The Open Journal

Stream of Consciousness Writer's Warm-up

I find this kind of writing insightful and cathartic.

Start:
My hens Rusty and Six are walking on the porch railing again. Rusty is an Americauna with mostly rust colored feathers with a black tail and black accents on her wing.  Six is a speckled hen called a Barred Rock. I can't believe how big they are now.  They should be laying eggs soon. Now the other barred Rock Mary has jumped up to join them.  Her whole name is Bloody Mary because when she was a chick she got in with the older hens and they about pecked her to death. She seems fine now though.

I stayed up until 2 AM listening to Amy Winehouse and Joan Baez on Youtube. I love both of their styles but they are so different. I can sing like Joan Baez sort of but I'd really like to learn how to sing like Amy Winehouse.  It is a strange twist of fate that Joan is older than me, yet still alive and Amy died in her early 30's.

It is hard to concentrate with chickens bopping around the porch.
I have nagging guilt that I'm not working out. I never meant to stop being a dancer. I regret that it somehow all slipped away from me.

I am not being productive. I feel like I can't get off top dead center with getting my life organized. It depresses me. I went to what I like to call the Fire Hazard Thrift Store. It is run by a little ole lady and is so bursting at the seams that most of the house is full of boxes so she'll never sell those things because no one can get anywhere near them.  If she wants to sell things on the covered patio, she should have that portion be her store and shut the rest off from the public because it is a disaster. And then I thought that my house is the same way; an embarrassment.  My boyfriend had magical thinking when it came to buying this place.  I can't fit everything in it. Things are getting ruined. I don't know what to do.

Apple Valley's rain on Thursday never made it to Lucerne Valley, CA.

I am glad the heat of summer is tapering off. It is not as brutal as a week ago. I'm sure we'll get plenty of hotter days but they will be broken up by some rain or some clouds or some wind.

I want to sew. I bought a ton of patterns.  But it is too hot to sew in my container and too crowded in the house. But perhaps if I devote the next hour to it I can do some hand sewing before my boyfriend comes home. Then again if I'm sewing, I'm not writing now am I?

I'm trying to do 10 things at once. I have never figured out how to be myself when my boyfriend is around, so if I want to do any singing or music stuff I need to do that before he gets home too. I'm not blaming him. I'm just self conscious.

And I'm tempted to just go into the hypnosis chat room, but if I do that the day will disappear before I think to look around me again. Plus I'm trying to save bandwidth. Sigh. If it is not one thing, it is another.

I'd like to organize my room too and make it calm and appealing.

I went to a yard sale and scored an unwrapped DVD of the Black Swan.  So excited that I'll get to see it again. I saw it at the theater but I'm sure I missed some plot details.

That's it for today. Leave comments below.

Freelance Writer

I've decided that as soon as I've either succeeded or failed at writing 100 articles in 30 days for the hubchallenge, I'm going to take a break from that site and focus on writing more for Constant-content. I've put their link on the sidebar.

Though it is great fun and excitement to write for Hubpages, and I do make a few dollars a day with adsense, the one article I sold on Constant-content paid me $75. And frankly I'm just working too hard on Hubpages to be working for free. I'm not sure why I took that direction to begin with, other than I just love the way Hubpages look with all their glossy photos and video links. Of course I'll leave all my articles up on Hubpages because I'm no dummy and I like the income from there, as sparse as it is. But with the economy being what it is, I need to be earning a living.

I am conflicted though, because I did want to reach the 500 article mark on Hubpages. Jimmythejock did it so very long ago and I feel like I'll never get there. I'm not even to 300 yet.

100 Hubs in 30 Days...still working on it.

I'm having a great time working on the 100 articles for the #hubchallenge. I just put up another article about succulents. Someone was grousing that the challenge was a terrible idea because it's going to create low quality hastily written articles that are just going to gunk up the Internet. I'm sure that is possible, but most of us take pride in our work and will be doing our best not to let our quality suffer. My quality has actually gone up because I've been on the site for 3 years and there are a lot more bells and whistles now than at the beginning so I can make my work there better and better with videos, RSS feeds, photos, and so much more. And I feel a great passion is happening like a writer's revival of sorts. Writers that were in a slump and haven't added new material in a long time are coming out of the woodwork to meet the challenge and show off their skills.
Won't you join us over there as a reader or a writer?
http://hubpages.com/profile/Moonmaiden

And Today I Write

I do write every day and I have for years. I write for online sites like http://www.hubpages.com. And I keep a journal. And now I vlog and blog.
Also I've written many a brochure for businesses I have owned and operated in the last 30 years. And of course many college papers and reports. I don't even know what I'd do if I didn't know how to read and write. And type. I learned to touchtype in high school in the 70's. And I've never regretted it. I almost didn't take the class because I didn't want to be pidgeonholed as a secretary. But then I remembered I wanted to be a writer, and I sure didn't want to waste my money hiring other people to type my books and papers. So as far as the most useful classes I've ever taken, typing is in the top ten I'm sure.