Where Oh Where Did My Muse Go

Well, it happened again. My writer's muse visited me this morning. I was half way through an article on herbs for container gardening when I heard a light but persistent knock at my door signaling the arrival of my four-year-old grand daughter from next door. I think when I opened the door for her my writer's muse escaped! So here I sit with a half finished article and a blank mind.

I haven't been able to find any titles that I can write about on Demand Media this month, but have been able to write a couple to publish to fireHow. I'm also in the process of learning to navigate the new Women Who Write Online site. The site offers much more than Ning did, but I'm getting old and adapting to change is difficult even when I welcome it.

We had a nice rain. . .accompanied by not-so-nice wind yesterday so I'd thought I would get out and do some yard work today. I had cataract surgery last tuesday and all's well, my eye has given me no discomfort what so ever, but when I opened the door to go outside, the cool air irritated my other eye, the one I had the surgery on last July. I shut the door and decided I'd do yard work another day. Fortunately I'm retired, so I don't have to wait until the weekend to get out. I just have to choose a day that's not too hot, not too cold, and not too windy. Uh Oh. I live in West Texas. We don't have many days like that. I've tried wearing goggles, but they fog up in about 5 minutes so that's out. I used to scold my son for using the weed eater without the goggles. Now I know why he does it.

What? No Bloopers Today?

Today was fairly simple. I didn't get anything done on 30 day challenge yesterday. I watched the videos today about checking your stats in Market Samurai and publishing an article from Market Samurai to your website, then submitting it to Traffic Bug, all very streamlined and time saving? I didn't make any bloopers, but Market Samurai kept freezing up on me, so I wrote my next page "Herb Gardens" for my website and uploaded it manually. Traffic Bug is still ignoring me, so I'm not getting a lot of traffic.

I checked my Google analytics account and found that while most of my traffic was coming from the articles I've submitted else where, and this blog I am beginning to get a small amount of traffic from google.

I went back to the 30 day challenge site and watched today's videos. Nothing new there. LOL They were about how to create a blogger blog and link to your website. I honestly don't know how she managed to make the first video 13 minutes long. Setting up blogger is the easiest thing I've ever done and I've set up 5 blogs on blogger so far.

Somewhere in the midst of all this I went off chasing a wild hare, you know, that subject that just pops into your head out of the blue and you know you've just got to write an article on it. I pulled some articles for research, added some of my own knowledge, then decided I'd better check eHow to see how many articles on the subject were already there. OK, so one blooper, check first before you write the article. Anyway while I was checking every way I could possibly think to phrase the title and finding they were already taken, firefox decided to freeze my computer. Uh. . .two bloopers? I didn't save my article. I can only stand so much in one day. Good night all.

Could I Possibly Make Any More Mistakes on. . .

such simple directions? I got my article, "Planning Your Container Herb Garden"for Scribd written today. I went back and watched the video just to make sure I remembered all the key steps to get it uploaded and published. OOOPS. First mistake. I'd typed my article in Word Perfect which doesn't save as a .doc file, so I had to copy and paste it into Google Docs. Then I linked my keywords to my site, saved it as a Word document and uploaded it. One of the links didn't work! It had a typo in it. I went back and corrected the Google Doc, and saved it as text which of course didn't upload. I think all in all I deleted that document 3 times before I got it into Scribd as a readable document with clickable links. I spent a lot of time doing something that shouldn't have taken but a few minutes because I was so nervous and wanted it done perfect. I don't know why new sites and programs put me in such a tizzy. I got it done anyway. I haven't gotten one written for Ezine Articles yet.

I watched today's video and a light bulb came on. Today's lesson is about making Squidoo lenses which I've been doing for quite a while now. I have an RSS feed module in most of my lenses, but I only had excerpts from my blogs showing. Google likes new content and updated sites, so by putting your RSS feed showing your latest blog entry in your Squidoo lens, you have fresh content every time you write a blog! Talk about automation! What an a haa! moment. Especially since my lenses all relate to one of my blogs or another.

Well I'm not quite so uptight today as I was yesterday. Maybe I'll go watch TV and pet my cat for a while before I go to bed tonight.