May 2019

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across from May 3 to May 30, although some may be older than that. 

I am out of town June 10-16, so I cannot predict when the next edition will come out, but I will do my best to make it before the June trip. I’ve recently narrowed my reading list so that I can get through it more quickly and post these more often. If you have any suggestions or comments, please let me know! 

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

If you had your entire promoted listing budget eaten up by clicks on an item with “shoe” in the searchable keywords, contact Etsy to make sure you will be refunded. 

Etsy was accidentally suspending some shops for not using Etsy Payments, but they are in ineligible countries. Some but not all drop ship or use fulfillment in countries with Etsy Payments, but that doesn’t appear to explain all the errors. 

Mailchimp launches a new marketing platform that integrates multiple marketing needs, not just emails. Pricing will stay the same for existing customers for the time being. 

On the same topic, here is a study of various email services, and their different deliver-ability rates. 

Etsy is being sued after a child dies, strangled by an amber necklace bought on Etsy. [video & article] This is getting a fair amount of media attention. Not covered in many stories is the fact that the daycare employees didn’t call 911 at first, and the day home had more infants that day than they were licensed for.  

Better media attention: disappointed in the long delay for the introduction of the Harriet Tubman $20 bill in the US, an Etsy seller designed a stamp buyers can use to cover up Jackson’s face with Tubman’s. “Harriet Tubman” is a trending search on Etsy frequently since these articles, so this media coverage is really bringing traffic to the site.

Amazon is now using packing machines in a few of its warehouses that replace 12 workers each. They have other warehouse automation, too, & just started work on their hub at the Cincinnati airport. If you need any more evidence that diversification is the key to successful businesses, remember that they make the biggest chunk of their profit on their cloud services. 

ETSY NEWS 

This year, Etsy’s Maker Cities program (US only) has joined up with Mastercard for their grants. Applications are due July 3, and there is a webinar on June 3 with more info and instructions. [links in article]

They’s also extended their Design Awards submission deadline to June 4. Check out their FAQ if you have any questions.  

Etsy released a summer update to their spring/summer trends guide, with some useful search data. Clothing shoppers are interested in vintage styles, “with Etsy searches for “70s” and “90s” up 26% and 7% year over year.” I summarized the earlier report here.

In case you missed it, Etsy released their first quarter financial report for 2019, & I summarized it in the Etsy forum. 

In related news, Etsy ranks 3rd in USA Today's list of the top 20 fastest growing retailers in the world, even ahead of Amazon.

Some businesses are competing based on delivery speed, but Etsy is able to do well with much slower shipping. (That’s a nice feature in an article they didn’t write; not all good promotion is paid.)

I can’t remember if I posted this interview with Etsy chief financial officer Rachel Glaser before, so here it is again. [audio file/podcast and short text excerpt. Please note I have contacted Etsy about the photos & search comment, but they have not yet replied, other than with the usual links to Etsy’s search guide.] 

Short piece on Etsy’s approach to diversity. Spoiler alert - they like it, and the article links to other materials demonstrating why this is the best approach for businesses.  

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

If you want to get your website or blog material ranking faster, Moz has some tips for you. Note that the first part in particular contains advanced-level technical tips, but most of the rest is easier to grasp for non-techies. It’s worth a skim! 

But don’t break Wikipedia rules to get your images on top - North Face got caught doing that, & had to apologize. But “[f]rom Leo Burnett Tailor Made's original statement, it seems the agency was anticipating such a reaction to the North Face effort all along. In stunts like these, the ensuing controversy and attention around it can be part of the overall campaign goal and strategy.”

Once your website starts getting Google traffic, it is not unusual for growth to start to slow or even stop completely, but there are things you can do to avoid that.

Despite many people insisting that longer blog posts are necessary for good Google ranking, there is no ideal length for a blog post. 

Here’s a good list of free SEO tools; note that some are paid tools that have a limited free version. 

Links on other high-quality websites still matter to Google. (Most of us won’t be able to do the link-building that this test did, but the test demonstrates how much the links are worth. So if you aren’t ranking, realize that other people linking to your page is probably a big factor.) Some of your pages might fit perfectly on a resource page/site, if they answer a question or uniquely fill a need. You can find link opportunities on Twitter through following certain hashtags and engaging with the users. 

Google search results now include podcasts. “This feature doesn’t only search for the title or meta data of the podcasts but also can search for the audio – as Google transcribes them — directly within the podcast show itself.”

As of July 1, Google will use the mobile version of all new websites for their index, so make sure that you have a good mobile set up on any new websites (or old ones, for that matter, since most web traffic is mobile these days). 

There was a possible Google search update around May 9, then May 22, and now maybe May 29th. Google updates its algorithm a lot, if you hadn’t already noticed.  "To give you a sense of the scale of the changes that Google considers, in 2010 we conducted 13,311 precision evaluations to see whether proposed algorithm changes improved the quality of its search results, 8,157 side-by-side experiments where it presented two sets of search results to a panel of human testers and had the evaluators rank which set of results was better, and 2,800 click evaluations to see how a small sample of real-life Google users responded to the change.” (and some people think Etsy tests a lot LOL)

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails) 

Have popular content on one platform/site? You can repurpose it to use elsewhere, for maximum reach. It’s less work than coming up with brand new ideas all of the time! 

Micro-influencers may work best for most businesses, because they can speak directly to your target market. 

There are proven ways to get more social media followers; it’s not just luck. 

Up-to-date infographic on the ideal sizes for social media images, by platform. 

Facebook announced several upcoming plans at their annual developer conference, including a desktop redesign. Facebook has also changed the video algorithm to favour posts that people watch for longer, and to disfavour posts that are just repurposing old video. 

Tweetdeck is rolling out more updates, including emojis and the ability to set up polls within the app. I use it, & I like it - I wish they had a phone app! 

If you are using LinkedIn, you may be missing some great tricks to get more attention. 

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS) 

Here’s how you can get better results out of Microsoft ads (formerly Bing ads) 

There was a bug in Google ads stats for April 30 & May 1st; they are working on fixing it. 

Google advertising can be very confusing, so here as some tips on mistakes you should avoid. [video with transcript] They also recently announced some upcoming changes.

Etsy shops can only buy their own Google Shopping ads through Etsy’s program, or you can let Etsy buy them for your shop, but if you want to advertise your website, here is a great starter guide.

Chrome is giving you more control over cookies so that you can avoid more targeted ads. Some point out this is not necessarily as user-friendly as it sounds - it means Google can stop other companies from tracking their ad performance while Google has all those records through Chrome & other tools.  

Facebook is also giving users more control over tracking for ads, & advertisers are not happy. 

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING 

You are going to be surprised that Russian search engine Yandex has a really good Webmaster tools package.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS 

Some people are comparing Walmart’s new online wedding shop to Etsy, "with tons of personalized wedding gifts to buy on a budget.”

The coverage of Amazon’s big announcement about one-day shipping with Prime (in the US) mostly missed the fact that Amazon can already deliver to 72% of the US population in one day. 

Amazon employees told some third-party sellers that religious items were banned from the site - but it wasn’t true. 

Big Commerce now has a plug-in for Wordpress blogs. 

As promised, Zibbet has added Etsy to its integrations, which allows you to list on Zibbet and it will automatically be added to Etsy as well. This is only going to be useful once they add other platforms (since Zibbet has no traffic), so shop around if you are interested in this sort of tool, as other companies are doing the same things. Indiemade websites completely integrate with Etsy, for example, and they have more website tools. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

With increased discussion of free shipping on Etsy recently, this is a good time to review some of the more recent studies & surveys on the topic.  One US report from January shows that buyer expectations in this area continue to increase. Shipping cost is a big factor in purchase decisions, & shipping costs are a common reason for cart abandonment. There are a variety of ways to calculate how to offer free shipping without losing money. (Thank you to Rebecca for the last link!)

If you want more shares on social media, this study on the top 5 reasons people share things online will be useful. But Americans are now more engaged by mobile games than social media, which has implications for app development and advertising. 

Googly eyes make people donate more.

Smaller online businesses tend to make very specific types of customer service mistakes that harm your ability to compete. Although there isn’t always much you can do about the fact that “37% of customers expect a response within an hour“.

Can everyone read and understand your web page? Easy-to-understand English is an important aspect of accessibility. 

Help Scout produces some fabulous material on customer service; here is a great article on value propositions, with examples, and another on how to collect customer feedback, including analyzing your stats package to see where customers are having trouble with your site. 

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

Trend alert: more professional women switching purses for backpacks. 

You can now control how long Google retains data on you. 

You can also join the class action against major US telecom companies that sold your location data. 

Another example of a company getting people to post photos so it can develop facial recognition technology. 

Some businesses are offering products & services based on your DNA & other biological markers. 

Most people worldwide over the age of 15 have a cell phone, although not all are regular users. 

If you are concerned about internet privacy, & hate tracking, the browser Brave may be worth a look. (I haven’t tried it yet, but it comes well-recommended from various tech people I respect.)

Burger King has trolled McDonald's in ads & social media posts for years, & it can be pretty funny. “When McDonald’s abruptly and surprisingly lost its trademark on “Big Mac” in the EU earlier this year, Burger King couldn’t help but rub some salt in the wound. BK’s Swedish operations decided to celebrate for a day by offering a menu of “Not Big Macs” such as “The Like a Big Mac, But Actually Big” and “The Big Mac-ish But Flame-Grilled of Course.”

#seo #search engine optimization #search engine marketing #etsynews #analytics #stats #social media #contentmarketing #ecommerce #smallbiz #cindylouwho2newsupdates