Is it time to write a book?

There are probably a lot of online writers who were members of Helium, the revenue sharing site that has recently announced its demise.  Helium was a fairly good place to write and earn passive income from ad revenue for many years, but Google's Panda brought the revenue stream down to a trickle for most Helium writers.  The revamping of the site last year did nothing to help, in fact, it caused revenues to go down even further.  At some point, Helium decided to call it a day.

The bright side of Helium's failure is that I can now remove all of my articles from the site and  re-purpose them.  Some may work well as blog posts, or be eligible to be posted on other writing sites - once they have been de-indexed by Google.  I did take the opportunity to download all my articles and have them sitting in a neat file on Dropbox.

Today I decided to see how difficult it would be to strip the html from the article files.  I found a neat little tool online that was free and plugged in the text from a Flash Fiction story.  It worked very well, leaving me only a few formatting chores - paragraphs, quotations marks, etc.

But I hadn't even remembered writing this story and so it was really fun reading it all over again.  Then, as I thought about it more, I realized that even though this story was stripped down and compact (flash fiction had to be 400 words or less on Helium) that it implied a lot more going on behind the scenes, and a much bigger story was potentially waiting to be written.

In fact, it seemed like a good foundation for a novel.  And I wondered if I would be making a mistake to republish this short fiction, when it could be turned into something much more substantial.

So, the question for me this morning is:  is it time to write a book?

I am going to try to flesh out the setting, the characters and the plot and see if I can muster the discipline to give it a go.

You may also have something that you've written that has the potential to be more.  Think about your stories, your ideas and see if there is one that has the potential to be more than you've written thus far.  Ask yourself if it is time to write a book.  Can you do it?  Why not?

When Good Hobbies Turn Bad

There was a time when I was the queen of hobbies. I must have taken up dozens of hobbies which having experimented with, I quickly put back down. I suppose I had a need to feel accomplished, and goodness knows I reveled more in the accomplished tasks than in the actual practice of whatever hobby I had chosen to pursue.

I learned to knit from instructions in the Book of Knowledge, a vast encyclopedia of facts, geography, fairy tales and lessons in everyday life that was my constant reference when I was young. But knitting was tedious work, I soon found, and having begun with the intentions of knitting fabulous sweaters, I ended up making several pairs of mittens and one or two hats once I had discovered the joy of circular knitting needles.

I am afraid the same held true for crochet. Plans for large, warm afghans to cuddle up in on chilly winter nights ended up being pillows or afghans done in a large, open woven design that did little to keep in warmth but reduced the time it took to finish a project to a couple of days at most. I found crochet to be even more tension-causing than knitting and I am still not sure if several loose fillings were a result of the teeth-grinding that usually accompanied each row of crochet.

I turned to the arts, with an eye to "learning" to draw and paint. Much work went into learning how to produce a few things - a square-rigged ship, an apple blossom - despite my frustrating lack of ability to realistically render three-dimensional objects into two dimensions. I have two or three pieces of artwork that were produced during this period. They are sufficiently well done to elicit the approval of friends who can't draw at all but I would never show them to anyone who actually possesses any artistic talent.

It may be that writing is simply another one of these hobbies, except that I never studied writing, never planned any writing, don't bother working hard enough at it to cause my teeth to shatter and can't say if I ever produced anything worth the reading. I think of all my hobbies, it may be the one I do just because I like to do it. Perhaps that's more important than whether or not I do it very well.

A Hogeous Post

Tolstoy wrote " Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". What he didn't mention is that every family, happy or unhappy, speaks its own language. A lexicon peculiar to that family and its members, trickling down through generations, enhanced by new additions to the family through marriage and passed on. An oral tradition, if you will.

My mother's family had a rich tradition of words. I don't think so many words have ever been spoken in all of New England as were uttered by her family. By volume alone they are staggering. I did not know, however, nor suspected as a child, that the language I was learning from my mother was not quite English but some strange concoction resembling English and complementing English, yet wholly their own invention.

My mother's version of family history includes a huge migratory period of her ancestors from the Ukraine, traveling ever westward across Europe, settling in England for a time and then ending up in the American colonies and Canada. I am not sure what they were running from, this was never made clear to me, but apparently it was greatly appreciated that England had provided asylum for them in their flight from whatever it was. It may have had something to do with their brief stint in France.

In any case they were so indebted to England for something, not sure what ( not throwing them out perhaps) that they refused to fight against the English in the Revolutionary War and became outcasts once more, being forced to flee to Canada due to their unpopularity. By this time, I should think they would have gotten used to being chased out of countries.

I mention this as it may hold the keys to some of the words and sayings that I heard as a child, and still use today despite the occasional odd stare. "Hogeous" is a perfect example. I am not sure of the spelling, this is how my mind's eye always saw it spelled. It may well be spelled "hojus" but I doubt it, that would be spelling it as it sounds. I am sure that is too sensible an idea to be true.

Hogeous has many uses, usually meaning something vile or distasteful, often related to pungent smells. However it can also be used to describe a rather unpleasant dish being served to you, as in "I dont know what they had to run down on the road to make that stew, but it was hogeous"!

Anything cunnin' was cute. A soulcase was a person, most often a child. If you were called a cunnin' soulcase, you could be sure that meant they liked you. You did not want to be called a poohcat, though I confess to not knowing what that was. It was just bad. Something hogeous.

My mother had a gift for delegation and if you were so insubordinate as to ask why you were elected to any unpleasant chore, she would simply shrug and say "Why keep dogs and bark myself"? We were advised to "scud to school or you'll rue it". Education was important, and we had to scud to get it.

And then there was the mysterious medical condition known as a "split straddle". A girl always had to be careful of certain types of physical activities such as riding a boy's bike with the bar across, as there was a possibility that she might "split her straddle". She usually followed this up with the story of a girl she had known personally who had this happen to her, and it was horrible and irreparable. That touch of realism usually did it for me. My mother was good at supplying horrifying graphic images to make sure you were sufficiently emotionally scarred.

And more than anyone I ever met, my mother knew how to use words to her advantage. I remember her telling my father "Jack, I am your wife. Your money is my money and no one is going to tell me how to spend my money". Her logic was impeccable.

Now I must go and do my daily readings. Reading the blogs of others is a great way to avoid writing your own. I mean, why keep blogs and write myself?

Helium Update

I have been writing at Helium for about a month now and I see both its potential and its limitations. I have seen both positive and negative reviews of the site as a writing site and I think that each argument has some merit.

For instance, as far as publishing my writing on the web, I am perfectly capable of doing that myself. I should probably do it more often as several of my blogs are slightly behind on the updating schedule. They do offer payment in the form of a percentage of the advertising revenue. However, I have my own advertising revenue of which I get the entire payment. What they may offer in this area is wider exposure and possible higher ranking in the search engines.

What they do offer that is a boon for those who are considering freelance writing is an opportunity to submit articles for review to publishers who will pay for the article if it is the one chosen. It's a bit like a cattle call, in that many other members will be writing for the same opportunity, but that makes the selection of your article by the publisher even more satisfying. You have to beat out a lot of other articles to get noticed. Additionally, it's a place to get started in the area of freelance and build a portfolio of work.

That being said, I am not straying from Helium anytime soon and have begun to concentrate on the publisher opportunities rather than any other venues and channels. I have had some success here, and have sold several articles.

What anyone gets out of a site like Helium is what they put into it, but they must know what it is they want before they start. For a blogger, the prospect of writing just to see it on the net is not enough to warrant putting a lot of effort into what is essentially, someone else's site. But if a blogger wants to enhance their resume and broaden their experiences by learning to write on someone else's demand, it's a decent training ground.

If anyone is interested, my Helium pages can be found here. A list of my articles can be found here.

It's All Creative Force

I still write. Sometimes I write a lot, sometimes very little. I feel thwarted, blocked and uninspired often. I feel the need to update nagging at me even more often.

Writing comes from some unseen creative force that moves me, I want to but cannot push my creativity through my own force. But what I realize, is that if one avenue is blocked, another allows it through.

I have always enjoyed creating things although I do not consider myself a "crafty" person. The desire to create may be inherited. My mother was a creative person who drew and wrote; my father was a carpenter, constructing visions with his hands. My earliest inclinations followed both these paths.

For instance, I wanted to learn to knit for both creative and practical reasons. I could make clothes for my dolls, hats and mittens and afghans for myself. I employed my older sister in the position of instructor, as she was already proficient in the art of knitting. This, however, had disaster written all over it. My sister is left-handed, I am right hand dominant. As she taught me, I had to envision everything as the other way round, practice taking what I observed as if it were a mirror image. I still haven't got the hang of mirrors, which is why I don't use a curling iron - I simply can't make my mind join the command of my brain to go one way with that hand in the mirror going the opposite way. I soon abandoned her tutelage.

Eventually, I did learn to knit, but I did it through a set of books that I now consider the greatest resource of my childhood, The Book of Knowledge. Full of everything from world history to fairy tales to how to build a birdhouse, The Book of Knowledge taught me anything I desired to know.

I dismissed any backwards practices I had learned from my sister and started by very carefully following the instructions and illustrations provided by the book. I remember how disappointing it was to find my lovely knitted square was a bit more oblong that it ought to be, but through practice and patience my skills improved.

Learning to knit was a great boon for me as a young girl, for I branched out and learned the art of circular needles, knitting, purling and changing colors. For Christmas I was able to present each of my friends and family with a handmade pair of mittens.

I don't knit anymore, my hands won't hold the needles long enough or grip them tightly enough these days. But learning to knit enriched my life in many ways beyond the simple joy of a completed project. It taught me that creativity takes many forms and must be allowed to come forth, in any medium that it chooses.

Branching Out

I've done something a little different, or at least different for me. I joined Helium, which is a writing community which enjoys a fairly wide readership. There may be pros and cons for me, one con of course is that since articles are rated on Helium as to style, content and popularity, it has the great potential of becoming a personal inadequacy crisis. But I suppose that if you can't stand the blue pencil, stay out of the editor's office.

I have just recently discovered that it is allowable to cross-post articles, that is, I can post them on my blogs and on Helium which made me give out a small sigh of relief. It can be hard to decide which place to post an article, whichever I choose, I would lose some hard work that could be put to use.

I haven't been a member long enough to decide if Helium is something I will stay with for a long time (I have only posted four articles so far) but I am going to give it some time to see how I like it. I may even have one or two articles that I will post here as well, and I may designate them as such (although I doubt that I have to do so).