Handling possible "spam" comments on your blog.

Handling possible “spam” comments on your blog.

Since most blogging software allows people to include their blog link with their name, is it “spamming” when they also end their comment with a link to their blog?

I’ve been having this happen lately and I’ve been rejecting the comments.

My view is that you should comment on the post you’ve read, fill in your name and URL (which is common), and leave it at that. Adding another link to your comment is little more than self-promotion and it makes it look like you’re only commenting to get traffic.

Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Thanks.

Links that are “True Spam” are indeed spam comments and are booted off my blog before they even have time to settle in the dust. What is “True Spam”? We all know it. We’ve all seen it. And we get dozens to hundreds of it in our email every single day. They are links to websites, with or without a comment. Most spam comments look something like this:

“get free diet pills by clicking here!”
“hot pictures of hot girls”
“buy my eBook and make millions overnight!”

However:

Links in comments are not always a bad thing!

*THUD*

Oh dear. Half my readers just fainted. I’ll sit here and twiddle my thumbs while I wait for them to get over the shock of what I just said . . . oh look! an ice cream sandwich! I’ll eat that while I wait.

AL-ERT!-AL-ERT!-THEY-HAVE-A-WOKEN!
EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!
KILL-THE-DOC-TOR!
Zaps Dalek with Sonic Screwdriver.

Good! You’re awake again! You missed the war between the Daleks and the Time Lords while you were out of it. Let’s continue . . .

I know, I just got off ranting about links in comments being spam, but not every link in every comment is spam. Spam is unwanted. Spam is off topic. Spam serves no purpose. Spam helps no one. And here’s the shocker: Relevant links are NOT spam!

So what exactly is it I’ve done here and why do I do it? Simple. The way I see it, people are going to leave links in your comment box, wither you like it or not, that’s just the way life is.

Now you have several choices. You can rave and moan and get mad about it and go leave nasty comments on their blog. You can ban them from ever commenting on your blog again(if your blog host has that option). You could just delete them and hope they never post again. . .or

You could do what I do and ASK people to leave links in your comment box. Yes, that’s right, I actually tell my readers to go ahead and leave links in my comment box. Why? Well, for one thing, they are going do it anyways. There really is no reason to get mad at them, because all getting mad will accomplish is getting you all stressed out and they will not feel any effect from that, so first off don’t get upset. If it’s spam, just delete it and move on in a calm rational manner. So if they are going to leave a link anyways, why not do what I do and I ask them to leave an on-topic link?

I shock people when they find out that in many of my blog posts I actually ASK people to leave links. I tell them that this is a topic I’m researching and would like to find other bloggers who are interested in it, and ask them to leave links to either their blog or some site that deals with this topic so that I can add them to my blog’s blog roll.

I’ve found a lot of good forums, sites, and blogs this way, most of which since were added to my blogrolls. Since I have started doing this I get a lot less spam comments too. Seeing that request for on-topic links in comments has just about stopped most off-topic links from being put in comments on my blogs! Less comments for me to approve, but hey, less spam for me to delete as well.

99% of the comments I receive on my WordPress blog are spam – and some pretty bad ones at that. So I use Spam-Free and Akismet to filter them out. Of the comments, that I do leave on my blog or have read on other blogs, about 1% add value, the rest are just “nice blog” kind of comments.

ugh! I hate WordPress for the kind of comments it brings! Akismet, grabs up spam comments at a rate of 200 – 300 per day on my WordPress blog! I hate it! It says that in the last year I’ve gotten some 40,000 comments! But I’ve only actually approved maybe 20 of them!

I think WordPress just attracts spammers for some reason. I never have problems like that with my Blogger blogs, and not once have I gotten a spam comment on my Blogger blogs either. I can only say that about Blogger though, all the other blog hosts I’ve tried, I get swamped in spam, often spam that is not even written in English!

If I am looking for comments, I will usually go to niche forums, where there are active and moderated discussions. Usually comments on blogs don’t add to much to the blog itself. Blogs don’t seem to be a good means to interact with members – compared to forums such as DigitalPoint, where information sharing is much more active.,

I hear ya there, and second that! My blog posts are generally about one of my hobbies: creative writing, sewing, comic books, etc. So I join forums for those topics and most of mt blog posts get “reposted” there as thread topics. On my blog the same post will get maybe 2 comments, while as a thread on a forum, it’ll get a whole flood of comments and I end up chatting up a storm with the other members and making new friends. Forums are great, I love them.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

————-
If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Publishing Your Novel? Find out more about Publishing Methods and did you ever wonder How to Start a Publishing Company?

Want to join Squidoo? Than you need to read EelKat’s Secrets To Squidoo Success and What Can You Do With Squidoo?

Are you seeking an online debate to join and tell the world what you think about it? Than you need to check out this List of Active Debates that are waiting for you to speak out on them!

Here is where you can find out How To Start Your Own POD Business to sell your art online and How I Became An Artist and What Art Equipment I Use and where
My Art is For Sale Online.

Handling possible "spam" comments on your blog.

Handling possible “spam” comments on your blog.

Since most blogging software allows people to include their blog link with their name, is it “spamming” when they also end their comment with a link to their blog?

I’ve been having this happen lately and I’ve been rejecting the comments.

My view is that you should comment on the post you’ve read, fill in your name and URL (which is common), and leave it at that. Adding another link to your comment is little more than self-promotion and it makes it look like you’re only commenting to get traffic.

Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Thanks.

Links that are “True Spam” are indeed spam comments and are booted off my blog before they even have time to settle in the dust. What is “True Spam”? We all know it. We’ve all seen it. And we get dozens to hundreds of it in our email every single day. They are links to websites, with or without a comment. Most spam comments look something like this:

“get free diet pills by clicking here!”
“hot pictures of hot girls”
“buy my eBook and make millions overnight!”

However:

Links in comments are not always a bad thing!

*THUD*

Oh dear. Half my readers just fainted. I’ll sit here and twiddle my thumbs while I wait for them to get over the shock of what I just said . . . oh look! an ice cream sandwich! I’ll eat that while I wait.

AL-ERT!-AL-ERT!-THEY-HAVE-A-WOKEN!
EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!
KILL-THE-DOC-TOR!
Zaps Dalek with Sonic Screwdriver.

Good! You’re awake again! You missed the war between the Daleks and the Time Lords while you were out of it. Let’s continue . . .

I know, I just got off ranting about links in comments being spam, but not every link in every comment is spam. Spam is unwanted. Spam is off topic. Spam serves no purpose. Spam helps no one. And here’s the shocker: Relevant links are NOT spam!

So what exactly is it I’ve done here and why do I do it? Simple. The way I see it, people are going to leave links in your comment box, wither you like it or not, that’s just the way life is.

Now you have several choices. You can rave and moan and get mad about it and go leave nasty comments on their blog. You can ban them from ever commenting on your blog again(if your blog host has that option). You could just delete them and hope they never post again. . .or

You could do what I do and ASK people to leave links in your comment box. Yes, that’s right, I actually tell my readers to go ahead and leave links in my comment box. Why? Well, for one thing, they are going do it anyways. There really is no reason to get mad at them, because all getting mad will accomplish is getting you all stressed out and they will not feel any effect from that, so first off don’t get upset. If it’s spam, just delete it and move on in a calm rational manner. So if they are going to leave a link anyways, why not do what I do and I ask them to leave an on-topic link?

I shock people when they find out that in many of my blog posts I actually ASK people to leave links. I tell them that this is a topic I’m researching and would like to find other bloggers who are interested in it, and ask them to leave links to either their blog or some site that deals with this topic so that I can add them to my blog’s blog roll.

I’ve found a lot of good forums, sites, and blogs this way, most of which since were added to my blogrolls. Since I have started doing this I get a lot less spam comments too. Seeing that request for on-topic links in comments has just about stopped most off-topic links from being put in comments on my blogs! Less comments for me to approve, but hey, less spam for me to delete as well.

99% of the comments I receive on my WordPress blog are spam – and some pretty bad ones at that. So I use Spam-Free and Akismet to filter them out. Of the comments, that I do leave on my blog or have read on other blogs, about 1% add value, the rest are just “nice blog” kind of comments.

ugh! I hate WordPress for the kind of comments it brings! Akismet, grabs up spam comments at a rate of 200 – 300 per day on my WordPress blog! I hate it! It says that in the last year I’ve gotten some 40,000 comments! But I’ve only actually approved maybe 20 of them!

I think WordPress just attracts spammers for some reason. I never have problems like that with my Blogger blogs, and not once have I gotten a spam comment on my Blogger blogs either. I can only say that about Blogger though, all the other blog hosts I’ve tried, I get swamped in spam, often spam that is not even written in English!

If I am looking for comments, I will usually go to niche forums, where there are active and moderated discussions. Usually comments on blogs don’t add to much to the blog itself. Blogs don’t seem to be a good means to interact with members – compared to forums such as DigitalPoint, where information sharing is much more active.,

I hear ya there, and second that! My blog posts are generally about one of my hobbies: creative writing, sewing, comic books, etc. So I join forums for those topics and most of mt blog posts get “reposted” there as thread topics. On my blog the same post will get maybe 2 comments, while as a thread on a forum, it’ll get a whole flood of comments and I end up chatting up a storm with the other members and making new friends. Forums are great, I love them.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

————-
If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Publishing Your Novel? Find out more about Publishing Methods and did you ever wonder How to Start a Publishing Company?

Want to join Squidoo? Than you need to read EelKat’s Secrets To Squidoo Success and What Can You Do With Squidoo?

Are you seeking an online debate to join and tell the world what you think about it? Than you need to check out this List of Active Debates that are waiting for you to speak out on them!

Here is where you can find out How To Start Your Own POD Business to sell your art online and How I Became An Artist and What Art Equipment I Use and where
My Art is For Sale Online.

Handling possible "spam" comments on your blog.

Handling possible “spam” comments on your blog.

Since most blogging software allows people to include their blog link with their name, is it “spamming” when they also end their comment with a link to their blog?

I’ve been having this happen lately and I’ve been rejecting the comments.

My view is that you should comment on the post you’ve read, fill in your name and URL (which is common), and leave it at that. Adding another link to your comment is little more than self-promotion and it makes it look like you’re only commenting to get traffic.

Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Thanks.

Links that are “True Spam” are indeed spam comments and are booted off my blog before they even have time to settle in the dust. What is “True Spam”? We all know it. We’ve all seen it. And we get dozens to hundreds of it in our email every single day. They are links to websites, with or without a comment. Most spam comments look something like this:

“get free diet pills by clicking here!”
“hot pictures of hot girls”
“buy my eBook and make millions overnight!”

However:

Links in comments are not always a bad thing!

*THUD*

Oh dear. Half my readers just fainted. I’ll sit here and twiddle my thumbs while I wait for them to get over the shock of what I just said . . . oh look! an ice cream sandwich! I’ll eat that while I wait.

AL-ERT!-AL-ERT!-THEY-HAVE-A-WOKEN!
EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!
KILL-THE-DOC-TOR!
Zaps Dalek with Sonic Screwdriver.

Good! You’re awake again! You missed the war between the Daleks and the Time Lords while you were out of it. Let’s continue . . .

I know, I just got off ranting about links in comments being spam, but not every link in every comment is spam. Spam is unwanted. Spam is off topic. Spam serves no purpose. Spam helps no one. And here’s the shocker: Relevant links are NOT spam!

So what exactly is it I’ve done here and why do I do it? Simple. The way I see it, people are going to leave links in your comment box, wither you like it or not, that’s just the way life is.

Now you have several choices. You can rave and moan and get mad about it and go leave nasty comments on their blog. You can ban them from ever commenting on your blog again(if your blog host has that option). You could just delete them and hope they never post again. . .or

You could do what I do and ASK people to leave links in your comment box. Yes, that’s right, I actually tell my readers to go ahead and leave links in my comment box. Why? Well, for one thing, they are going do it anyways. There really is no reason to get mad at them, because all getting mad will accomplish is getting you all stressed out and they will not feel any effect from that, so first off don’t get upset. If it’s spam, just delete it and move on in a calm rational manner. So if they are going to leave a link anyways, why not do what I do and I ask them to leave an on-topic link?

I shock people when they find out that in many of my blog posts I actually ASK people to leave links. I tell them that this is a topic I’m researching and would like to find other bloggers who are interested in it, and ask them to leave links to either their blog or some site that deals with this topic so that I can add them to my blog’s blog roll.

I’ve found a lot of good forums, sites, and blogs this way, most of which since were added to my blogrolls. Since I have started doing this I get a lot less spam comments too. Seeing that request for on-topic links in comments has just about stopped most off-topic links from being put in comments on my blogs! Less comments for me to approve, but hey, less spam for me to delete as well.

99% of the comments I receive on my WordPress blog are spam – and some pretty bad ones at that. So I use Spam-Free and Akismet to filter them out. Of the comments, that I do leave on my blog or have read on other blogs, about 1% add value, the rest are just “nice blog” kind of comments.

ugh! I hate WordPress for the kind of comments it brings! Akismet, grabs up spam comments at a rate of 200 – 300 per day on my WordPress blog! I hate it! It says that in the last year I’ve gotten some 40,000 comments! But I’ve only actually approved maybe 20 of them!

I think WordPress just attracts spammers for some reason. I never have problems like that with my Blogger blogs, and not once have I gotten a spam comment on my Blogger blogs either. I can only say that about Blogger though, all the other blog hosts I’ve tried, I get swamped in spam, often spam that is not even written in English!

If I am looking for comments, I will usually go to niche forums, where there are active and moderated discussions. Usually comments on blogs don’t add to much to the blog itself. Blogs don’t seem to be a good means to interact with members – compared to forums such as DigitalPoint, where information sharing is much more active.,

I hear ya there, and second that! My blog posts are generally about one of my hobbies: creative writing, sewing, comic books, etc. So I join forums for those topics and most of mt blog posts get “reposted” there as thread topics. On my blog the same post will get maybe 2 comments, while as a thread on a forum, it’ll get a whole flood of comments and I end up chatting up a storm with the other members and making new friends. Forums are great, I love them.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

————-
If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Publishing Your Novel? Find out more about Publishing Methods and did you ever wonder How to Start a Publishing Company?

Want to join Squidoo? Than you need to read EelKat’s Secrets To Squidoo Success and What Can You Do With Squidoo?

Are you seeking an online debate to join and tell the world what you think about it? Than you need to check out this List of Active Debates that are waiting for you to speak out on them!

Here is where you can find out How To Start Your Own POD Business to sell your art online and How I Became An Artist and What Art Equipment I Use and where
My Art is For Sale Online.

>Handling possible "spam" comments on your blog.

>

Handling possible “spam” comments on your blog.

Since most blogging software allows people to include their blog link with their name, is it “spamming” when they also end their comment with a link to their blog?

I’ve been having this happen lately and I’ve been rejecting the comments.

My view is that you should comment on the post you’ve read, fill in your name and URL (which is common), and leave it at that. Adding another link to your comment is little more than self-promotion and it makes it look like you’re only commenting to get traffic.

Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Thanks.

Links that are “True Spam” are indeed spam comments and are booted off my blog before they even have time to settle in the dust. What is “True Spam”? We all know it. We’ve all seen it. And we get dozens to hundreds of it in our email every single day. They are links to websites, with or without a comment. Most spam comments look something like this:

“get free diet pills by clicking here!”
“hot pictures of hot girls”
“buy my eBook and make millions overnight!”

However:

Links in comments are not always a bad thing!

*THUD*

Oh dear. Half my readers just fainted. I’ll sit here and twiddle my thumbs while I wait for them to get over the shock of what I just said . . . oh look! an ice cream sandwich! I’ll eat that while I wait.

AL-ERT!-AL-ERT!-THEY-HAVE-A-WOKEN!
EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!-EX-TER-MI-NATE!
KILL-THE-DOC-TOR!
Zaps Dalek with Sonic Screwdriver.

Good! You’re awake again! You missed the war between the Daleks and the Time Lords while you were out of it. Let’s continue . . .

I know, I just got off ranting about links in comments being spam, but not every link in every comment is spam. Spam is unwanted. Spam is off topic. Spam serves no purpose. Spam helps no one. And here’s the shocker: Relevant links are NOT spam!

So what exactly is it I’ve done here and why do I do it? Simple. The way I see it, people are going to leave links in your comment box, wither you like it or not, that’s just the way life is.

Now you have several choices. You can rave and moan and get mad about it and go leave nasty comments on their blog. You can ban them from ever commenting on your blog again(if your blog host has that option). You could just delete them and hope they never post again. . .or

You could do what I do and ASK people to leave links in your comment box. Yes, that’s right, I actually tell my readers to go ahead and leave links in my comment box. Why? Well, for one thing, they are going do it anyways. There really is no reason to get mad at them, because all getting mad will accomplish is getting you all stressed out and they will not feel any effect from that, so first off don’t get upset. If it’s spam, just delete it and move on in a calm rational manner. So if they are going to leave a link anyways, why not do what I do and I ask them to leave an on-topic link?

I shock people when they find out that in many of my blog posts I actually ASK people to leave links. I tell them that this is a topic I’m researching and would like to find other bloggers who are interested in it, and ask them to leave links to either their blog or some site that deals with this topic so that I can add them to my blog’s blog roll.

I’ve found a lot of good forums, sites, and blogs this way, most of which since were added to my blogrolls. Since I have started doing this I get a lot less spam comments too. Seeing that request for on-topic links in comments has just about stopped most off-topic links from being put in comments on my blogs! Less comments for me to approve, but hey, less spam for me to delete as well.

99% of the comments I receive on my WordPress blog are spam – and some pretty bad ones at that. So I use Spam-Free and Akismet to filter them out. Of the comments, that I do leave on my blog or have read on other blogs, about 1% add value, the rest are just “nice blog” kind of comments.

ugh! I hate WordPress for the kind of comments it brings! Akismet, grabs up spam comments at a rate of 200 – 300 per day on my WordPress blog! I hate it! It says that in the last year I’ve gotten some 40,000 comments! But I’ve only actually approved maybe 20 of them!

I think WordPress just attracts spammers for some reason. I never have problems like that with my Blogger blogs, and not once have I gotten a spam comment on my Blogger blogs either. I can only say that about Blogger though, all the other blog hosts I’ve tried, I get swamped in spam, often spam that is not even written in English!

If I am looking for comments, I will usually go to niche forums, where there are active and moderated discussions. Usually comments on blogs don’t add to much to the blog itself. Blogs don’t seem to be a good means to interact with members – compared to forums such as DigitalPoint, where information sharing is much more active.,

I hear ya there, and second that! My blog posts are generally about one of my hobbies: creative writing, sewing, comic books, etc. So I join forums for those topics and most of mt blog posts get “reposted” there as thread topics. On my blog the same post will get maybe 2 comments, while as a thread on a forum, it’ll get a whole flood of comments and I end up chatting up a storm with the other members and making new friends. Forums are great, I love them.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

————-
If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Publishing Your Novel? Find out more about Publishing Methods and did you ever wonder How to Start a Publishing Company?

Want to join Squidoo? Than you need to read EelKat’s Secrets To Squidoo Success and What Can You Do With Squidoo?

Are you seeking an online debate to join and tell the world what you think about it? Than you need to check out this List of Active Debates that are waiting for you to speak out on them!

Here is where you can find out How To Start Your Own POD Business to sell your art online and How I Became An Artist and What Art Equipment I Use and where
My Art is For Sale Online.

Question about blog comments?

Question about blog comments?

Do you reply to each and every COMMENT made on your blog?

Just wondering if this is the proper thing to do? or not?

Your thoughts?

I leave comments on nearly every blog I visit (provided I found a blog post that caught my attention and I felt was interesting enough for me to add my 2c on what the poster was saying), it is quite rare however, that a reply is ever made or questions ever answered. I don’t let it bother me that most bloggers do not reply, however, I do question the fact “Did they ever read my comment?” . It is very rare for me to leave a simple “drive bye” comment, most of my comments run into the 200 word range. Last week I wrote a comment that went on for some 600+ words! OMG!

I can explain how my comments get so long though. It’s because of the type of posts I tend to comment on. I enjoy seeking out questions to answer, so I actively look for blog posts that ask questions to which I know the answer too.

For example, that 600 word comment I left the other day, was left on a blog post that asked a simple 2 sentence question, about how to do a certain type of sewing. The blogger was sewing a costume and was stuck on a piece and used her blog to ask for help, and I read her question and knew the answer and how to correct the problem she was having, and so I wrote down the detailed instructions which she needed to solve her sewing problem.

Anyways, it is very rare for me to stop by and say a simple “Great post”, I’m more likely to say “Great post, I loved what you said about… yadda yadda yadda, for another 100 words.”

When I do leave a quick comment, it is usually a “Your welcome” to their “thank you” reply to my comment.

On my own blogs, I don’t get too many comments, but I try to reply to them when I do get them, because I think of the comment box ask a forum discussion rather than a comment box.

And this comment that you are reading right now, is a typical example of how long a comment you can expect to see written by me, should I decide to comment on a blog, btw! I feel that if I’m going to leave a comment, it better be a worthy one.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

————-
If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Publishing Your Novel? Find out more about Publishing Methods and did you ever wonder How to Start a Publishing Company?

Want to join Squidoo? Than you need to read EelKat’s Secrets To Squidoo Success and What Can You Do With Squidoo?

Are you seeking an online debate to join and tell the world what you think about it? Than you need to check out this List of Active Debates that are waiting for you to speak out on them!

Here is where you can find out How To Start Your Own POD Business to sell your art online and How I Became An Artist and What Art Equipment I Use and where
My Art is For Sale Online.

Question about blog comments?

Question about blog comments?

Do you reply to each and every COMMENT made on your blog?

Just wondering if this is the proper thing to do? or not?

Your thoughts?

I leave comments on nearly every blog I visit (provided I found a blog post that caught my attention and I felt was interesting enough for me to add my 2c on what the poster was saying), it is quite rare however, that a reply is ever made or questions ever answered. I don’t let it bother me that most bloggers do not reply, however, I do question the fact “Did they ever read my comment?” . It is very rare for me to leave a simple “drive bye” comment, most of my comments run into the 200 word range. Last week I wrote a comment that went on for some 600+ words! OMG!

I can explain how my comments get so long though. It’s because of the type of posts I tend to comment on. I enjoy seeking out questions to answer, so I actively look for blog posts that ask questions to which I know the answer too.

For example, that 600 word comment I left the other day, was left on a blog post that asked a simple 2 sentence question, about how to do a certain type of sewing. The blogger was sewing a costume and was stuck on a piece and used her blog to ask for help, and I read her question and knew the answer and how to correct the problem she was having, and so I wrote down the detailed instructions which she needed to solve her sewing problem.

Anyways, it is very rare for me to stop by and say a simple “Great post”, I’m more likely to say “Great post, I loved what you said about… yadda yadda yadda, for another 100 words.”

When I do leave a quick comment, it is usually a “Your welcome” to their “thank you” reply to my comment.

On my own blogs, I don’t get too many comments, but I try to reply to them when I do get them, because I think of the comment box ask a forum discussion rather than a comment box.

And this comment that you are reading right now, is a typical example of how long a comment you can expect to see written by me, should I decide to comment on a blog, btw! I feel that if I’m going to leave a comment, it better be a worthy one.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

————-
If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Publishing Your Novel? Find out more about Publishing Methods and did you ever wonder How to Start a Publishing Company?

Want to join Squidoo? Than you need to read EelKat’s Secrets To Squidoo Success and What Can You Do With Squidoo?

Are you seeking an online debate to join and tell the world what you think about it? Than you need to check out this List of Active Debates that are waiting for you to speak out on them!

Here is where you can find out How To Start Your Own POD Business to sell your art online and How I Became An Artist and What Art Equipment I Use and where
My Art is For Sale Online.

>Question about blog comments?

>

Question about blog comments?

Do you reply to each and every COMMENT made on your blog?

Just wondering if this is the proper thing to do? or not?

Your thoughts?

I leave comments on nearly every blog I visit (provided I found a blog post that caught my attention and I felt was interesting enough for me to add my 2c on what the poster was saying), it is quite rare however, that a reply is ever made or questions ever answered. I don’t let it bother me that most bloggers do not reply, however, I do question the fact “Did they ever read my comment?” . It is very rare for me to leave a simple “drive bye” comment, most of my comments run into the 200 word range. Last week I wrote a comment that went on for some 600+ words! OMG!

I can explain how my comments get so long though. It’s because of the type of posts I tend to comment on. I enjoy seeking out questions to answer, so I actively look for blog posts that ask questions to which I know the answer too.

For example, that 600 word comment I left the other day, was left on a blog post that asked a simple 2 sentence question, about how to do a certain type of sewing. The blogger was sewing a costume and was stuck on a piece and used her blog to ask for help, and I read her question and knew the answer and how to correct the problem she was having, and so I wrote down the detailed instructions which she needed to solve her sewing problem.

Anyways, it is very rare for me to stop by and say a simple “Great post”, I’m more likely to say “Great post, I loved what you said about… yadda yadda yadda, for another 100 words.”

When I do leave a quick comment, it is usually a “Your welcome” to their “thank you” reply to my comment.

On my own blogs, I don’t get too many comments, but I try to reply to them when I do get them, because I think of the comment box ask a forum discussion rather than a comment box.

And this comment that you are reading right now, is a typical example of how long a comment you can expect to see written by me, should I decide to comment on a blog, btw! I feel that if I’m going to leave a comment, it better be a worthy one.

What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

————-
If you liked reading this blog and want to read more stuff written by me, I have lots of websites, where you can read other things I write, here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Publishing Your Novel? Find out more about Publishing Methods and did you ever wonder How to Start a Publishing Company?

Want to join Squidoo? Than you need to read EelKat’s Secrets To Squidoo Success and What Can You Do With Squidoo?

Are you seeking an online debate to join and tell the world what you think about it? Than you need to check out this List of Active Debates that are waiting for you to speak out on them!

Here is where you can find out How To Start Your Own POD Business to sell your art online and How I Became An Artist and What Art Equipment I Use and where
My Art is For Sale Online.

Choosing a Topic to Write About: Are You Enthusiastic About the Idea?

Writers are sentimental about their writing, but are they enthusiastic about it? You have found a topic to write about, but you don’t know if it’s one you really want to write about. How can you tell if you should use it as your next topic? Just ask yourself this: Am I sentimental or enthusiastic about the idea? Does it matter?

 

Do not mistake sentiment for enthusiasm. They are not the same things. Don’t believe me? Let’s ask the dictionary:

Sentiment: noun

1.) Tender, romantic, or nostalgic feeling or emotion

2.) A personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty

Enthusiasm: noun

1.) A feeling of excitement

2.) Overflowing with enthusiasm

3.) A lively interest

A tender romantic emotion that evokes nostalgia vs. a lively interest filled with excitement. So how does this affect you the writer? Think of it this way: You may have sentiment for an old faded Valentine, but do you have enough enthusiasm about it to write a story about the Valentine and how it came to mean so much to you? It holds a warm place in your heart, and you well never throw it away, but do you burn with the feverish desire to tell the world about it?

 

Now think about your readers. Your reader has no sentimental attachment to your Valentine, if they saw it, they’d probably toss it in the trash, for it means nothing to them at all. Would they read about it? Well that depends on how you write the story, doesn’t it? If you spend you’re times mooning over the Valentine and its sentimentalness, most likely your reader well toss the story aside calling it a load of sentimental tripe.

 

Sentimental tripe. Yep, that’s what kills many a story. People don’t want to read sentimental tripe that moons and simpers over days gone by and the writer’s obsession with their own past. The reader wants to know the hows and whys behind the Valentine. They want the facts, every juicy detail. The Valentine in and of itself is not enough to keep the reader reading, there has to be something more. Think of the Valentine as the skeleton, the bones of the story upon which you must build up the muscle and flesh to give it substance. Write a story about the sentiment of the Valentine and bore your readers to tears. How do you correct that? With enthusiasm. Question is, do you have it?

 

Your reader wants to know how the Valentine became sentimental. They want to know how the Valentine came into the possession of your character. They want to read about the chain of events that caused it to become a sentimental item. Write a story about the Valentine and how it came to be important TO YOUR MAIN CHARACTER. Instead of sentimental mooning you have vibrant enthusiasm. You have a character, not yet turned sentimental. Now the reader has a reason to want to read about the Valentine. They can see a character that has feelings and emotions just like them. They can become the character and feel what the character feels when he feels it.

 

But are you truly enthusiastic about your idea? Do you burn with the desire to write it? Do you feel that you cannot exist until you have spread the word throughout the entire world? Does a fiery passion to tell everyone everywhere about your story, drive you forward? That is enthusiasm, and that is what you need to tell a great story. Leave the sentiment behind, and let your story burn with passion, let that passion fill your soul; pour your soul into the story.

 

 

Conventional Advice that Didn’t Work for Her (or Me Either!)…

Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”.  After reading her article, I have to say that basicly, she has said pretty much what I would have said, and what I do say, whenever someone asks me.

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

1) Write every day.

This piece of advice is repeated in almost every book on “how to write.” Maybe some people need this sort of discipline, but I would find it counterproductive. Sometimes I write feverishly every day. Sometimes real life intervenes. I have a demanding job and a family. If I believed I had to write every day, even when I absolutely had no time, I’d quickly grow to hate writing and I’d stop doing it. Mostly, I have more ideas than I have time to process, so “forcing myself to write” is not a problem. And during those periods when “real life” heats up and I can’t write, I don’t feel any guilt. Why should I? Writing isn’t a religious penance or a health routine. It’s something I enjoy.

My responce to what she says:

You’ve heard it preached from the pulpit of every sacred book on writing: WRITE EVERY DAY!!!

Now ask yourself this: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A hobby?

If you think of writing as a hobby, than who cares when you write? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if your writing gets sloppy? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if you ever get published? No one. If you write as a hobby, than by all means writer seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, because you know what? If you are writing because writing is a hobby, no one cares. Why? Because hobby writers write for their own pleasure. If they get published, it’s a great big WOO-HOO! for themselves and their family. But very few hobby writers ever get published. Why? Because they are content to post their stories on message boards and web-sites and blogs. They are happy to see their work on the internet. Writing after all is just a hobby to them. They are content with what they do.  So, for writers who write as a hobby, it is not important when they write, because their family is not dependant on the writing. Just search on Google for Fan-Fiction. Millions of stories are posted all over the internet, but because they are written by hobby writers, tthose stories well never be printed in books. They well never be published, but no one cares, not even the writer. So why than does it matter if the hobby writer writes every day?

Let’s look at the other side of this story.

Now ask yourself this once again: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A career?

I ask you: What is your day job? Do you  wait tables? Drive a school  bus? Are you a cashier at the local super market? Maybe you teach high-school geography? Whatever it is that you do for your day job, ask yourself this: How many days do you work each week? A few well say three, some well say four, almost all of you well say five. By law your employer is required to give you at least two days off each week. That’s a law. That law is enforced. If an employer asks you to work more than five days a week, they are required to pay you time and a half. That too is a law. Why? Because even the government knows that you can’t get the job done if you are not given a day or two of rest. If you work seven days a week, you well run down, wear out and get sloppy. Your work well suffer, because you didn’t get a day off.

So, we come back to your answer: Why do you write? Hobby or career? If you said career, than you know that being a writer is just like every other 9 to 5 job. Nine o clock you sit down at your desk and you start writing. Around noon you take an hour break for lunch. After lunch it’s back to your desk to write until five. Five o clock comes around and no matter how compelled you are to keep writing, you put down your pen, turn off the light and don’t go back to your desk again until tomorrow morning when nine o clock rolls around again. Like any other job, you take the weekend off. Why? Because for you writing is more than a hobby. For you writing is what puts food on the table. For you writing is what puts clothes on your children. Writing just paid for your teenager’s PS3. Writing pays the mortage. Writing pays the vet bills caused by the recent pet-food recall. You write because writing is your career, your job, your livelyhood. For you writing is not a hobby. You can’t afford to let you writing get sloppy and you know that, which is why you also know that it is foolish for you or any other writer to think that it is in your best interest to write every day.

And that is  why I do not write every day.

Moving on to myth #2…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

2. Don’t Edit Until the First Draft is Done.

I edit obsessively as I go along. I like rewriting things. I can’t imagine another way to write and would be utterly incapable of completing that first draft if I didn’t do it this way.

My responce to what she says:

This, I think, depends on the writer and what they are writing about at the time. Personaly I do not believe in editing as you write, as a general rule. Why? I find that when I am writing, I  write better if I don’t stop. I have learned to ignore typos and spelling mistakes, to turn a blind eye to bad grammar, and to not listen when my mind says I should go back and re-write what I just wrote. Why? Because if I stop, it creates a speed bump. That speed bump slows me down and causes me to go lose track of what it was I was writing. So I find myself going back to where I had stopped, because I have to re-read what I wrote several times before I can remember where it was I was going with that train of thought. In a sence by stopping to edit while I was writing, I have now derailed my writing train, and put it back on a new track, and it just can’t get back onto that old track, because the old track for some odd reason is no longer there. On a road, a speed bump just jostles your car a bit and make you slow down, but on a train track, that same little speed bump not only jostles the train, but knocks it off track and sends it flying into the oncoming train on the other track. That speed bump is now a mangled mess of crumpled train cars, which ow must be towed away and tossed into  a junk heap. A huge rusted junk heap towering high above your head. The next thing you know you can’t write anything at all because all there is is a pile of mangled wreckage. You have hot a writer’s block.

So, where are we now? Well, for me, stopping to edit while I’m still writing is the deadliest thing that can happen while I’m writing. Usually, but not always. This is just me though, and as I said, all writers are differant.

Moving on…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

3. Use Note cards or Notebooks to Organize Ideas

Even the thought of using index cards to organize fiction ideas is almost enough to make me run screaming into traffic. In my mind, these little cards will forever be associated with undergraduate term papers. I don’t use notebooks because I hate to write longhand. I do all my writing on the word processor — even background notes for novels. Actually, I prefer to do background for novels as short stories, even lame short stories with no chance of selling. I see things better that way.

My responce to what she says:

As most of you know, I never went to school. I can’t identify with term papers because I’ve never had one, let alone seen one, and I’m not realy sure what they are, except that everyone who talks about school talks about term papers too. I’m not sure what an undergraduate is, I’ll look it up next time I’ve got my dictionary at hand. For those who have followed my posts on the net since 1997, you already know that when I joined the internet world, it was my first time typing. I had never used a keyboard before in my life. Likewise, I had also never learned how to spell. I wrote at that time in what I have since been told is a form of a “native lingo of my own invention, cause by lack of previous contact with humans”. In 1997, I first I joined the internet, and became an over night celebrity, not because I posted on every forum and chat room I could find, but because people were fascinated by my complete and total lack of any ability to spell. In the years since that time, my fan following grew to a cult status as people set out to teach me how to spell via online forums.

Than came a revilation to the world, that no one had befor known: My books, the Twighlight Manor seires, several thousand pages, and countless drafts of each, had never seen typewritter, I had written all of them in longhand. The manuscipts where totally written in bright colored notebooks with Lisa Frank art on the covers: thousands of them. Some 40 boxs worth of notebooks, stacked floor to ceiling. Noetbooks that I have been writing in since 1978. Thirty years worth of notebooks.

Today, I still write my books in longhand. I still hand write all of my manuscripts in bright colored children’s note books. To date, I have only ever written one outline. I have never used index cards. I do not type my manuscripts until after haveing hand written several drafts. I do not organize my ideas, my ideas flow from my mind at a rapid rate, and I write them as they come. No notes. No note taking. They are not my style.  They do not work for me.

And finally we come to:

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

4. Keep a Story Circulating until it Sells.

This is another piece of almost universal advice that I don’t follow. I tend to select my markets rather carefully. If something is rejected at the market I’ve thought most probable for it, I will normally only try it on one or two other markets before giving up (or in some cases no other markets). Although there are a lot of magazine markets for speculative short fiction, there are actually relatively few professional markets for speculative short fiction of any given type. I guess my economics training makes me weight the possible benefit (payment for a story) by my subjective evaluation of the “odds” of being published in that magazine. If the weighted payoff is less than the postage, I put the story in a drawer and work on another one.

My responce to what she says:

In some cases, this is true, in others it is not.

Some times I write for copyrighted characters not of my own making. For these stories there is only one publisher that I can legally send the stories to. If they reject the story, than that’s it. It can’t be sent to anyone else.

More often I write stories of characters of my own invention, and for these, I can choose any publisher I damn well please. I can also choose who I DO NOT want to publish it. Than again I can also choose to do what I usually do, and that is to self publish my stories. That is how I came to own my own publishing house. It is through owning my publishing house that I came to become an editor. Today I am a writer, a publisher, and an editor, because I reserved the right to choose when, where, and to whom I sent my manuscripts too: no one!

Well, that is my take on what Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”. 

~~EK

A Writer’s Emotions

Writing is a very sacred thing for a writer, it is deeply personal and deeply emotional, because we pour our very heart and soul into what we write, and when someone rejects our words, they in a way reject our very soul as well. While writing we are thrown through every possible emotion, both the good and the bad. Writing can been very relaxing when we do it, because we feel that our words well hold a warm meaning to our readers, but than it become stressful and we are filled with the fear that what we wrote well not be well recieved by our readers.

Writing is prob’ly the most emotional, exhilerating, and stressful act anyone can ever do.

~EK

Business Plans: Moonsnails Magazine: We’re Back!

In fall of 2005 Twighlight Manor Press announced that it was planning the release of a new magazine, which at that point was untitled and it‘s genre unknown. Our original idea was to keep it local; local writers, local sales, local flavor to the stories. Market research, however showed us that that would be a very unprofitable venture that would doom our magazine to failure before it’s fifth issue. We had to rethink out plan.

Over the next several weeks we threw around ideas and finally decided that the magazine would be a fiction “literary journal”. At first we planned on “all good fiction”, but than after studying the market, realized that this was virtually a bottomless pit, that would result in more manuscript submissions than our tiny staff of four would be able to handle.

Another thing we decided early on, was that, we wanted to stand out on bookstore shelves. Looking at other magazines sold at a local bookstore, Nonesuch Books in Saco, I discovered something. Rack upon rack of magazines, where all the same: 8×11” glossy and flimsy issues, that would not stand the test of time on a bookshelf, given them a shelf life of just 3 weeks. (This short shelf life was according to a study I found online.) According to that study, only a few magazines would be shelved and saved to be read again and again for several years. These magazines had good content and a sturdy binding. I went to Nonesuch Books looking for magazines with good content and study bindings, and was amazed at how few there actually were. In the end I found only three, out of the hundreds of magazines the shop had on the racks. By the end of this stage in our study we came to one conclusion: this magazine, was NOT going to be a 8×11” glossy; instead it would read like a book, with crisp white paper and a square bound “paperback” cover.

After some more market studies, we came to the conclusion that rather than focusing on fiction in general, we would instead use the same rule we use for writing: Write what you know. In our case it would translate into: Publish what you read. All four of us are sci-fi buffs. Sci-fi movies, sci-fi TV, sci-fi comics, sci-fi books… well it seemed only natural that we would thus choose sci-fi as the genre for the new magazine.

By January of 2006 we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with the magazine. On Space Dock 13 (the website) we announced that the magazine was a defiant go, and we were planning it’s release later that year.

With our genre in mind, we set out the name our new magazine. After several weeks of debate, only one thing was agreed upon: that the magazine must have a sci-fi sounding name and that it should reflect our local home base, namely that we are on the world’s most beautiful beach: Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

In April 2006 we introduced the world to two new websites. The first was the message board for writers: A Writer’s Desk. It was our hope that through here we would find new talent seeking to be published in our magazine. A message board built entirely to promote the magazine, today it stands on it’s own and has no connection to the magazine at all.

Our second Website was of course the homepage for our magazine. We had finally decided on a name, and that name was: Moonsnails. After a walk to the beach that cold April, me and my three brothers returned home with tote bags filled with Old Orchard’s most beloved seashell: the Atlantic Moonsnail. Later that day, while sorting the shells on the lawn, it hit me: Moonsnails was the perfect name for our magazine, it kept the local flavor and it sounded sci-fi. Later that week Moonsnails homepage went online.

By the end of April 2006 we were getting quotes from various printers, both local and online. Announcement went out with the news that Moonsnails would see its public release in September of 2006. We were off and running, and than came May 9, 2006 and the flood that washed away all of our plans, destroying everything we owned and bringing Twighlight Manor Press to an instant standstill. We lost everything, the building was condemned, and nothing survived. As far as the business was concerned, we were back at ground zero.

That same day, as a result of the flood, my dad went into a coma. In July of 2006, my dad awoke from the coma and returned home disabled and in my care. In September of 2006, instead of releasing Moonsnails, we found ourselves in the midst of fight to save our land from a local land shark. The result was my dad’s return to the hospital. In October of 2006, a fire swept through. What little we had that survived the flood, was destroyed in the fire and we were faced with fighting out Maine’s frigid winter in a tent, a fate that did not sick well with my disabled dad’s rapidly failing health.

In January of 2007, things took a turn once again, this time in our favor, and we found our selves with electricity, heat, and a roof over our heads, for the first time since May 9, 2006.

Reunited with my computer, I was amazed to find, that in spite of the flood, in spite of the fire, the hard drive remained intact, and with a few minor repairs, it runs as good as new. It looks like hell, a bent mangled mess, but who cares, all my files are still here! All my plans and templates, all those months of research and market studies: they had survived! With that knowledge in hand I set out to pick up the pieces, and once again, plans are underway, full speed ahead, to bring Moonsnails into production.

And that brings us to today. Nether flood, nor fire, nor cold of winter, could stop Moonsnails. Moonsnails rises once again.

~EK

testing tags

having a problem getting posts to show up… testing to see if tags are working yet

Why Do Editors Reject MSs?

I just read this:

Treat your editors like the coach from any sports team because the editor knows their audience and only rejects writing with a good reason–even if you never learn the specifics.

Seemed like good advice, though I know nothing of sports or coaches. I do know, however, that editors have no choice but to reject 90% of what they recieve. Why? Well, for every book they have the physical ability to publish each year they receive 1,000 or more manuscripts. Many publishing houses only print 12 new books a year, one each month, and yet they receive ten times that many manuscripts in a single day. What does that mean for you the writer? That means that your manuscript had better be damn good if you want it to punch out the compatition and make it onto the editor’s desk. Once on the editor’s desk it had better glow if it wants to get picked for publication.

Why do editors reject manuscripts? Well as the editor in chief of Moonsnails Magazine and The Twighlight Manor Press, I think I might know the answer.

Here are copies of a few of the rejection forms we use:

Rejection Notice: No Space At This Time; MS Put on File:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on the following:At the current time we do not have space for your story in our publication. The reason for this is that all of the space slots have already been appointed for all of our upcoming issues, meaning that it may be a year or more before we well be able to use your story. However, we did like your story, and may use it in the future. Therefore I have put it on file for possible future publication. This does not mean that we can guarantee we well accept it in the future.
Because it may be a year or more before we would be able to accept your story, you are welcomed to submit this same ms to other publishers. If it is accepted by one of them, please inform us of such. If it does get published in an other magazine, we well move it to a file for possible reprint in our magazine.
If at some point in the future we do decide to use your ms, you well be notified and payment well be sent at the than current payment rate.So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct any spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it even better, maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.While your story was not accepted for publication in our magazine at this time, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Inappropriate Content:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on one or more of the following:

explicit sex or sexual references
graphic violence for violence sake
mention of or reference to suicide
animal, child, or elder abuse
excessive use of vulgar verbology
mention of or reference to drug use — this includes one or more of the following:

smoking
drinking
illegal drug use

At this point if you are like most writers, you are sending me a long letter of complaint, protesting that your ms was misrepresented and misjudged, followed by a list of reasons why sex, drugs and gore are essential to your story, ending with a threat of some sort at the bottom. Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to re-read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.

Our editors read the mss and than accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. Likewise, it is the customer who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. You do a good job, the customer pays you to do your job. What is your job?
Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. What can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read. To determine how to keep our customers happy, we first must know who are customers are.
Who are our customers? Let’s examine our magazine.
Our magazine is family friendly: i.e. read by families. Families include all ages. In other words it would not be unusual for the oldest grandmother to be seen reading a story from our magazine to her youngest grandchildren. Keeping that in mind, we do not accept stories that contain any of the above mentioned things.
We are also a small press, sold locally at a tourist resort town on the frigid North Atlantic coast of Maine. Most people who buy our magazine are often tourists looking for something to read on the beach. Others who buy us are local teachers and parents who trust us to publish stories that provide a safe, clean, enjoyable read for students.
What do our readers want? They want a story that they can enjoy reading again and again. They want action, adventure, fun, and entertainment. They want to read about heroes off on grand adventures, pirates seeking lost treasure, super heroes vanquishing dastardly villains, wars in outer space, knights in shining armor, spooky old haunted houses, the type of stuff that was popular in the 1950’s comic books is what our readers enjoy.
What our readers do not want is pointlessness. What is pointlessness? Pointlessness is ho-hum, I think I’ll ad a sex scene in here because I can’t think of anything else to write right now. Pointlessness is , yawn, the dialogue got to short, so I’ll stick in a few swear words. Pointlessness is, geeze this sure is going slow I’ll add a serial killing vampire and have him splatter entrails all over the pages. Pointlessness is, I can’t think of anything else to write, so I’ll have a teenager overdose herself than slice her wrists while jumping off a bridge, because my life is so dull that that’s what I might do tomorrow. Pointlessness is anything that adds nothing to the story plot, it is simply there to fill up empty space. That is pointlessness. Our readers look at sex, swearing, bloody violence, and suicide and say, “Ho-hum. Looks like yet another depressed teenager wrote that piece of crap. Booooring! When are they going to get some real writers to write some real stories. I’m going to cancel my subscription.”
As you can see, if we print those things we lose our readers. If we lose our readers, we lose our customers. If we lose our customers, we lose money. If we lose money we go bankrupt. If we go bankrupt we have to close down the magazine. If we close down the magazine, we end up homeless and starving. So, the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

It was a dark and stormy night, the night I wrote this story. I remember it was dark and stormy because I was watching the drug dealer outside my window that night. But my story isn’t about him, no, it’s about me and my life as a teenager. This is the coolest story in the world! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! It is all about how my teen years were nothing but heaping loads o’ crapola. You’ll just love to reading about how my step-dad was hell and how he raped me and beat up my dog, and how my mom was on drugs (that‘s how I knew the guy outside my window was a drug dealer), and how I run away and everything! It doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the story don’t need no plot. YAH! But than I got to thinking it’d be great if it was a horror, so I turned my step dad into a blood sucking vampire and I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock your readers with too!!!! Isn’t that jus the coolest thing??? I’ll bet no body ever thought of doing that yet. Yeah I know, it’s great, don’t thank me, I’ll settle for you kissing my ass and being my eternal slave, I’m so great you know. Oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex scene on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? You don’t need a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me! Me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great in your face kiss ass @#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! Oh yeah! I’m right baby! Can ya dig it?!

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to WANT read a ms that is submitted without the author at least stopping to think about what our readers do and do not want. Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories that focus on me, myself and I surrounding by naked girls and serial killers on drugs and nor do we. Okay, maybe there are a few magazines that publish that sort of thing, so, send it to them, they want it, we don’t.
As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories, nor do they want to read pointless ramblings. How long do you think a reader will stay interested in your story if you haven’t actually got a story to tell? You would not read it and you know that, and editors know it even better than you do. You’d never pay money to read something like that, so how can you expect other people to buy it? That said, why should we bother to accept it?

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms, delete the sex, blood, and drugs and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. Remove the vulgarity from it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect. Write it, than re-write it.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about with characters readers well want to read about. Who did it? What did they do? Why did they do it? Where did they do it? What was the result of what they did?
Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning tells us what the goal of the story is. The middle tells us what the character did to reach that goal. The ending tells us what happened when the character reaches the goal.
Be sure that your main character is someone that you readers well have a reason to love.
Third person stories (he said she did) get accepted more than 80% times more often than first person stories (I said I did), and second person rarely gets accepted by anyone (you said you did). 99.8% of all best sellers are written in 3rd person.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.
Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can yours become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

While your story was not appropriate for publication in our magazine, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.

Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Lack of Spelling and Grammar:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here]we must regretfully advise you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance is based on:

Lack of correct spelling and an abundance of basic grammar mistakes.

Due to the volume of mss we receive each week, we are unable to read mss which require us to first stop and make spelling and/or grammar corrections in order to be able to read it. In the 1800’s when most authors were unable to spell due to lack of education, yes, editors did correct spelling. This is not the 1800’s, it is 200 years later. In today’s world, you would be hard pressed to find an editor that would correct a writer’s spelling and grammar mistakes. Today authors didn’t grow up in log cabins 1,000 miles from civilization, and even if they do live in the Artic Circle, they type the story up on a computer, and guess what? Computers spell check, and most grammar check too.
Before your ms gets to one of our editors, it must first survive the shush pile. The slush pile is a mountain of stories, which threatens to smother our editors in a paper avalanche. Once in a while is found one or two authors who have sent their 4th or 5th draft, a well polished draft with mistakes corrected, and the ms printed neatly and formatted correctly…and editors can actually read it. Those one or two that we can read because they are clean and neat with no mistakes… those are the ones we read, because those survive the slush pile and make it on to an editor’s desk.
Which mss drown in the slush pile? If the paper is dirty, crumpled, and torn, it drowns. If the font is big and flowery, it gets tossed. If the font is smaller than 12pt, it seeps into the unknown. If the paper is scented and has confetti flying out of each page, it gets fumigated. If the paper is pink, red, yellow, blue, or any other color not white, it gets tossed before it gets a chance to blind the editor. If it reads like a dry collage text book, it gets recycled quickly…we don‘t want our editors sleeping on the job. If there are 10 or more grammar and/or spelling mistakes on the first page, it gets tossed. Of every 100 mss we receive, more than three thirds are tossed in the trash as unreadable. Sadly, your ms has fallen into the unreadable category. As a result, your ms did not survive the slush pile and went unread by our editors.
Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.
Our editors read the ms and accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. The customer is the one who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. What is your job? Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. Now than, what can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read.
The author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

dis is da coolest storee i’s even did wrote!!!! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! it is all about how my teen years were noting but heaping loads o’ crapola, you’ll just lov at read about how my step-dad was hell, and i run away and everting! it doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the storee don’t need no plot. I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock the readers wid too!!!! Is’nt tat jus the coolest thing??? Ya I knoe, it’s great,,, oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex sence on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? you don’t neeed a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great@#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! can ya dig it?! howe loong do ya tink a weeder will stae intrested in yor storee ifing dey kan’t weed wat U al wote? and you hav‘nt actualy got a story to tell ? “YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!“ U wood knot weed it and yos no that, & us editers no dat even betta tan U doo, so why wood we bodder to weed it? even if it had been a goode storee, we wood not have nonw for all the mistakes… !!!! it jus 2 bad that mor wriders did knot spell an grammer checke afor dey submit

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to read a ms that is submitted without the author first spell-checking it at least. A typo here and there is understandable and overlooked, but how often do you see a magazine publish a story in a complete lack of grammar? Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories and nor do we. As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories.

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere. Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?

Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about characters readers well want to read about.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.

Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can your become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

You have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well ever accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss in the future.

Sincerely,

As I said these are premade forms. Why do we have premade forms? Because we do not accept certain things, and no matter how many time we tell people that we do not accept certain things, they still send them out anyways, thinking “well, they well make an eception for me”… no, not even if you were Stephen King, would we make an exception.

Baiscly, write the best you can, edit it yourself as best you can, always read submission guidelines carefully, and send your ms out to the places that WANT the type of work you write. Editors are desperatly seeking good writers, they want to accept your work, you just have to find the right editor for what you wrote.

~~EK

Town Begins Investigation of Manager

What follows is a copy of a news article from a Maine newspaper: Portland Press Herald. If you haven’t done so already, please read last month’s post: Government Corruption: Town’s Harasment of Disabled Senior Goes Too Far!for more information regarding the series of events in the lives of just one of the families that this man has tormented.

Town Begins Investigation of Manager

Jim Thomas’ management style has led to complaints in Old Orchard Beach

By Seth Harkness;Staff Writer, Portland Press Herald York Edition March 15, 2007 copyright 2007 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

OLD ORCHARD BEACH_ The Old Orchard Beach Town Council voted Wednesday night to hire a lawyer to examine complaints against Town Manager Jim Thomas.The councilors did not name the employee under investigation when they voted unanimously to hire Brunswick attorney Martin Wilk “in connection with a personal matter”, and no councilors would publicly confirm the town manager was involve. But in the last six weeks the town council has held two closed door meetings to discuss personal issues, neither of which were attended by Thomas. The Old Orchard Beach town charter requires the town manager to “attend the meetings of the Town Council, except when the Manager’s removal is being considered.”

Before the meeting, Town Council Chairmen Joe Klein was asked whether the personnel matter on Wednesday night’s agenda involved Thomas. “That’s a logical deduction,” he said.

As recently as last fall, the council extended Thomas’ contract and gave him a raise. Many people also credit the town manager, a Lewiston native who was hired in 2003, with helping to improve the appearance of downtown and attracting a new wave of economic development.

However, what some describe as Thomas’ headstrong style of dealing with town employees and members of the public has credited conflict, both in Old Orchard Beach and at his previous manager’s job in Sterling, Colo.

Thomas was fired from the Colorado position in December of 2002 after four months on the job, according to Frank Gower, a city councilor in Sterling for the past nine years. “He didn’t get along with employees and it was like his way or the highway,” said Gower. “He’s a good visionary man, but I think his management style left a lot to be desired. It was a conflict type management style like I’ve never seen before.”

Some former town employees in Old Orchard Beach said they had similar experiences while working for Thomas.

Tim Braun was director of Public Works in Old Orchard for six years and is now town engineer in Gorham. Braun left his position in Old Orchard one year after Thomas arrived, he said, because he could not tolerate working with the town manager. Braun described Thomas as a temperamental boss, prone to delivering orders and threatening employees with the loss of their jobs.

“He uses the authoritarian model,” Braun said. “I was reminded that I was an employee at will. There wasn’t any mincing of words.”

Thomas did not respond to requests for an interview Wednesday.

In September of 2005 the Town Council discussed residents’ complaints that the town manager had shown a lack of respect toward individuals and a disregard for public opinion. The council took no action at that time and Thomas said that his efforts to improve the town were bound to upset some people.

One recent controversy involving Thomas occurred last week when two town councilors, Jim Long and Robin Dayton, questioned the legality of a closed-door meeting in which they said Thomas urged the council to extend a contract with Poland Spring.

Thomas also was accused of running afoul of freedom of information laws during his tenure in Colorado. In October of 2002, the Journal Advocate, a daily newspaper in Sterling, published an editorial that chastised Thomas for refusing to release a copy of minutes from a city staff meeting. The paper also criticized Thomas for a policy requiring city employees to answer questions from the press only in writing.

Despite the controversies, a majority of the Old Orchard Beach Town Council voted in October to extend Thomas’ contract through June 2008 and raise his salary to $92,000.

Contact Staff Writer Seth Harkness at 207-282-8225 or at: sharkness@pressherald.com

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old orchard beach
corruption
government
government corruption
government harassment
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abuse
torture
civil-rights
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Second Round of Blog Additions

Here is the second round of blogs I plan to add to the Z-List for Writers:

Writing Fiction
Crime Fiction Dossier
Kathryn Cramer
WritersWrite.com
Writer’s Beware
The Fiction Writing Blog: Articles, Writing Exercises, Prompts and More….
sfsignal.com
Bowing to the Future
David Louis Edelman
Louise Marley
Among Amid While
Authors Blogs
The Writer’s Life

This Day in History: March 13

March 13 is an interesting day; here are a few examples:

On March 13 in 1781, German born English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the seventh planetfrom the sun, Uranus.

On March 13 1887, Chester Greenwood of Maine recieved a patent for earmuffs.

On March 13, 1964 Catherine Genovese was killed in the Kew Gardens Community of Queens, NY, while 38 of her friends and neighbors, “not wanting the get involved” watched for nearly 30 minutes as the girl was repeatedly stabbed by her 29 years old attacker. Others, outraged by her friends’ testamony declared March 13 “Good Samaritan Day”, a day to emphasize the importance of unselfish aid to those who need it.

What happened to this girl reminds me of our family. Dozens of people, possibly hundreds, know what has been happening to our family, and yet, no one well help us, no one well do anything to stop it, even when we have begged and pleaded for help from everyone we can think of, still no one well help us and thier reason is always the same: “It’s not my place to get involved.” Most of those would say this claim to be Christians. Now I ask you, in view of this being Good Samaritain’s Day, “What would Jesus do?”

The Friends of Star Log Network

EK’s Star Log is a blog for writers, lovers of sci-fi, and just general observations on life, the universe, and everything.

The Friends of Star Log Ning-Network, is for all other bloggers with blogs of similar tastes, that want link together and get more readers for their blogs. All owners of family-friendly blogs are welcomed to join. Thank you for visiting, hope you decide to stick around and join! Once you have joined the network you can add discusions to the forum, post in the group blog, and post links to your own blog//myspace/websites here. I hope to see you around! Thanks for visiting!

Do you enjoy chatting with other bloggers? Want to get more readers to your blog? EelKat has started a Zing Community, just for people like you. Why not join The Friends of EK’s Star Log today?

Friends of EK’s Star Log

~~EK

What is the topic of your blog?

Started by EelKat on Mar 2 2007

What is your fave sci-fi movie/tv show?

Started by EelKat on Mar 3 2007

The Friends of Star Log Blogs

EelKat

The Z-List, EK Edition 2.0: The Ultimate A to Z-List

Note: I am editing this post, so that it’s an a-z list…. 

Still researching Z-Lists… well, this time I searched Google for Z-Lists, and now I’m going to post the longest Z-List you well find any where!

Copy This entire  post to your blog, for inclusion in this The Ultimate Z-List!The Z-List: A great wonderful idea to help advertise blogs. Yes? Yes. I think anyone who has used the Z-List well agree with that. The principle behind the Z-List is the same as a chain letter. In a chain letter, you mail a letter to five people. One that letter is the addresses of five more people. Each person who recieves a letter, adds five new addresses, and sends those to the five addresses on the letter that they had recieved. The piont of a chain mail is to send the same letter to an ever increasing network. Useualy the letter is an advertisement for something being sold. Basicly it’s a lot of free advertiseing for a company, based on “word of mouth”.

Like the chain letter, the Z-List contains addresses, but it differant in that it never asks you to buy anything. You don’t even have to buy a stamp. The Z-List is the chain mail for bloggers. It gets a blog pingbacks and inbound links, and helps to send more traffic to the blog, hopefully traffic that well stay on to become regular readers.

Anyone can start a Z-List. It’s easy. Just take a list of Blogs which you enjoy reading, and put them in a post on your own blog. Some say not to add your Blog to the list, while others say to go ahead and put your Blog right on the top of the list. Well, it’s your Blog and your list so you can put links to any Blog you please in it.

With the list you leave a message, asking that the next person to read this post, copies it and pastes it into the next post they make on their own Blog. They are free to add as many Blog links to the list as they like, and they are welcome to remove any links that are already in the list, if they feel that theose Blogs are inappropiate to be linked back to their own Blog.

Most Z-Lists start out with five or ten links, but after being passed on to just ten more bloggers, that Z-List can quickly have 100 or more links in it. The advantage of this is, that for each post, that each Blog in each link, well recieve a ping-back for that post. In other words, their Blog becomes linked to your Blog and your Blog to thiers, making it a win-win situation for both your Blog and their Blog, by raising the inbound link ranking with such places a Technorati and Google, meaning that you Blog moves higher in the ranks on search engins, resulting in more people finding your Blog and giving you more readers. Great huh? Absolutely!

Absorbingneutrino

adsense4dummies

Adventures in Parenting Adventures in the SF Trade

Africa Unchained

aialone

The All-Grown-Up Woman

Ally’s

Anderson Daily Photo

Andrew pakpahanAngel Feathers Tickle Me

Anne 2.0

Another great blog about earning money

Anthony’s Blog

Apache

Are most writing contests even worth it anymore?

Arthur’s Hall of Viking Manliness

Aspiring Comedian

The Asylum of TerminalFrost

Altjiranga Mitjina Awesomely Amazing

Bathos

Battlestar Galactica Blog BecKaDoodles

Being Peter Kim

Billions With Zero Knowledge

bizsolutionsplus

Blogging Secret

Blogging to Fame

Blog-Op

Blogtrepreneur

BlogSire

Bob Sutton

Boise Wants Jay Mariotti

The Branding Blog

Branding & Marketing

Branding and Marketing

BrandSizzle

Broadband and Me

Bullshitobserver

The Busy Dad Buzzoodle

Calico Monkey

Calling On All Serius Bloggers To Read This And Respond

Can I Make Big Money Online

The Case of The Bulletproof Harpist

Celebrating Holidays Everyday Celebrityday

Chasing The Moon……

Cherry, Plum, Peach and Damson Blossoms CKs Blog

Click Here to Advertise on My Blog

Clo’s Fascinating Things.

Coffee2go

Coleman Web – The personal Website of Anthony P. Coleman

The College Marketer

Community Guy

Composing Myself

Conspiracy Theory, UFOs, and Alternative Topics

converstations

Copywriter’s Crucible

The Copywriting Maven

Copywriting Tuneups

CrapHammer

Creating Passionate Users

Creative Confusion

Crisisblogger

Critique My Blog

Crumbling Spires

Customers Rock!

Curbside View

Daily Blog Tips

DaisyCake — oh yeah! crafty crap!

Dane Carlson

darrenbarefoot.com

Design Sojourn

Did You Ever Get the Feeling… Difference Make Identity

The Digital Cloud

Dinosaurs: A Creationist’s Fairy Tale

Dipping into the Blogpond

Dishpan Dribble Do You Have Issues?

DoshDosh

DotMySpot.com

Dove Pro-Age Campaign

Drew’s Marketing Minute A droll way to look at things. EK’s MySpace Blog

EK’s Star Log

EK’s Star Log, the Pink Edition

ElsaElsa – The Advice Blog

The Emerging Brand

Emily Chang – eHub

The Engaging Brand

eSoup

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LONDON

Ficken Chingers

Flee the Cube

Flooring the Consumer

For Queen and Country

Frank Uncovers Excellence in Leadership Frazzled Lashawn

Frozen Puck

The Fun Hunt

Getting Rich

gDiapers

Giraffe Blog!

Golden Practices

Grasshopper Ramblings

Gritty Thoughts

Guy Fawkes

Half a Dozen Streets

Haunting Thunder

Hee-Haw Marketing

Hidoi Desu: Sayonara’s Dull Blog

Hillary Clinton’s Blog

Hits and Mythses

Hochiak! Delicious Asian Food

¡Hola! Oi! Hi!

Home with Heather

How to Earn Money Blogging

How To Earn Money Online

I didn’t understand ghosts and spirits If Ya Want to Make Money In.co.her.ent~ish

Indians in China Indigus Interactive Health

Internet Bazaar

INTRADAY TIPS Is there God indeed?

I’ve got you under my skin

Jake and Sarah

John Wagner

Jottings From Jersey

journalcomic

Journey to a new found ME!

Kinetic Ideas

kipperfrog

Knitty In Pink

Kumiko’s Cash Quest

La Bella Noire’s Ramblings

Late Developer

Learning To Be Dad

Lee Carlon’s Writing Blog

Life

The Life and Times of Apparently Crazy Lil’ Duck Duck

Logic + Emotion

MapleLeaf 2.0

Marketing Nirvana

The Making of an Internet Entrepreneur

The Meaning Of Life

memetherapy.net

Metaphysics As A Guide to Lunch

The Metaresonant Temple

Mike’s Money Making Mission

The Million Dollar Experiment

The million dollar experiment down under

Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum

The Moment It Hit

Monetize Your Blog

Money!

The Money Spider’s Guide to Earning Money from your Web Blog

Mountain Bikes And Life The Moving (Middle) Finger Writes Multi-Cult Classics

Musings of a chick

My Journey to One Million Dollars

My Life

my little corner of my little world

My Quest to Success

The Nice Guy

Nick Rice

Nifty Chart

On Influence & Automation

One Reader at a Time

One Student Doctor’s Thoughts

One Thing

Online Money Reviews and Tips

Out in the Parking Lot

Own Your Brand!

Pablo Pabla’s Whatever

Pacifist Guerilla

The PaperBirdBlog

Peculiar Lives

Perspective

PhotoShop Sims

Pixelated Abe Poet Skinny’s Webpicks

Popcorn n Roses

Pow! Right Between The Eyes!

PRACTiCAL CHiCK

Presentation Zen

Promoting Your Site

Quest 4 Sanity

The Quest Of Nik

Quest to make money on the internet Rainyuki

Ramblings Of An Undisturbed Mind Rambling On

Random Encounters of We raving lunacy

Risk Exile An Allegorical

Ruminate this site

RyeUrn – A Blog Kegful of Wry

The Sartorialist

Savvyology Designs

Say It, Don’t Spray It

The Seaside Stitcher

Semicolon

Servant of Chaos

Shameless Complacency

Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!

Shady’s Blog

ShawnAllison.com

Shivered Sky

Shotgun Marketing Blog

Skittles’ Place

Small Surfaces

Smeg’s Window

SMogger Social Media Blog

Smoldering Embers In a Mohawk Campfire

Snark Fest

Social Media on the fly

Social Misfit

Standing under the Sky

SuccessCREEations

Successful Blog

Sunshine

Tawny Taylor

Tell Ten Friends

This Writing Life

Thoughtz from da HEADoc

Time to Budget

To be Mrs. Marv…

Troy Worman’s Blog

Two Hat Marketing

Turn Your Blog Into Money Making Machine

Trapped in the Body of a Civil Servant…Help!!!

The Ugly Truth

The Ultimate “Make Money Online” Blog

Unconventional Thinking

Us Danes & Our Family

Using My Powers for Good

Velcro City Tourist Board

Viaspire

The Weird World of MerapuMan What is Brand?

When You Brake Up With Someone..

Where Worlds Collide The Wicked Bitch of the West Side With A Turn And A Twist She Gets Her Wish

The Wombat Cage

Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together

Woolgathering

Working at Home on the Internet

World Blog Collection

Wormbrain

Write now

Writer’s Block

writers are horribly boring

WTIT WVUA-TV Weather Blog

Yada Yada Yada The Z List

Zamphir Panflutemaster

Volume31.org My Fun House 

Life’s a Dance

The Babblings of Whimsicalnbrainpan

Opinion Minions

Acne Treatments and Information

How to get healthier

Naturopathic Medicine

Always Sleepy

PCOS Gurl’s Blog

Meditation for Enlightenment

The Gnostic World of Candy Minx

Brow of Calm

Short Story Blog

Books Love Me

Southern Expressions

Rugjeff’s Blog

The Simple Blog

Investor Market News

Gifts-For-Kids-And-Pets

Paid Mails

Consolidate Debt Loan

Earning online from MyLot

Earn at Home Tips

Some Useless Info

CASHSPEAK

April Decheine 2006 at a glance

Crazed Mama’s Work At Home Strategies

Wizened Wizard

My World

Terri Terri Quite Contrary

The Far Queue

Duct Tape Diaries

Christy’s Coffee Break

Weight Loss Diet

I-Bibliophile Library

Thoughts and Imagery From the World of Karl Moore

Hot Tatoo Dot Com

Blind Copy

SaF Investments

Stello Blog

Bob Sutton

Perspective

Ramblings from a Glass Half Full

Simplicity Mary’s Blog

Funny Business

Creative Think

The Copywriting Maven

Brain Based Biz

Experienceology

QAQNA

Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!

MineThatData

Design Sojourn

aialone

Frozen Puck

Africa Unchained

Energy Blog

Movie Marketing Madness

gDiapers

Time to Budget

Soloride

Girls Swimsuits

Home Business Wiz

Working at Home on the Internet

Kristie T

Asia Inspection Community

Employment Law Colorado

Leading Questions

Steve Olson

Make It Great!

You Already Know This Stuff

HolyMama!

My Marrakesh

Gangster Sonny

Talking Story

AENDirect

Being Peter Kim

BizandBuzz

bizsolutionsplus

Blog Till You Drop!

Branding & Marketing

Business Garden

Buzz Canuck

Buzzoodle

Christine Kane

CKs Blog

Conversation Agent

converstations

CrapHammer

Customers Rock!

Diva Marketing

Dmitry Linkov

Drew’s Marketing Minute

eSoup

Flooring the Consumer

Get Shouty!

Golden Practices

Hee-Haw Marketing

Hola! Oi! Hi!

Jeremy Latham’s Blog

John Wagner

Kinetic Ideas

Logic + Emotion

Marketing Hipster

Marketing Nirvana

Mindblob

Multi-Cult Classics

Nick Rice
On Influence & Automation

OTOInsights

Pardon My French

Pow! Right Between The Eyes!

Purple Wren

Servant of Chaos

Shotgun Marketing Blog

Small Business Blogging

Tell Ten Friends

The Branding Blog

The Experience Curve

The Instigator Blog

The Marketing Minute

The Viral Garden

Two Hat Marketing

Unconventional Thinking

Viaspire

Popcorn n Roses

Current World news

Choice at Your Fingertips

Blogtrepreneur

Can I Make Big Money Online

Dosh Dosh

Internet Bazaar

Kumiko’s Cash Quest

Million Dollar Experiment heads Down Under

Quest to make money on the internet

Above Popular

Critical Fluff

Forged Euphoria

OrbitNow!

The Sartorialist

Bullshitobserver

New Millenium PR

The New PR

Carpe Factum

Work, in Plain English

turned out

Evolution…not just a theory anymore

SEO Blog

Flee the Cube

Community Guy

A Free and Decent Blog Host

Billions With Zero Knowledge

Connected Internet

darrenbarefoot.com

Deepak

MapleLeaf 2.0

Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn

Small Surfaces

TechBuzz

Masey.com

Through the Lenses

Travel And Vacation On Blog

The Best Guides to eCommerce with Favor

Web Metrics Guru

The Future of the Web

Social Media on the fly

http://asyuu.asablo.jp/blog/

The Z-List, EK Edition 1.0: Blogs for Writers

The Copywriting Maven

Click Here to Advertise on My Blog

EK’s Star Log, the Pink Edition

EK’s MySpace Blog

Wayfarers Journal

Calling On All Serius Bloggers To Read This And Respond

Are most writing contests even worth it anymore?

Writer’s Block

writers are horribly boring

journalcomic

Troy Worman’s Blog

Copywriter’s Crucible

Copywriting Tuneups

bizsolutionsplus 

Servant of Chaos

darrenbarefoot.com

ANITA’S OWL CREEK BRIDGE

Decadent Tranquility

Welcome to Axe’s Asylum

NaNoWriMo: I Won!

Whew!

Hawaii, My New Novel

1minute book reviews

livingthequarterlife

Naughty Heather

Mom & Much More

ninglun

lew-lew

Writing Mamas take note

what you write

the book

Blog Of The Problematique

Chasing The Starlight

Saipan Writer

a lifetime of dreaming

 antithete

Michigan::Flint Red Hot Writers Blog

1 Word 2 Words

NaNoCaiRo

The Dream Thief

Reality is Running Away

Author! Author!

Backstory

Deserved Indulgence

Heather Harper

Hulles

Observations From Missy’s Window

Paperback Writer

Plot Monkeys

ProBlogger

Putting It All Together

Rachel Vincent

The Write Snark

Write Stuff

The Incurable Disease of Writing

Writer’s Edge

101 Reasons to stop writing

An Innocent A-Blog

At Home in Rome

Confessions of…
TracyPlaces
Web Worker Daily
5-web-based-entrepreneurship-experiments
Crushing Krisis
theLactivist

Arkansas Times Daily Blog

E-r-u-d-i-t-e Redneck (I must not be Erudite cause I cain’t even SPELL it)

Entertainment Fort Smith magazine

Find Yourself in Fort Smith

HotSoup

lucidpoints.com

RiverValley411

The Five Forty

Feedback Secrets Blog

Geekwhat
Hundred Dollar Business
Juice Feed

Robert Afnani’s Blog

CraveOnline.com

Diversified Stocks

TalkMatic
Gigaom
internet business daily
Tom Ferris

Motherwear Blog

Mama Knows Breast

Breastfeeding 1-2-3

TulipGirl

doulicia

MaMa C-Ta

Jen’s Musings

ChewyMom

A Little Pregnant

Making it Up

Mocha Milk

Breastfeeding Mums
Friends of Star Log
Navelgazing Midwife
Spring Widgets

Antiwar.com

FreeTalk Live

Get Ready!

Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church

Ivey
Nikole Conspiracies
Jeremiah
The Debris Files
Kindom Trees
Miss Conspiracy
LewRockwell.com
Moonage Spacedreams
LibertyConspiracy.com
Revelations
Ludwig von Mises Institute
John Bitch Society
New Hampshire Underground
Conspiracy of Care
Samurai Appliance Repair Man
Freedom Philadelphia
The Samurai Appliance Repair Forums
Freedom Fight
Tim
The Zeniod Files
Tregubov Studios
911 Blogger

The Z-List, EK Edition 1.0: Blogs for Writers

The Z-List: A great wonderful idea to help advertise blogs. Yes? Yes. I think anyone who has used the Z-List well agree with that. The principle behind the Z-List is the same as a chain letter. In a chain letter, you  mail a letter to five people. One that letter is the addresses of five more people. Each person who recieves a letter, adds five new addresses, and sends those to the five addresses on the letter that they had recieved. The piont of a chain mail is to send the same letter to an ever increasing network. Useualy the letter is an advertisement for something being sold. Basicly it’s a lot of free advertiseing for a company, based on “word of mouth”.

Like the chain letter, the Z-List contains addresses, but it differant in that it never asks you to buy anything. You don’t even have to buy a stamp. The Z-List is the chain mail for bloggers. It gets a blog pingbacks and inbound links, and helps to send more traffic to the blog, hopefully traffic that well stay on to become regular readers.

Anyone can start a Z-List. It’s easy. Just take a list of Blogs which you enjoy reading, and put them in a post on your own blog. Some say not to add your Blog to the list, while others say to go ahead and put your Blog right on the top of the list. Well, it’s your Blog and your list so you can put links to any Blog you please in it.

With the list you leave a message, asking that the next person to read this post, copies it and pastes it into the next post they make on their own Blog. They are free to add as many Blog links to the list as they like, and they are welcome to remove any links that are already in the list, if they feel that theose Blogs are inappropiate to be linked back to their own Blog.

Most Z-Lists start out with five or ten links, but after being passed on to just ten more bloggers, that Z-List can quickly have 100 or more links in it. The advantage of this is, that for each post, that each Blog in each link, well recieve a ping-back for that post. In other words, their Blog becomes linked to your Blog and your Blog to thiers, making it a win-win situation for both your Blog and their Blog, by raising the inbound link ranking with such places a Technorati and Google,  meaning that you Blog moves higher in the ranks on search engins, resulting in more people finding your Blog and giving  you  more readers. Great huh? Absolutely!

Well, I only just discovered the Z-List earlier this week. and searching for more Z-Lists had lead me to one conclusion: most of them are just randomly thrown together with no rhyme nor reason, and so comes my idea for Keyword Specific Z-Lists or links to blogs all on a single topic.

The first of these I shall call:

The Z-List, EK Edition 1.0: Blogs for Writers

The Copywriting Maven
Click Here to Advertise on My Blog
EK’s Star Log, the Pink Edition
EK’s MySpace Blog
Wayfarers Journal
Calling On All Serius Bloggers To Read This And Respond
Are most writing contests even worth it anymore?
Writer’s Block
writers are horribly boring
journalcomic
Troy Worman’s Blog
Copywriter’s Crucible
Copywriting Tuneups
bizsolutionsplus 
Servant of Chaos
darrenbarefoot.com
ANITA’S OWL CREEK BRIDGE
Decadent Tranquility
Welcome to Axe’s Asylum
NaNoWriMo: I Won!
Whew!
Hawaii, My New Novelwriting : thinkmap visual thesaurus
1minute book reviews
livingthequarterlife
Naughty Heather
Mom & Much More
ninglun
lew-lew
Writing Mamas take note
what you write
the book
Blog Of The Problematique
Chasing The Starlight
Saipan Writer
a lifetime of dreaming
 antithete
Michigan::Flint Red Hot Writers Blog
1 Word 2 Words
NaNoCaiRo
The Dream Thief
Reality is Running Away

Do you have a Blog for writers? Are you a writer who has a Blog? If so, leave a comment on this post,  with a link to your Blog and I well  add it to the list.

Do you know of any good Blogs for writers? Leave a comment with a list of the Blogs for writers, that you enjoy reading so I can add them to my list!

Don’t forget to copy this post and post it on your Blog!

Government Corruption: Town’s Harasment of Disabled Senior Goes Too Far!

February 26, 2007

My name is Wendy Allen. I am writing to you on behalf of my father, Kenneth Allen of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Our family is in desperate need of help. In the past year we have tried without success to get help locally, but now the deadline is less than a week away and we do not know what to do or who to turn too for help. Since this is a long and complicated ordeal, I well start at the beginning.First off, I should tell you that we are fighting the local government, the officials of the Town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, for the following charges:Discrimination against a disabled senior. A seniors rights being taken away from him.Repeated harassment, and discriminatory attempts to force a low income family off their land, resulting in the year long hospitalization of already mentioned senior and resulting in his becoming disabled.Threat of the destruction of property, including the threat of tearing down the home of aforementioned senior and his minor children and their pets.Forcing the senior and his minor children out of their home and onto the streets where they lived for much of 2006 in a “tent” constructed out of shipping pallets and a tarp, where they lived in the elements of Maine’s harsh winter, some days suffering at below zero temperatures.The threat of having all our belongings destroyed.The reason the town official Ken Shoup gave for this harassment was quote:“This is Old Orchard, you have to change you lifestyle.”End quote. No other reason has been given.Now, for our story and how this train of events came to be:First off, our family has a long history with the Town of Old Orchard, due to the fact that our family settled this town more than 300 years ago. Our family has lived on the properties here in since 1657. Originally there were several hundred acres on our land, both forest and farmland, but as the centuries went by the land was divided among relatives and passed on in increasingly smaller sections from one generation to the next. As the town grew and the land became more valuable, relatives sold out and moved away. By the 1940’s ours was the last to remain in the original family, a small lot less than an acre in size. Not only was it the last to remain in the original family, but it was also the last farm in Old Orchard Beach.It should be noted that property in Old Orchard is valued in the millions due to it being one of the world’s top rated award-winning beaches, and there in lies the root of our problem. Our farm has been accused of decreasing the property values. By the 1980’s Old Orchard became known as the hang out for biker gangs, honky-tonks, and strip shops. Property values dropped as the family image of the town plummeted. In the 1990’s, things changed once again, the gangs were driven out, the honky-tonks and bars shut down, and the strip shops became restaurants and art galleries. Property taxes sky-rocketed to the second highest in the state as millionaire mansions and high rise condos reconstructed the sky-line, forever blocking out the view of the beach from the roads.Old Orchard beach town officials, spent millions putting in brick sidewalks, Victorian street lamps, and building a replica of the town hall that had stood here in the 1800’s…. their campaign was to create a “historical town” to draw in high income tourists. The campaign was wildly advertised, and well promoted… until the new town manager and his new staff showed their true colors, that is and their campaign turned to harassing long time locals off of their land.  Several families have been driven out already. Most unable and unwilling to fight the local government as the threats of propety destruction, and the removal of personal belongings (including pets) has scared most of the “offending families” into selling thier land and moving. There are only a handful of families that have stood thier ground, but those too are leaving. Ours is one of the last to remain, still standing our round, and refusing to give in to the threats made by local police officers, local code enforcement officers, and the town manager himself. In the past year they have changed (without proper votes from the people) nearly every code on the book in an attempt to force these families off thier land. Changes in code include such things as “banning the growing of vegetation”, “painting your house”,  “owning more than one car per family”, and other ridiculous town laws, that now prohibit such things as growing a garrden. It is like living in a strict gated community, only it is the entire town.On the outskirts of the town, one finds the beautiful rolling acres of Ross Forest, once a candidate to become a national park, most of it now clear cut, and what little remains is soon to be sold for housing complexes, many already under construction. Dividing the Ross Forest from the down town district, lay the remains of a few scattered farms, no longer in use. Except for one: ours. At one time a large full production poultry farm, today the home of pet farm animals, but still very much an active farm, small as it is.

The harassment of our  family began in the fall of 2005 after an unknown person, wrote an editorial to the local newspapers, saying, “Four homes on Portland Avenue were distracting from the value of other properties in the town”. The writer continued saying that something should be done about it, that these four homes “should be torn down”, and the families should be forced to move out of town to make way for the new generation. Two of those four homes mentioned, as it turns out, were 144 Portland Ave and 146 Portland Ave.

At 144 Portland Avenue there lives my elderly dad Kenneth Allen, myself, and my three brothers (all under 16 years of age). As you may guess, our dad was much, much older than our mother, explaining how a senior came to have young children. In 1983, my dad’s mother died and he inherited her house at 146 Portland Ave. The tiny 16 foot by 9-foot house, which never had plumbing, etc. Was turned into a shed, but even so, the town has continued to tax it as a house. Since October of 2001 (six years ago) we have been applying for a permit to repair this building, and turn it into a greenhouse so we can extend our growing season, but the town STILL has that on a waiting list.

We continued to live in the old 700 square foot house, more of a cabin than a house by the town’s standards anyways. My dad was a newspaper carrier for 21 years, our family income was under $20,000 a year, so we were never able to afford much, but we never noticed, because we were happy. Our family was living together, we had our pets with us, and we lived on our farm. That we lacked a “normal income” or a “normal lifestyle” (as the town officials now put it) never occurred to us.

Than in spring of 2006, there came the letters from the town. One after another. Demands to “remove the junk and debris” or else. As it turns out, what they were calling junk and debris, was as follows:

Our car, which though they consider it “junk” still runs in spit of what it looks like, and we use it daily.

Our fire wood (we have a woodstove for heat, cause we can‘t afford anything else.)

My dad’s tools (he was a car mechanic in the 1970’s, and still works on his own car and cars of relatives)

Our brooder (used for raising baby chickens each spring)

My dad’s antique cast iron wood stove collection

Our garden (bean poles, pea fences, etc… they say we can’t have a garden any more either)

Our washing machine (a 1947 wringer, which we use weekly)

Our farming equipment (tiller, ATV, etc…. all used on a regular basis)

In other words, what they are calling “trash”, “junk”, and “debris” are actually things we use every day, things we need in order to survive… without them we can not garden, if we can not garden we can not eat, because we can not afford to buy enough food to eat more than one meal a day per person, without the garden we well starve to death, without the farm equipment we can not garden, they are trying to kill us… this is not a figure of speech… as you shall soon understand.

My dad explained to the town that this stuff is not junk but our livelihood. The town responded by attaching a lean/fine on our property, for “refusal to comply with orders“. I’m not sure how much the amount is unto today, but it was much more than we could afford than, and more so now.

My dad made an attempt to move the items so that they could not be seen from the road, in an attempt to comply with the town’s orders, hoping that if the items could not be seen from the road, that it would stop the harassment by the town… this was the biggest mistake he could have made, because as a result, a few days later on May 9, 2006, he went into a coma.

May 9, 2006 started like any other day. I woke up and went out to feed the chickens, work in the garden, and than help my dad move items out of view of the street. My dad had not yet gotten up. I had been in the yard barely 20 minutes when my 15 year old brother  came running across the yard in a panic… something was wrong, I could see it on his face, and I ran to meet him… he told me that something was wrong with daddy… daddy had woken up and torn the wood stove out of the wall tearing with it all of the water pipes… and now the house was under water, while daddy was throwing everything from the toilet to the tables to shelves to files all over the house. By the time I arrived in the house there was 8 inches of water on the floor, and nothing left of anything… everything in the house was totally destroyed, there was not only nothing left on shelves, there were no longer any shelves. It looked like a tornado had gone through the house. The house was barely recognizable.

My smaller brothers  had run into the bedroom to hide, terrified at the event that was unfolding, while daddy was now in an attempt at tearing out the windows. When I asked him what he was doing, he did not recognize me, he could not hear me, he could not see me… it was like he had turned into a blind man and was tearing at the walls in an attempt to see… I rushed to the neighbor who called an ambulance.

The ambulance arrived, and talk of nervous breakdown and meningitis, were scatted around the conversations… the emergency team was in attempt of asking me what happened, when I was pulled away by a police officer named Jack Nichols, who proceeded to interrogate me about the condition of our house.

The wood stove was laying in pieces in the center of the dinning room, and this was his main focus…

repeating the same question again and again: “How long has this been laying here?” he demanded. I told him, it had just happened, he accused me of lying, and repeated the question…. over and over again, and I kept explaining to him, that daddy had just done this, which was why we had called 911. Than he turned his questions to the piles of paper and mail that scattered the house… “What’s all this clutter?” he yelled. Again I explained that this had just happened, that it was stuff that had been on the shelves and table, but as before, he accused me of lying and repeated the question again and again, his voice growing more heated and temperamental each time. Than in a menacing voice he turned on my three little brothers “Why aren’t these children in school?”. I explained that we home schooled, and we had approval from the town’s superintendent. Next he railed me out about how children can’t live in “clutter and filth” like this… again I explained that this “clutter and filth” as he called it, had just happened moments ago, and it was because this had happened that we had called for his help. He responded by calling the Department of Human Services to take my brothers away, and than calling the town code enforcement officer to condemn the house on grounds of “clutter and filth”.

While all this was happening the ambulance had taken my dad away, to where they had taken him I did not know, because Jack Nichols had not given me a chance to even know what had happened to my dad. More police, this time with cameras, stormed into the house, none of them would tell me what they were doing, why they were there, or what had happened to my dad. In the mean time my mom and her husband arrived, and my brothers and me packed a few things so we could move in with her while we figured out what to do next. We tried to pack what little we could find that hadn’t been destroyed by the flood, and do it around police officers who seemed to be going through everything in the house for no reason at all, and who refused to talk to me or even acknowledge that I was there. Luckily the hospital called us during this time and told us where my dad was, but they would not discuss his condition over the phone. It was four hours before the police would let us leave to find out what happened to my dad. A friend, who had witnessed the police searching the house with their cameras, said that he thought it looked like a drug raid, and he suggested that we get copies of the police report to find out why they were going through the house like that. I told my dad this after he came out of the hospital and he went to the station to get copies of the report, but they refused to give them to him without a court order, so we have been unable to obtain any info as to why the police were going through everything like that.

It was a lesson well learned. We called the police for help and they turned on us like rabid wolves. I well never call 911 again.

Once at the hospital I was told that what we had just witnessed was a diabetic seizure, brought on by extreme amounts of stress. The doctor asked if my dad had any recent stress… yes, he had, with the town harassing him the past couple of weeks, and than the police harassing him even during a medical emergency, nearly hindering the emergency teams ability to get him to the hospital. Dr. Greene than explained that it was luckily he had gotten to the hospital when he did “another 20 minutes and he’d have been dead” is what he said. I shudder to think that the town police and their obsession with throwing us off our land nearly resulted in my dad’s death. Dr. Greene went on to explain that my dad was now in a diabetic coma on full life support. Wither or not he would live was not yet known

As days, turned to weeks, my dad remained in a coma, his system getting weaker by the minute, at one point his kidneys failed him and he had to be rushed in for dialysis.

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My dad remained in Southern Maine Medical Center in a diabetic coma on full life support for 21 days. In mid-June they moved him, wheelchair bound, from SMMC to New England Rehab Center in Portland. On June 29, 2006, my dad came home, unable to walk on his own, and saw for the first time what had become of our house. Just three days after my dad went into the hospital our electricity was shut off. The town claims they had nothing to do with it when I asked them. Without electricity, there was no light, and thus no way to see to clean the mess from the flood, and so, it remained just as it had been left on that day in May.

My dad, was now severely disabled, only able to walk a few feet at a time and unable to lift anything. The stress caused by the town’s harassment had left him with a weak heart and failing kidney’s, but the harassment had only just begun, for almost as soon as he was out of the hospital, the town once again began its relentless pursuit to remove us from our land. Land that for us means our heritage, our history, our legacy, but land that for the town, means nothing but dollar signs and profit margins.

Due to the months of the house sitting filled with water, we could not go back in to live in it. Having no family or relatives willing to help us, we were forced to camp out in the yard. We signed up for various shelter foundations and were put on their waiting lists. At HUD we were informed that we were #600 on the list.

Problems had gotten worse than I had known… for my dad was now disabled and could not go to work, thus I started my long and fruitless search for a job, which is today still ongoing. During his hospitalization, no bills had been paid, and about 10 or so years ago my dad had taken out a mortgage on the house… there has been no money since May of 2006 (nearly a year now), and thus no mortgage payments since that time either, they are now threatening to foreclose, but know the situation and are trying to work out a payment plan with my dad, in hopes that his disability check well eventually be approved by the state (he is still waiting to hear from the state on that… they sure do take a long time. They said it well is approved, they just have to wait for the paperwork to go through, so there should be some type of an income soon, we hope.)

With no income, and a house that we can not live in, my dad lived in his car, my brothers now liveing with our mom and her husband, and I built a house-tent-lean-to type of thing out of 12 shipping pallets, 3 cinderblocks, and a tarp. We had asked the town if we could put up a yurt (not hard to build as our land boarders a forest) until we could get a house back up, but they told us no, only tents were allowed, but we couldn’t afford to buy a real tent, so I built one instead.

Letters from the town continued to arrive. We continued to visit the town hall where we got the run around… “Come back in the morning, he’s only here in the mornings.”…Next day: “I’m sorry, did I say mornings? No, you’ll have to come in the afternoon.”… Day after day after day… week after week after week… “He’s out sick today”… “He’s on vacation this week.”… “He’s out on an inspection today.”… Weeks became months and STILL we had yet to meet the man behind the letters: Ken Shoupe. Though we went to his office almost daily, we would not meet him until November of 2006.

In July my dad had to have surgery, and was bed-ridden or rather car-ridden, as he had no bed, for several weeks afterwards. For food we get a bag a month from the Salvation Army (the only place that made an attempt to help us, little as it was) and each month we stretch that single bag of food as much as we possible can to make it last the entire month, but that often means we are limited to one very small meal a day (sometimes less). The State only allows us $13 a month for food stamps, and we aren’t eligible for TANF or welfare because we own our land.

We went to our church for help, but than there isn’t much they can do, you see, our town manager, the man giving the orders to Ken Shoop, is a “leading member” of the church, and others involved in the letters, such as the secretary who mails them out, also go to our church. The bishop tries to help when he can, but, in the end all he was able to do was get our electricity turned back on, but for that there was a catch: The town was going to let us remove our belongings from the house, before they tore it down. So, with the electricity back on, and this new threat hanging over our heads, me and my 3 brothers, built a second tent next to the first one, and began to move what we could salvage out of the house and into the second tent. Everything we own now sits outside, damp and wet, under a tarp, buried in snow.

Such threats and happenings have been going on now ever since my dad came home from the hospital, and the stress has made his recovery almost impossible, and thus he remains weekly, sometimes daily, in and out of doctor’s offices and hospitals with increasingly failing health, and every day his doctors tell him: “You have got to get the stress out of your life before it kills you.”

And now I shall skip ahead to where we are at today and why I am writing to you:

In December, with below zero temperatures and snow burying the “tent”, a woman from the Department of Human Services showed up at our land, explaining that someone had filed a complaint, because there was a family living outdoors during Maine’s harsh sub-zero winter. We have been on waiting lists for shelter since this had happened, but we are such a large family: 5 people, plus cats, dogs, and farm animals, there is no one who would take us, we had no choice but to sit out Maine’s winter and try to keep the tarp from collapsing on our heads under the weight of the snow. She was furious, at the Town Officials, for she had attempted to contact them first and was given the same “run around” that we had been given. She told them that if they were going to force us out of our home than they should at least pay for a hotel room (Old Orchard Beach has over 300 hotels, motels, cabins, camp grounds and condos.) She said that they had told her off. She is the one who said that what was happening here was not legal, that it was harassment, and that it was bordering on criminal. It seems that if one of us had died from the cold, the town could be charged with murder, we did not realize this. Before the DHS came in, we didn’t know that what was happening was illegal, we didn’t know that we had the right to fight the town. She gave us the phone number of Pine Tree Legal, Maine’s free lawyer group. We called. And called again. And keep calling, but can’t get past the operator, who says our name is on a waiting list.

This woman from DHS was the very first person to make any attempt to really and truly help us, with her help we went from #600 on HUD’s waiting list to #1 and on January 10, 2007, after nine months of homelessness, me and my dad were allowed to move into a temporary apartment in Biddeford, while HUD, AVESTA, and CALEB Foundation, try to find a place that well take both us and my 3 brothers, and our pets… a wait that we are told could take as many as 8 years! Unfortunately the apartment is tiny beyond belief and so everything we own is still back at home in the 2 “tents”.

We thought things were looking up at this point. We should have known that the town officials would not allow us to be happy for a single moment. Following the news that we are in an apartment the town has moved on to a new level of harassment: This week, we received a letter from the town, saying that we have until February 12 (just 3 days from now) to remove EVERYTHING from our land (including not only the things they had listed before but also the 2 tents, our house, the sheds, and the barns), after which time they well come in and level the land. They came to the land and told us that they wanted a totally empty lot… nothing, apparently not even the trees. They are complaining that the tents are an eyesore… the tents that THEY told us we had to put up to store our belongings in, because back than they were threatening to tear down the house. Among the items in the tent is my book collection, some 7,000 books that I have been collecting over the years; antiques that had belonged to my great-grandmother, and

grandmothers; and other such items. Everything we own, now stands to be stolen from us, by the town officials, and why? We asked Shoop why he was doing this to us, he said: “This is Old Orchard, you have to change you lifestyle.”

We know this is Old Orchard! Unlike outsiders like him, our family has been here on this land since 1657. My dad’s family built this town. Of course we know its Old Orchard. What kind of a reason is that to force a family off their land? We have 3 days to stop them, and no one well helps us. It seems like the whole town has turned on us. People who we once called friends now seem to be strangers.

Today this caper of harasment has taken on a new level… they are now threaten to take our animals away, based on false accusations made by one named Morin. They say they well take them in 5 days from today, but they have no grounds to take them, and as with everything else they have done, they have no court order to back themselves up with.

We have gone to everyone we can pleading, begging for help, but no one is willing to help us. Every church, every charity… even the volunteer lawyers, but Old Orchard Beach is Maine’s biggest tourist attraction, a town that draws in millions of tourist each summer, tourists who bring with them, money that makes Old Orchard one of Maine’s wealthiest towns, and because of that no one well help us fight them. We are told to give up, to just move… we are told that we can’t fight the Town of Old Orchard because it’s one of Maine’s most powerful government seats. But that doesn’t give them the right to steal our belongings! That doesn’t give them the right to steal our land! That doesn’t give them the right to force us to live in a tent during the winter! How can they just come in and level our land? They don’t even have any court orders to back themselves up with! What they are doing is not legal, but no one well do anything to stop them! They well not break us into losing, but if this doesn’t stop, they well kill my dad. This has to stop. They have too far. Please, there must be someway someone can help us! If you know of anyone who may be able to help us, please let us know!

Our Mailing address is still the same as it was before the apartment:

Kenneth R. Allen

Wendy C. Allen

144 Portland Ave

Old Orchard Beach, ME 04064

my email address (my dad don’t have one) xavychup@yahoo.com

edit:

Updates to this post have been made in the following posts:

Government Corruption: Another Update…

  • 2 Comments (Edit)

An upate on THIS POST.

The latest round of harasment is now a requirerment that we keep a log of each and every time we feed our pets and give them water. The town has required that we keep a logbook hanging at our frontdoor so that the police can come in a check it whenever they deem it “necassary”.

They have also said that we must cut a hole in the wall so that the cats and dogs can go in and out 24 hours a day. These are house pets! They don’t even LIKE going outside! Worse, there is a pack of cyotees and at least one black bear, that rutinely wander about on our land. We can’t have a hole cut in the side of our house! The cyottees well eat my babies! The town laws have  reached the point that they have become Communistic. This is insane! How can they pass laws like this?

They are also requiring that all cars be in a garage. They say that we can not have more than one car, and that if we own more than one car they can fine us $2,500 for each day that we have more than one car in our yard and not in a garage! How can they get away with this? Old Orchard Beach is a town not a dynasty! What is wrong with them? How do these laws get passed?

Well, a result of these latest harasements is that my dad has had yet another stress overload, and has to go in for surgery yet again, tomorrow morning as a result.

What they are doing to us is not right.

~~EK

human-rights

civil-rights

government corruption

corrupt leaders

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Importance of Attitude (for writers)

How to you feel about writing? Are you writing because you enjoy doing so? Are you writing because your teacher/boss says that you must? Do you want to spend your days writing or do you do you wish someone else could do it for you? Wither you know it or not, how you feel about writing affects how well you write. No matter how much you try to hide it, your attitude show on paper, and your readers will feel it. If you think of writing as a tiresome task, a nuisance, and an agonizing chore: your readers well know it. Think of you paper as a mirror, it shows your readers how you felt at the time you write it. You would be amazed at a readers ability to “see” how you felt while you where writing the piece that they are now reader.

We can take this one step farther. The way you feel directly affects the way you write. Look at your handwriting. You can see from looking at your daily handwriting that your mood affects you writing. If you are angry, you handwriting becomes jagged and heavy, yet when you are happy it is light and loopy. If your mood affects the physical appearance of your words, how much more does it affect the words themselves? When you are angry, your words on paper will sound bold, even spiteful. Your reader will be able to feel the tension rolling off the pages as they read. Likewise, if you are happy your readers will feel the warmth and love coming off the pages.

And how about your subject? How do you feel about that? What is your attitude towards the person/thing you are writing about? Do you admire your topic of choice? Do you loath it? Are you writing about it because you want to or because you have to? Your readers well know that you have a passion for your topic, because you well through your whole heart and soul into it. They well also be able to tell if you did a half ass job because you couldn’t care less about the subject.

How you write is how your readers well see you. Before you begin writing, take some time to really think about this fact. How can you make boring writing tasks more interesting, so that you do not bore your readers, as much as you are bored yourself? Contemplate why it is you are writing. The attitude you have when you come into any new writing project is the same attitude that your readers well take away with them when they have finished reader the piece. That same attitude you had written, is the attitude in which they well in turn look back on you. How do you want your readers to see you?

Remember too, that the way you speak, is as important as what you say. Think about the tone of your writing. What words do you use often? Cold, indifferent, unfriendly, cynical, critical, or antagonistic tones will put your reader on the defensive and encourage a negative response from them. You want your writing to be warm and inviting for your reader. You as the writer should be seen as the readers friend. You have a story to tell, and you want to tell it to your readers. You want your readers to want to hear the story. If your words are those of a friend, than your readers well give you their full attention, they well hang on your every word. To be seen as a friend of the reader, someone they can trust, that is the attitude you want to convey, that is the message you want to send.

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Are You a Witch?

The following article was written on March 8, 2004 and is copied from my book “My Grimoir: EelKat’s Views on Witchcraft”

 

Are You a Witch?

This is a test of how well you will be able to adjust to the life style of a Witch. A test to see if you have what it takes to become a Witch. Below is a list of 150 statements that any good Witch should be able to say about themselves. Next to each statement is a space to make a check mark. Carefully read each statement and think about what it says and what it means. If after much thought you decide that you can truly and honestly say this out loud about yourself, than place a check mark next to it and move on. If for some reason you feel that the statement does not apply to you and your life at this time in your life, than skip it and move on. Now take your test. You will find instruction on graded your test at the end of it.

 

 

_____ I pray every day.

_____ I am very religious.

_____ I can remain strong in my beliefs even if it means losing all of my friends.

_____ I believe that we were created by a Supreme Being that we did not “just happen”.

_____ I believe that abortion is murder

_____ I always seek for spiritual/divine inspiration and guidance.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a religious leader (priest, pastor, monk, nun, preacher, etc.).

_____ I do not tell people that their religion is “wrong”,”evil”, or “of Satan” or that “they will go to hell” if they don’t give up their religion to join mine.

_____ I do not tell other people that my religion is “the one true religion” or that “my way is the only way”.

_____ I am respectful of other’s religious beliefs.

_____ I own a Rosary or string of Prayer Beads.

_____ I am a holy person.

_____ I have a positive outlook on life.

_____ I have very high moral and ethical standards.

_____ I can get along with people of all races.

_____ I believe in life after death

_____ I attended the funeral of a close friend or relative.

____ There has been a death in my immediate family, close friend, or a pet that affected me greatly.

_____ I have helped dig a grave for someone I loved (this can include pets).

_____ I have touched/held a dead body (this can include pets).

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a funeral home director.

_____Sometimes I think that I might like to become a mortician.

_____ I am able to provide comfort to the grieving.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a guidance counselor.

_____ I have studied some psychiatric medical science and am able to diagnose many “simple” ailments as well as correctly prescribe a method of cure (counsel, therapy, herbs, massage, over the counter medicine, homeopathy, ect.).

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a psychiatrist.

_____ I am caring and compassionate.

_____ I have a deep since of integrity.

_____ I obey the laws of the land–(including such “minor” overlooked things as not speeding and not talking back).

_____ I like to always be on time–I try to never be late.

_____ I can remain focused.

_____ I try to love everyone as though they were my brothers and sisters-even my enemies.

_____ I am very enthusiastic.

_____ I can fast from food for 3 days (72 hours)–NOTE: this does not apply to those with a medical condition, such as diabetes, that does not allow them to fast from food.

_____ I believe that a career that I enjoy and am happy with is more important than a career that brings in a lot of money.

_____ I am good at theoretical analysis and logical problem solving.

_____ I am intuitive.

_____ I can understand complex and difficult subjects.

_____ I love challenges.

_____ I try to turn every thing in life into a learning opportunity.

_____ I have a very good memory.

_____ I visit the library at least twice a month.

_____ I like to do a lot of research and book learning.

_____ I love to read lots of books.

_____ I am self-motivated.

_____ I like/liked school.

_____ Science is/was one of my favorite subjects.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a schoolteacher.

_____ I put a lot of effort into my education.

_____ I believe that studying my textbooks is more important than socializing with friends.

_____ I believe that no matter how well I do, there is always room for improvement.

_____ I strive to expand my intelligence as much as I can.

_____ I can commit myself to many years of self-schooling and difficult training.

_____ I like working with people.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a doctor.

_____ I have studied some medical science, and am able to diagnose many “simple” aliments as well as correctly prescribe a method of cure (herbs, massage, over the counter medicine, homeopathy, ect.).

_____ I like/liked Biology class.

_____ I enjoy volunteer work.

_____ I want to heal the sick.

_____ I want to ease the needs of others.

_____ I want to feed the hungry.

_____ I want to shelter the homeless.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to start a homeless/food/animal shelter.

_____ I like working with animals.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a veterinarian.

_____ I like helping sick animals, get well.

_____ I can complete a complex 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle in an hour or two. (Not a requirement of Witchcraft, but it shows that you are a patiant, fast working, and a dedicated problem solver, with a good eye for finding the solution to tough problems)

_____ I am good at solving problems (in math, riddles, or your daily life).

_____ I use ingenuity and the ability to improvise to solve difficult problems.

_____ I give money/food/clothing/blankets to the homeless people that I see on the streets in my local area.

_____ I give money/toys/food to charity organizations.

_____ I am persistent-I never give in or give up.

_____ I enjoy helping people.

_____ I feel that I am responsible for making my community a better place.

_____ I am deeply emotional.

_____ I am very patient.

_____ I am honest–I would never tell even the slightest hint of a tiny white lie.

_____ I am willing to change my habits for the better.

_____ I am courteous and kind.

_____ I feel that I have a lot to offer to the world.

_____ I like gazing at the stars.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become an astronomer.

_____ I can identify some of the stars, constalations, and planets in the night sky.

_____ I can correctly identify most crystals and gemstones.

_____ I like to walk to places, rather than use a car.

_____ I love all outdoor activities-from sunning on the beach to hiking on snowcapped mountains and everything in between.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become an environmentalist.

_____ I never pass a dead or injured animal (wild or domestic) in the road, without stopping to help them, bless them, get them to a vet, bury them, and/or find their owner.

_____ I like working with plants.

_____ I have a garden-or at least a few houseplants.

_____Sometimes I think that I might like to become a herb/flower/vegetable grower/farmer.

_____ I know basic outdoor survival skills.

_____ I could live without electricity if I had to.

_____ I can correctly identify both edible and poisonous plants.

_____ I can correctly identify most wild plants, know how to harvest them, and know many of their medicinal uses.

_____ I know which vitamins, who should take and when they should take them.

_____ I know how to use and prescribe homeopathy pills.

_____ Sometimes think that I might like to become a pharmacist.

_____ I am dedicated.

_____ I can get up and get going without being told to–I don‘t even own an alarm clock.

_____ I strive not to be vain or prideful.

_____ I do not seek to “keep up with the Jones”.

_____ I do not buy things just because someone else has one.

_____I do not seek after wealth and great riches.

_____ I do not require instant gratification.

_____ I am confident that I can do or be anything that I choose.

_____I am determined, even in the face of opposition.

_____ I can give up modern life and city habits–I can give up material things such as a car, a TV, or electricity because I do not need them.

_____ I enjoy creative and intellectual challenges.

_____ I can look forward and “see” possibilities that don’t exist at this time.

_____ When I make a commitment, I always see it through.

_____ I have set goals and succeeded.

_____ I am able to change my goals when new information becomes available.

_____ I do not see time as an infinite or renewable resource–every second that goes by is gone forever and can never be replaced–therefore I use my time wisely.

_____ I can work well alone, without the help of others.

_____ I am able to make personal sacrifices.

_____ I can handle criticism.

_____ I can handle failure.

_____ I do not have a bad temper-I can control my anger.

_____ I love to laugh.

_____ I eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains.

_____ I am a vegetarian.

_____ I live a healthy lifestyle.

_____ I can handle stress.

_____ I like Yoga.

_____ I love classical music and/or opera-I don’t need rock music anymore.

_____ I like to meditate.

_____ I am able to relax–stress is not a problem in my life.

_____ I can do without a bed, sleeping on the floor is fine.

_____ I can do without table and chairs; I can eat while sitting on the floor.

_____

_____ I can live without a driver’s license or a car.

_____ I would rather make my own things, instead of using store bought ones.

_____ I make most items myself, and try to do without things I don’t really need.

_____ I own and know how to use a sewing machine (or I sew by hand).

_____ I sew my own home furnishings.

_____ Sometimes I think that I might like to become a seamstress/tailor.

_____ I like to sew my own clothes.

_____ I like to wear capes, cloaks, and robes.

_____ I like to wear ankle length dresses and long skirts. (Long, loose, unresticting, unadorned clothing is preferred by most Witches–both men and women–as it frees the body and mind of pressure, stress, vanity, and pride and allows free, fluid movement unhampered by pants and tight sleeves)

_____ I can go out in public without any makeup on at all. (Many Witches feel that wearing makeup is a thing of vanity and pride and protest against pride and vanity by throwing away their cosmetics-this is not a requirement of Witchcraft, but many Witches-both male and female-feel so liberated and free once they throw away their face paints and live just as natural as the Creator intended them to be)

_____ I can go out in public without any jewelry on at all. (Many Witches feel that jewelry is a thing of vanity and pride and protest against pride and vanity by throwing away their jewelry-this is not a requirement of Witchcraft, but many Witches-both male and female-feel so liberated and free once they live unadorned and just as natural as the Creator intended them to be) _____. I can go out in public without shaving for two months or more.

(Many Witches feel that shaving legs, face, underarms, and other places is a thing of vanity and pride and protest against pride and vanity by throwing away their razors-this is not a requirement of Witchcraft, but many Witches-both male and female-feel so liberated and free once they throw away their razors and live just as natural as the Creator intended them to be)

_____ I can go a whole year without dyeing my hair, using a dryer or curler, or getting a hair cut. (Witches live naturally–both men and women–this includes their hair-which they let grow long-when Witches do dye their hair they use herbs such as hibiscus and henna–if you see a “Witch” with their hair dyed black, chances are they are not Witches.)

_____If I am not married, I am a virgin.

_____If I am married, I have never cheated on my spouse.

_____If I am widowed/divorced, I do not seek another, and live in celibacy.

_____ I can live my entire life without sex.

_____ I do not smoke.

_____ I do not drink alcoholic drinks.

_____ I do not use drugs (including tobacco).

_____ I own a sword.

 

Now that you have completed your test, go back and count how many statement you have checked off. Take the total you have and find your score on the chart below. After each score is a corresponding grade. Take the grade letter that corresponds with you’re total and find out how qualified you are to become a Witch.

 

After reading your answer think about how important it is to you to become a Witch, ask yourself why you want to be a Witch, and than go back and read all of the statements that you checked off. How does each of these statements apply to you in your life? Why did you check them off?

 

Now go back to the test again, this time read only those statements that you did not check off. Why didn’t you mark them? Can you still be a good Witch without having those things in your life? How can you change your habits to include more of these things in your life? Do you really want to change your whole life around like that? Are you sure you are that dedicated to becoming a Witch? Or are you just going through a phase that will pass by in a year or two or even sooner? Do you truly want to make such dramatic changes in your life? Are you willing to put your hands to the plow and never look back? Will you be able to stand strong when friends and family come down around you and turn their backs on you because they think you’ve lost your mind? These are things that you really want to consider very seriously before you decide wither or not you really want to be a Witch.

 

 

145-150 = A+

 

125-144= A

 

99-124 = B

 

75-98 = C

 

50-74 = D

 

1-49 = F

 

 

 

A+.) Wow! Maybe you should write a book about Witchcraft. You harm no one, you love nature, and death doesn’t frighten you. You have no trouble living in the woods with absolutely nothing, just living off the land. You most certainly have a Witch hiding somewhere inside of you-find him/her and set ‘em free. You are already a Witch at heart wither you realize it or not, you may be a little rusty and need a little practice on some things, but you really aren’t going to need much help-if you need any at all. You have soared far above the average, and should really consider seeking to start a professional practice of your own. With your talent you can certainly take your pick of just about any career in Witchcraft. If you aren’t one already you might want to look into becoming a Hougan, Mambo, High Preist/ess, Monk, Nun, or a Witch Doctor. You should most certainly be able to do one of these high-ranking jobs. You are by far ready for them.

 

A.) You are already a Witch at heart wither you realize it or not, you may be a little rusty and need a little practice on some things, but you really aren’t going to need much help. You have soared above the average, and should really consider seeking to start a professional practice. You may even make an excellent candidate for becoming a Houngan, Mambo, High Priest, Monk, Nun, or Priestess and you may also want to consider such other high-ranking jobs as a Witch Doctor, Priest, Priestess, Shaman, or Magician Man/Woman. You can choose from almost any career in Witchcraft–however if you are weak hearted around the dead, you will want to avoid the following jobs: Hogan, Mambo, High Priest, High Priestess, Al Keem, Borka, or Witch Doctor.

 

B.) You are well on your way to becoming an excellent Witch, and could certainly start practicing now; there’s a few things that you need to brush up on, but basically you have an above average chance at making Witchcraft your lifelong career if you work hard at it. With a a bit of extra effort you may make a good candidate for becoming a Priest or Priestess over time, but this type of Witchcraft is probably not really to your likeing, and may want to consider such jobs as a Shaman, or Magician Man/Woman instead. Becoming a Witch Doctor, Hogan, Mambo, Monk, Nun, High Prehistory High Priestess will probably not be in your reach though, and you should focus your career towards the less demanding jobs in Witchcraft–if you are weak hearted around the dead, you will want to avoid the following jobs: Hougan, Mambo, High Priest, High Priestess, Al Keem, Borka, or Witch Doctor

 

C.) While you do have the potential to become a Witch, but you still have a very long ways to go before you will even be able to think about qualifying to become a Priest or Priestess, and it is unlikely that you will ever become a High Priest, High Priestess, Monk, Nun, Hougan, Mambo, or Witch Doctor. You should stick with the more “common” jobs of Witchcraft-herbalism, astrology, fortune telling, community service, etc.–if you are weak hearted or squeamish around the sick, the dieing, or dead bodies, you will want to avoid the following jobs: Hougan, Mambo, High Priest, High Priestess, Al-Keem, Borka, Witch Doctor, Priest, Priestess, Shaman, Monk, Nun, or Medicine Man/Woman.

 

D.) While it is possible for you to become a Witch at some distant time in your life (though much training, hard work, and personal effort will be required on your part) you really don’t have what it takes to practice Witchcraft at this time in your life. While you could strive for a career in Witchcraft if you really worked at it really hard, I don’t think that you will ever truly be happy being a Witch Are you sure you know what a Witch is–maybe what you really want to be is a Wicca? You may just be looking for costumes, makeup, chat clubs, and religious rituals–if so than you should forget about Witchcraft and get a book on Wicca instead. You probably will find Witchcraft rather dull and boring, and you may be much happier with a different career; you really should rethink your options. You really need to sit down and think long and hard about why you want to become a Witch, what it is that attracted you to Witchcraft–if you looked to become a Witch based on movies, T.V., fairy tales, and fantasy role playing games, than you had better just go back to watching movies and playing games, or better yet you should consider joining the theater, because a lifelong career in Witchcraft will do nothing but disappoint you. Don’t despair-very few people who take this test, scored any higher than you did, most don’t even make it this far–just like you they didn’t really want to become a Witch either, and were just fascinated, with Wicca and fairy tales.

 

F.) Although anything is possible, if you really put your mind to it, and if you really, really worked really hard; it is very unlikely that you will ever become good Witch material at any point in your life. Don’t feel bad though, this doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you, it simply means that Witchcraft is not your career path in life. There are thousands of other careers out there that would be just perfect for you, but Witchcraft is not one of them. You need to really sit down and think long and hard about why you want to become a Witch, what it is that attracted you to Witchcraft in the first place–if you looked to become a Witch based on movies, T.V., fairy tales, and fantasy role playing games, than you had better just go back to watching movies and playing games, because a lifelong career in Witchcraft will do nothing but sore fully disappoint you. If you want to wear costumes and makeup, maybe you should consider joining a local drama club–you may have a very good future in theater. Witchcraft requires you to be totally dedicated to it 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the rest of your life, and frankly, your heart isn’t in it. You are in good company-there are very few people who stick to Witchcraft for very long–the hours are to long, the work to grueling, and the lifestyle too demanding for the average person. Good luck looking for a job, elsewhere.

 

 

 

Explaining some statements in this test.

 

 

There are some statements here that most people new to Witchcraft, look at with a sense of awe and confusion. Such as “I am a holy person” or “I always seek for spiritual inspiration and guidance” or “I have very high moral and ethical standards”. When most “new” Witches think about Witchcraft they are thinking about Wicca and not Witchcraft, so they are quite taking back, when the subject of high moral standards, daily prayer, and living a very holy life is used to describe Witches. Most “new” Witches even get angry and say such things as: ” I don’t want to be morally clean, I just want to be a Witch, I don’t want to live like some saintly monk; I want to wear cool clothes and cast spells on my enemies. Why should I try to live a holy life? I ain’t no saint and you can’t make me be. I’m going to be a Witch and that’s final.” So you want to be a Witch, but you don’t want to accept the lifestyle of a Witch. Why? You just want to have fun, right? Let’s think about this. Why does it bother you that to be a Witch you must live like a saint? Are you suffering from a guilty conscience because you know that many of the things you do are morally wrong? Is that why it bothers you–that to become a Witch, you must be a morally clean, spiritual person? Are you sure that you really want to be a Witch? It sounds to me more like you want to be a Wicca or a Wiccan and not a Witch. Wiccas are known for their “freedoms”: freedom to drink, freedom to smoke, freedom of sex, freedom from marriage, freedom to use drugs, freedom to rebel, freedom to denounce God, freedom to denounce government, freedom to murder unborn babies, freedom of same sex relations–and all sorts of other immoral, unspiritual, unholy so called “freedoms” that the Wicca religion allows it’s members to commit without conscience. Unfortunately, because Wiccas and Wiccans like to falsely call themselves Witches, these same immoral acts are often thought of as being done by practitioners of Witchcraft as well. Did you know that personal sacrifice is one of the things that make a Witch a Witch–most all Witches abstain from things that the average person would consider a necessity of life. Common things that Witches abstain from include: meat, sex, luxury items such as beds or cars, electricity, television, telephones, and sometimes even talking? Did you know that most Witches live in small houses, with little or no furniture, that most sleep and eat on the floor because they gave up such luxuries as owning a bed, table, or chairs? Many Witches abstain from as much food as they can, fasting for days at a time, sometimes eating only one or two simple meals a week. Did you know that unmarried Witches (male and female) remain virgins their entire lives? That Witches view the act of sex as a distraction that interferes with their work–that many even become eunuchs, so that they will not have to be bothered by sex at all, ever? Did you know that Witches view sex as a means of creation and not a means of pleasure, and that sex is only done when a child is desired? Did you also know that Witches do not believe in public schools? When Witches have children, they raise them at home, away from the luxury laden vain influences of the schools of the world.

Before you decide to call yourself a Witch you really, need to find out if that’s really want you want to do with your life. Are you sure that you want to be a Witch? I have found that most people, especially teenagers, who say that they want to be a Witch, really want to be a Wicca. Wiccas do not believe in all of the personal monk-like sacrifices that Witches do. Wiccas often live very luxuriant lives of excess, vanity, pride, and sexual freedom, but Witches do not.

Can you give up your luxuries as other Witches have? Many people think, that this all sounds good on paper, but laugh and say that no body gives up stuff like that, so why should they; they then continue and try to say that I myself, although I preach it, wouldn’t even do this. Well, I couldn’t in good faith preach something that I don’t practice myself, now could I? What luxuries have I given up, you ask. Well now, let’s see: I grew up on a poultry farm and fried chicken was my favorite food, but eating chicken became the first luxury to go and I haven’t eaten any meat in twenty-two years, I love antique cars, can name most any model, and would like to collect and restore them, but I have no driver’s license and I have no car. I was once a “Goth-queen”, dripping in black eye shadow and lipstick, with red hair and blue nails, but I haven’t worn makeup in twelve years, haven’t shaved in three years, and have slept on the floor these past eleven years. I used to collect shoes-loved platforms, but now I have one pair of sandals that I’ve worn for four years now all year round, even during the worst of Maine’s three to six foot blizzards. I lived in spandex pants, bellbottoms, and micro mini skirts, but I stopped wearing pants twelve years ago, and haven’t worn a dress that was shorter than my ankles ever since. I was once addicted to TV-couldn’t get away from it, today I own a TV/VCR/DVD player, but the TV was used for less than ten hours in 2003, and similar amounts other years and the VCR and DVD, while used five or six hours each week, are now only used to watch “family” shows, such as “Little House on the Prairie”,”1776″,”King of Kings”, and other such shows. I was once a huge heavy metal music fan with hundreds of albums-but I gave up all but two bands in 1991,and stopped listening to the radio that same year, and I gave up rock music entirely two years ago, listening now to Liberace, Rossini, Handel, Mozart, Chopin, and others-I own a CD player and over 500 classics on 62 CD’s. I eat sitting on a pillow on the floor-and my diet is very strict: pasta and rice and fresh fruits and vegetables, many of which I grew myself-my diet also includes eggs from my hens, and some dairy products such heavy cream (but no mass produced milk), milk and ice cream from local farms, and soybean based meat substitutes from the “Seventh Day Adventist Church”, snacks include fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts, pretzels, chips from a local potato farm, “natural” candies made without preservatives, and homemade candy from a local confectioner. I drink water, green tea, herb tea, and 100% fruit juice.

For my gardening, I hand plow my field with a spade shovel and my hens and roosters do their part digging and scratching as fast as they can, I fertilize the ground with poultry manure and raked leaves, and when insects or weeds become a problem, I turn my roosters and hens lose in the garden, and pray they don’t eat the harvest, too.

I am often asked what I do for “entertainment” well, I leave a mile from Old Orchard’s seven-mile long white sands beach. For entertainment I walk to the beach, walk the length of the beach, turn around walk back to the beginning of the beach and than walk back home with four tote bags filled with shells, beach glass, beach pebbles, and seaweed, and a camera loaded with pictures of birds. My land boarders a 26-acre section of the Ross Forest, which is loaded with wildlife, plants, and has a small brook running the length of it. Here is where I take my dog Buddy and my rooster Chup-Chup for walks. The thing that entertains me the most is sitting beside the brook on a rock in my flower garden surrounded by my tiny bantam roosters, who happily cultivate the roots of my roses. Here I can read, write, and meditate. To me this is heaven, sheer bliss, and pure joy-there is nothing that makes me happier, than breathing the fresh air and listening to the babbling brook and the songs of a hundred roosters all crowing their shrieks of joy for hours on end-I have no need for anything more.

Don’t go thinking that I live on some big isolated country homestead in the middle of nowhere. Our land is only 3/4 of an acre and has four condominiums and a nursing home just across the street, right in the middle of town. I am quite fortunate to live next door to an empty 26-acre wooded lot (the last remaining section of Ross Forest), which, has been preserved, for use by a local campground. While more land would certainly be better in the since that I could have a larger garden and hundreds more roosters, it would be almost impossible to find another place walking distance from such a beautiful beach, a wonderful forest, and have a brook too. The land may be small, but it is my peace of heaven, a perfect paradise for me and my roosters.

While my way of life is the ideal paradise for me, my town thinks otherwise. My roosters live on my land, were the zoning says they can’t, however the zoning laws were made in the 1900′s,and this land has been in my family since the 1600′s. My Native American and Scottish ancestors raised chickens on this land since the very first day they settled it all those years ago, and since that day, never has a day gone by that chickens have not lived here. In the 1800′s huge barns were built for thousands of chickens-a barn for egg hens and a barn for meat roosters; in the 1960′s the barns came down and the meat production stopped; in the 1980′s I took over the chickens, egg sale ended and the pit fighter and rare breed rescue began; but in all of those hundreds of years, not once did chickens not live here. That is what they call the “grandfather law”, as long as the original family remains on the land and raises the original kinds of animals there, the government cannot tell them not to raise the livestock. The neighbors can complain of the “horrendous noise, the vile shrieks and eerie screams” of the crowing roosters sun rise to sunset to sun rise 24 hours a day, they can complain of the “toxic stench” of the manure, but no matter how hard or how long they complain the fact is the roosters were here first, and they have been here for 400 years, and as long as my family continues to lives here and raises poultry there isn’t a thing that they can do. The town hopes and prays that we will sell out and leave to “someplace in the country”. What?! And leave this sacred beach-the sacred holy ground of my people-were thousands gather each year to be healed in its sacred waters? Never! Small though it may be, crowed though the town becomes, I love my home and the land that the Great Spirit blessed us with.

Well now, enough ramblings from me. What about you? How much are you willing to give up to walk the path of a Witch? Your bed? Your TV? Eating meat? Wearing pants and short skirts? Can you stop shaving and wearing makeup? Are there things that you can give up in your life that I haven’t mentioned? How much are you willing to leave behind on your road to becoming a Witch? Now, as you can see from my own life, giving things up is a hard sacrifice that may take several years to complete. I found that by giving up the hardest thing first, that other sacrifices come easier. For me, I love chicken; it was my favorite meal, yet I love chickens too. My best friends have always been my chickens-I had thought about giving up meat, but it didn’t stick. Than one day a man came to the house saying his wife wanted to make chicken stew and asked to buy a chicken. My dad sent him out to take his pick, and I being a poultry farmer thought nothing of it–until that night when my little pet rooster wasn’t there to meet me at the door and by that time it was to late to do anything about it. That’s when it hit me, and it hit me hard–that man had murdered and eaten my best friend. It’s like if you had a little pet cat and one day someone came along and killed it for its fur. He was my pet. More than that, he was my friend, and he was gone. I thought about it long and hard. That rooster was my best friend-and someone bought him and killed him for food. He wasn’t even kept with the other roosters; he wasn’t like the other roosters–he was my pet. And than it hit me: Why was that rooster any different from the others? Why was it wrong to kill this rooster, but okay to kill the others? He was a rooster; just like the rest of them-they were all roosters. I sat there and took a good long look at those roosters-they looked just like my pet rooster, they acted like him, and for good reason too–they were just like him. The man came back a few days later, just as he often did, and needless to say he left empty handed, and never came back again–and neither did anyone else who came looking to by meat birds. A few days later when some frozen “store bought” chicken was being served–my favorite food–something happened to me. I looked at that chicken on my plate and I couldn’t eat it. All I could think about was-this wasn’t one of my chickens from my farm, it came from some other farm, but it was still a chicken. I thought about my rooster and how this could have been his cousin or his mother or father–and I was so sick at the thought that I refused to eat. I couldn’t, I felt like I was a murderer, I felt like I was betraying that rooster who had been my friend. I haven’t touched chicken since–I can’t even see one at the store without getting sick. But at that point it was just chicken and turkey. I didn’t eat chicken and I didn’t eat turkey–I won’t eat anything that might have been related to one of my friends. So for Thanksgiving that year we had roast beef–you know the big one’s, the kind that’s got a big bone down the middle. We were all getting ready to eat and I just sat there staring at that bone. A piece of a skeleton. I don’t know where I thought meat came from but I never connected it with a living creature before that day. There it was-a bone. That could only mean one thing–that that was a dead body–only dead bodies have bones. I felt like a grave robber. There was a piece of a dead body sitting on the table!! I felt so sick I couldn’t eat. At that point I didn’t realize that beef came from cow and that that was a cow’s leg sitting on the table, all I could think was “There a dead body on the table and we’re getting ready to eat it”. I stopped eating meat “cold turkey” and never looked back. Now I won’t by any product without first reading the label and being sure that no meat contaminated it in any way. As a result of this I came to the shocking discovery that it is nearly impossible to find any prepackaged food that does not contain meat! Seemingly “vegetarian” things often have such things as Tallow, Fat, Lard, Broth, Dehydrated Chicken Powder, and By Products listed in them (including such things as crème filled chocolate sandwich cookies, jello, crackers, chocolates, candy, some” plain cheese” pizzas, and even some ice cream!!). I am very careful not to touch anything or be other contaminated by any food that contains any part of any body that was once alive being–this means that shopping take’s several hours while I read entire labels to ensure that no death has contaminated it. I believe it to be a grave sin to steal someone’s life away, just to satisfy the vain lust of eating his or her flesh.

And so that is how I came about my first sacrifice of a luxury. Not having a driver’ license or a car is perhaps the hardest one for me–the one that temps me the most–of course I never learned to drive either, so although it’s a sorrowful temptation, I couldn’t drive anyone else’s car either, because I haven’t the slightest idea how one should go about it. The one that took the longest for me to give up was heavy metal and punk music–I struggled with that one for over ten years before I succeeded–I was never without music–slept with it on at night–listened to it on headphones all day long (I never took them off!). I had rock music playing 24 hours a day. It got to the point were I couldn’t do anything, everything evolved around how long my tapes were. After a while I started to get depressed all the time, and I couldn’t understand why. I realized one day, that I had a problem, a really big problem–I was addicted to music–not just a little addiction–a big addiction–and it was controlling my entire life. One day I was feeling really blue when I noticed the words to the song I was playing–How depressing I thought. I loved the music–the screeching guitars and booming drum, but I never really listened to the words. I started listening and than it hit me–all of these songs were either very depressing and sad or mean and violent–no one was ever happy and joyful. So I made major changes–I got rid of them, most of them: Guns and Roses, Motley Crew, Warrant, etc (If it was heavy metal from the eighties, I probably had it). I left in my collection only a few namely: David Bowie, Bon Jovi, Poison, White Lion, Carman, and Alice Cooper–and today David Bowie, Carman, and Bon Jovi alone remain in my collection, because they were the only three that ever sounded happy. However, getting rid of the collection and hiding my radio, didn’t end the addiction-I was going crazy-I needed music, I felt like I was gonna die if I didn’t have music. Than one day I was watching some old Bugs Bunny cartoons (I love the Looney Toons- -especially- -that’s right, you guessed it: Foghorn Leghorn the smart mouthed rooster). I’m sitting there watching as they play reruns of Bug Bunny’s spins of opera–you know Bugs as Leopold with the guy’s singing Rossini’s “Figero’s C—-”, Bugs and Elmer fighting in the barber’s shop will “The Barber of Seville” plays in the background, and who can forget Elmer Fudd the Viking singing “Kill the Rabbit” in tune to Wagner’s “Ring of N—-Ride of the Valkers”. I was mesmerized–I remembered loving these three Bugs Bunny episodes as a kid. I remembered too, how much I used to love watching “Great Performances” on PBS back in the 1970′s,and how I loved ballet and theater. And especially the story of Peer Gyunt and the Mountain King-the story that had inspired my favorite cartoon the Smurfs, and was played throughout the background of every episode, how whenever I heard “The Mountain King” I used to go twilling and dancing free as a bird, not caring who saw me. Suddenly I realized why I had liked Heavy Metal so much-it was the loud, boisterous, booming noise–I didn’t like heavy metal, I liked classical music, heavy metal was merely a substitute for what I really truly loved–screeching violins, banging cymbals, blatting horns, happy tinkling pianos, and lots of big booming drums. Well, that was two years ago–and during that time David Bowie and Bon Jovi have had three new albums come out and I wasn’t even the least bit tempted to buy a one of them (and I used to wait in line to be the first one in the store on the first day of the release of any Bowie album-I own 57 Bowie albums alone). So, while I’m still badly addicted to music and it still plays all day and all night, I’m no longer depressed and spend my time happy and joyful now. I keep my David Bowie and Bon Jovi and Carman albums and maybe I’ll listen to them again someday, but just knowing that I have them and I’m no longer tempted to play them all day long is a reward in itself, as I realize now that I was a slave to music.

So what are you addicted to? Does it stop you from doing other things you’d like to do? Can you give it up? One of the things that Witches believe is, simplicity and freedom–freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from slavery. Now by freedom of slavery I don’t mean a bondman’s slavery with chains and whips and taskmasters-I mean slavery to vanity, slavery to addiction, slavery to wealth, slavery to power–if you are not free from these slaveries than you are no better than bondman-for you are chained to your whip wielding taskmasters just as much as he-chained to them-chained to addictions and vanities. To be a Witch you must one by one break free from the chains of luxuries and now–now granted you don’t have to give everything up all at once–some Witches do, but most give up one thing this year and another the next and keep on going. The goal is to reach perfection, to strive to become more like our Creator. A difficult task yes, but one well worth the effort. Reaching spiritual perfection is the reason behind everything that a Witch does-the strange clothing, the chants, the prayers, the spells, everything–everything is done with one goal in mind–to become like the Creator–to live in the spirit world with our Creator–to make this world as much like our spirit home was before we came here. As a Witch that is your purpose that is your goal and you must never forget it–no matter how different the practices, rituals, and spell of each Witch may be–all Witches regardless of religion–strive for the spiritual perfection that will make us at one with our Creator.

And now, you decide: Are you ready to become a Witch? Do you have what it takes? Are you willing to make great sacrifices for your faith? Will you stand firm and strong year after year? Are you a Witch?

 

 

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Paid to Blog???

I have a question… I keep hearing about how people are getting paid to write in their blogs… or how people are makeing money just writing blogs…well, I’d like to do that too, if it’s true that you can do that, I mean I’m writing something every day as it is, I might as well get paid to do it right?so, my question is, has anyone done this? are there any good places you could recommend that actually work… meaning they aren’t just scams, that have you write something and than never pay you… is this whole geting paid to blog a real thing that you really can get money to do, or is it just another scam? Anyone know?  

I’m new to the blogging world though… I’ve been online since 1997, and only just FINALLY started blogging! LOL! I’ve got 4 on Blogger, 3 on MySpace, one that I lost the link to and can’t remember the name of the host, and one one WordPress… so that’s 9 right now, but no dought there well be more…I try to keep each on on it’s own topicAs soon as I started though, everyone starts asking me “How much are you getting paid to blog?” and I’m like wth? They don’t blog, but they said they heard people get paid lots to do it, and well, that was news to me, so I figured, well, if I can get paid to do it, than why am I doing it for free right? so, now I’m researching the whole idea of getting paid to blogg… but as far as I can tell so far, it’s just alot of hype… I’ve found a ton of places that “pay to blog”, but than when you read the fine print, they only pay likr .002c per thousand people who read your post!!!!!! wow! that’s less than half a cent for every thousand uniquie page hits! highway robbery that’s what it is!than I found these otherplaces, that you have to pay like $25 a month, to join, and than they pay you to write articles for THIER blog, and than they only pay you if that post gets enough hits… YIKES! what a scam!

 I searched on Google and found a couple of sites that say they pay $4-$25 per post, if you sing your blog up with them, and write reviews for other web sites and products… but they also say that your blog has to be well established and get regular visitors before they well aprove it… I just signed up (cause they said it was free, so I figure what the heck), but my blog has only been around a short while, and I think it’s only had like a hundred visitors since it started,, so I don’t know if they well approve it or not… I’ll just wait and see what happens next.…but, my search continues, I’ve found a few folks who are getting paid to blog, not getting rich by any means, but they are getting an income comming in here and there, and that gives me hope, so, I am studying them and their blogs to find out how they are doing it and how I can do the same thing they are doing, only do it better . If I find out anything that really truly works I’ll post it here and let you guys all know so’s you can do it too.~~EK

Thieves!

You know how that last post of mine, kind of looked like it wasn’t finished? Well, you know what? It wasn’t! X-( Our internet went offline, couldn’t figure out why, so called the cable guy, who came out to look at it, and guess what? Our neighbors (who live at 20 Water St in Biddeford Maine) had broken into our cable box, cut our line, and put a line to their house in!!!!!!!  I am so pissed! Shocked! Stunned! Why would anyone do something like that? That is stealing! Stealing is so wrong! Don’t they know that? How is it that people can think they can steal? Why wouls anyone want to steal? I don’t understand it at all. Not one bit!

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This is a test…

Okay, I’m editing again, this is a test post, to see what the layout well look like. Just ignore it. Real posts well be coming soon.

~~EK

http://eelkat.wordpress.com/

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