Earth Babies and Food

I have a guest article on Earth Babies blog entitled "Sex After Childbirth." Please check it out when you have a minute, and leave your comments and tips. Thank you Barb and Sally, for hosting me. Much appreciated.















Last night I had my biggest harvest from my garden to date, and based on the quantities I should be able to keep myself well supplied with vegetables for the next two months at least. Which is nice, because I had that basic goal in mind when I first started the garden. As you can see, there's a lot of variety here. I also have beetroot,green and red peppers, spinach, herbs etc. I have about 12 of these pumpkins in varius stages of growth. They're huge, so I cut this one up and gave some of it to a neighbour, with some spinach and cucumbers.















And for many of you who think I know what I'm doing, yes, I grew up in a village, so everyone was always growing their own food (regardless of whether they could afford to buy or not) and I took it all in by osmosis. But no one actually sat me down to say, this is how you do it. And I didn't use any insecticides; wouldn't know ones to use if you sprayed me on my face with it. My gardening philosophy is usually, " let's see what I can't kill." And suprisingly, there's lots of plants that can survive my tender care.

I am fortunate that I have a yard living right in the middle of the city, but I'm also learning that some of the plants don't need so much space. I actually wasted a lot of space allowing the pumkins to run through the floor, rather than making them go up. I could have planted many more crops that way, I learnt.

Anyhoo, had a fair writing day yesterday. Need to pump up my processes and produce more content, because my deadlines are looming. And if you have a minute or so, please take this poll and tell mI we if taking an HIV test with your partner is a romantic gesture/can be made into a romantic gesture. I would really appreciate your input.
Have a good day!

Getting Ready For A Writing Marathon

You know what I have loved most about the Zuma love-child debacle? The media is now using the phrase concurrent partners in conversations. When I first started to develop copy for the OneLove web site, I hadn’t even considered that someone you’re having an affair with could be called a multiple concurrent partner. The term is logical, when you think about it, but we usually used other phrases. And when your web content has to be search optimised a big concern is whether anyone (except the activists) would actually use the phrase or search for that term. President Zuma, bless his heart, is unwittingly making multiple concurrent partners an everyday phrase.

Had a long client briefing yesterday and am now going to begin work on a web site that goes live some time in March. The site is for a campaign against violence that’s driven by alcohol abuse and will be linked to two new seasons of ongoing TV drama series.

I can also see the content of this new web site linking beautifully with the OneLove and Kwanda web sites. Don’t you just love it when a puzzle comes together almost seamlessly?Sorry I can’t give more details until the media briefing when the new seasons of the series go on air. But I’ve known the project was in the pipeline for a long time and I’ve been looking forward to it. It’s something I can sink my teeth into, like the OneLove project, because the campaign will continue after the TV series, giving me an opportunity to get a bit creative with content.

I’m a bit bummed though that work on one web site that I thought I’d have finished developing by now has not even begun yet. I’m mostly doing the work on a volunteer basis, and I have a web developer and designer lined up (and raring to go) but the client is delaying things picking on small details. With my luck, this client will get sorted out just when my copy deadlines for the alcohol site start looming, complicating my life. Ho hum!

A Very Creative Weekend

Phew! My fingers are sore and the week is just beginning. There's a story that's been bugging me for months. The characters stayed in my head when I was doing client work, when I was working in the garden or even taking a walk. Everywhere I went the characters followed, wanting me to pay attention to their antics.
Problem was, the story didn't seem to be very viable (too different from what I usually write, not sure what it was exactly, if there is a market for it). Basically, working on it was too much risk in terms of time invested for something I don't know I could write well or sell. So it rattled around in my head, sometimes even blocking me from thinking about other fiction possibilities.
Until this weekend, when I locked down the house, took a notebook and pen and started writing. I didn't censor what I wrote, I just started from what seemed like a beginning and kept going. Sometimes I'd have to go back to change something, mostly add a lot more detail, but I put it all down on paper. In the 48 hours that was the weekend, I only went out once to the market to buy dog food.
60 A4 pages later, I have the very rough bones of God knows what. A novella? A novel? A short story? Whatever it is, it's now on pieces of paper on my desk. And I will have to give a lot of thought and attention to the world I'm creating, rework the story many times, rewrite portions where I got stuck with the details, give some definition to many of the supporting characters, expand on themes etc. Then I will have to edit, rewrite, bring some art and craft into the storytelling. But for now, I all I can do is be happy I finally have some relief. There is peace in my head! And I can finally get on with other projects "uninterrupted."

Also spent time doing some online research. Found a nifty book carousel at web site called LibraryThing. Essentially the carousel allows you to load your books, with short descriptions, ISBN details, reviews etc, and you can then pick up the code of these books to display on your web site. The book covers rotate on a small section of the allocated page, and readers can then click on a book cover that interests them to get more details. I've been looking for something like this for months and plan to use the widget for the books published by the OneLove campaign members and will let you know if it works. You can also use the widget to display books from your own library or those you wrote, depending on whether you're a reader and/writer. Amazon has a similar widget, but that only works for you if the books you want to display are for sale through Amazon. By the way, you can download the ebooks that I plan to make available through the widget here. You can also give the ebooks away through your web site if you want. Also note that members of LibraryThing, some of whom are authors and publishers, offer advance books for free to readers for review. So if you have a reading habit you can't afford, check the site out and find out if you can get some free books.

Elements Of A Blog That Could Earn You Money

During a forum discussion today, Corinna Turner (Simply Green) mentioned how difficult it is for writers to make blogging a paying proposition. My email response got a bit long, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and make my reply to her into today's blog post.

I think part of the challenge of making blogging a paying proposition is that we need to keep it professional and interesting. The blog also needs to have a narrow focus so that visitors are quite clear about what they'll get and what they can it for. BTW, my blog Storypot is not a good example of that kind of narrow focus, where my client site OneLove is.

Anyhoo, in order to make a blog more comercialised, you need:

1. A subject that people really want to know about, but that you're also passionate about. In my case, NOT writing, because while a lot of people say they want to be writers, few actually take steps to do it. And there is already very fierce competition from more established, more vocal writers. I guess what i mean is, find something beyond your immediate passion to something that would really sell. In my case, I think that would be kitchen gardening. I love it, lots of people do it, many more want to get into it, and there aren't many amateurs out on the blogosphere talking about it. Professionals, yes. But amateurs who understand that your basic aim is just to not kill the green stuff? Not so many.

2. Write good quality material that allows readers to walk away with something new and useful.
Again, if you just write about what you do ( which is my style on Storypot), your blog as a resource may be too obscure. Ja, sure be personal. But there should be a moral to the story.

3. Publish regularly
You want your blog to be a habitual place here your target audience congregates. If you don't blog regularly, then you'll lose some of your readers. Assuming you ever manage to get anyone to come regularly.

4. What's your drawcard?
Say I run a gardening blog, and week I have some sort of give-away. Maybe a gardening ebook, a packet of seeds, a collourful watering can some other day etc. Basically, my readers know that my site offers potential to impact on them directly. They're more likely to come often than if I keep blabbing on about my garden everyday. I've also seen a number of writing blogs offer job leads for writers. If you want to make a living as a writer, then you check in with them to see if they interesting job leads for you.

5. Build traffic
In a sense,that's mostly what your potential clients want to know: how many people visit your site daily, weekly, monthly?? Who are those people? Is your target audience within a demographic that's likely to want to buy their products? No matter how good quality your content is, if the right people don't come in droves advertisers won't be interested.

6. Reviews and endorsements
Now suppose I have 5000 amateur gardeners all across South Africa subscribed to read my blog about kitchening gardening on a regular basis. I could legitimately test out some gardening equipment/seeds/products etc and then review them on my site. The trick would be to be careful about what I actively endorse, because while money is nice, it's important to retain the trust and faith your subscribers have on you. Selling out for a quick buck is a mistake you may never be able to repeat, because your readers will move on to someone else quicker than you can blink. That said, you could get a few freebies from your related industry, which is an in-kind type of earning.

P.S. While I refer to the potential of a gardening blog on this post, I have no plans to start one:-)
P.P.S. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that I left out of this post, that could help make a blog more attractive to advertisers. Leave a comment to share with us, thanks.

1000 members! Yay!

The Read SA Facebook group now has 1000 members. That's right ladies and gentlemen. ONE THOUSAND MEMBERS! In 4 months! So, many thanks to all of you who joined, posted links on your Facebook pages and profiles, Twitted etc. You know we couldn't have done this without you.

Spent most of the day doing edits on a client project. The great news is that the publication reads and looks great now, and I can see its full potential being realised. And all this happened because I slogged through lots of suggestions, lots of pen marks all over what should have been my wonderfully brilliant second draft. OK, don't laugh. I know and you know that the first draft always looks good at first glance, and you send it to the client and it comes back with pen marks and you think WTF? Didn't I just polish this copy? Then you get over yourself, consider each point that is being made and whether it improves the overall project, and you mae decisions, big and small. Of course, all this depends on your client actually knowing what they are doing, or you end up with The Most Expensive Publication Ever Made.

Spent the rest of the day writing guest posts for my promotion drive.

Question: Do you think that guest posts still have the potential to drive traffic to your blog, or are they now so passe it's not funny?