One Year On...

It's been nearly a year since I last wrote anything here, and I'm sorry for that.

As a new writer, learning her way around the pitfalls and triumphs of on-line writing, I've been on a voyage of discovery. I've been building my little empire in cyberspace. It's grown in unexpected ways.

This time last year, I'd been writing for Suite101 and I'd just begun writing for Wizzley. The latter is where I've spent most of the last twelve months.

Suite101 seemed to disappear under the waves. An over reliance on Google practically sunk them, then Google turned against them. For much of the last year, I've barely earned a thing on my articles there. Then suddenly, in November, there was a big turn around. A revamped site, a different focus, and bam! My articles were going better than ever before. There's an author score, which I've seen steadily rising for me week after week. There are new channels, for which I've received several invitations (and accepted them). Without having written an article since last July there, I'm seeing a return.

It's put Suite101 back in the game.

Yet my heart had been stolen by Wizzley. I've practically no lifed my writing there, producing 372 articles by year's end. The community are lovely. The advice has been like attending writing school. My confidence and competence have grown exponentially.

By the end of the year, I was making decent money. I was practically owning the front page (popular articles). I had a lot of Editor's Choice Awards. It was all going well.

In addition to all of this, I've been building a store on Zazzle. It's called Beautiful Britain and includes photographs that I'm taking all over my country. That too is growing steadily.

Now it's 2013 and who knows what the year will bring. Happy New Year all.

SOPA and PIPA Strike: On the Other Side of the Darkness

On January 18th 2012, the internet went on strike. It was to protest two American bills, which could seriously threaten the basic architecture of the world wide web.

I took a grand total of nine websites, blogs, clubs and forum profiles into the protest. Some were off-line completely, while the others were redirected or otherwise censored. I wasn't alone. An estimated 7000 websites joined in the action, including Google, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Craigslist and the instigators of it all, Reddit.

Here is a photostream of just some of the sites that I saw censored during the day.

THTAGCJB Will Be Off-line Tomorrow to Protest SOPA/PIPA

Tomorrow (January 18th 2012), this blog will not be available. I am participating in American Censorship Day, a protest in which the internet effectively goes on strike.

For further information, please read this: Blackout! The Internet Goes on Strike Protesting SOPA and PIPA.

Wizzley Gold Star for Outstanding Articles

I've just been honoured with a Wizzley Gold Star for Outstanding Articles. I'm only the 7th person ever to receive it; and I managed it in just 26 days. Everyone else on the list has been there for months and they have far more articles than I have.

Let's just say that this has touched me more than I can possibly communicate right now. Words have finally failed me.

Best Authors on Wizzley

The accolade is purely cosmetic. There's a ribbon on my profile picture, which says 'excellent author' if you run your cursor over it. From what I can tell, it also places me (permanently?) on the front page of the best authors section.

Thank you ChefKeem and all of the team at Wizzley.

Freelance Writers: Are We Dumbing Down the Internet?

The pressure is immense. Forget about the human rights, the history and the literature, concentrate on Justin Bieber. It's what the people want.

Naturally it's not what the feedback is in comments. Ask the readership of any site what they think they want and a variety of topics end up on the list. The scope of curiosity is as expansive as the human mind itself. I can go whole weeks without any one of my friends mentioning Kate Middleton, Beyonce or Lady Gaga. (Ok, maybe not weeks with the latter. She is pretty ubiquitous.) But if I want hits, then they are the subjects to focus upon.

I didn't believe those experienced veterans of internet prose at first. When I joined sites like Suite101, I was prepared to fill volumes of binary text with descriptions of historical events. It was my passion and my raison d'être. I knew that I could make the past live again, if I was only given the chance. I was going to save lives with reporting human rights abuses, waving my Amnesty International membership in the air. All of that education would never go to waste.

Instead I'm writing about Beyonce and Jay-Z having a baby.

Giving the Public What They Want

In my early days at Suite101, I had a wise soul tell me that it's all about the hits. It doesn't matter where you're writing on the internet, you'll never get rich without those likes, retweets, favourites and links. People come; people read; people alert all of their friends. That's the bread and butter of on-line freelance writing.

My first article to approach any measure of success was about Justin Bieber. His fans picked it up and, for a glorious few days, the link was being reposted all over the internet. It's still being read. Months after the news became old, I get a dozen or so Beliebers a week looking in on the article.

You cannot believe how tempting it is to do nothing but write about Justin Bieber all day. The only thing stopping me is, well, I'd have to write about Justin Bieber all day.

The pattern was continued with other articles. Prince William and Kate Middleton visited Birmingham. I wrote about it basically because I had photographs of the riot damage that they'd come to inspect. The hits on that story dwarfed even those for Mr Bieber. They have continued to do so, whenever I've written about royalty.

But only the right royalty. I didn't get very far pointing out, for example, that Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, is related to Queen Elizabeth II. Perhaps Britons have always secretly regretted that whole unpleasantness with Charles I and would love to return to a proper governmental monarchy.

As I gaze down my statistics on every site, the same story presents itself. Write about celebrity and the hits pour in. Write about anything vaguely cerebral and they dry up again. Though I have managed to get away with it with a Wizzley article.

When it was called Studying History as a Timeline, the article was my only real failure on the site. As everything else that I've written slowly rose though the ranks, this one bucked the trend by falling. (On Wizzley, each article is graded according to hits, comments and likes etc.) I changed nothing but the title. Suddenly it's up at 86% and rising. Then again, Anne Boleyn's breasts have always had huge implications for the rest of the world.

Are We Dumbing Down the Internet?

I don't believe that my writing becomes worse or the whole page loses something, when I'm talking about the things I love. Do I really describe television programmes better than I can a pivotal historical battle? I received an Editor's Choice for my article about Torchwood. I barely got any hits on my series about what happened at the Battle of Shrewsbury.

The thing is that it's not just me. Every freelance on-line writer out there is facing the same dilemma. I know because I'm privy to them talking about it on writing forums, where the general public can't see. Experts in so many fields are just giving up, so they can concentrate on the stories that bring the hits.

I worry that we're dumbing down the internet. I worry that our readers are going to let us.

So just to give this blog entry some kind of meaning, let me add an important fact: Jay-Z has already got a track out about his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. Glory even features her cry. You can hear it right here! Awww!

Adventures of a Freelance Writer: Signing Up for Wizzley

Starting out as a freelance writer can feel so onerous. There is the love of writing, that makes this seem like a perfect career choice, but then there's everything else as well. Will the website succeed? Will you actually be able to make a living wage? Will the writing continue to be your passion in life, once you're knocking out articles for months on end?

Yesterday, I signed up for Wizzley. In many ways, it was just another site that I'm trying out for size. But this one feels just that little bit different. For a start, it's inserted a hefty dose of fun back into the writing and that would recommend it all on its own.

How I Found Wizzley

The advertisement seemed plain enough. There's the logo and my three major concerns outlined straight away.



On the other hand, there are about a billion other sites offering the same thing. I've signed up to a dozen in the past three months. Some I've explored, then wandered back out; others, like Suite101, have convinced me to invest hours of my time in researching and writing dozens of articles.

Wizzley came with a personal recommendation attached. The lovely Christian Dörr writes for its German counterpart, PageWizz, and he was gushing on the Suite101 forums about its virtues. I decided to give it a try.

Writing Articles for Wizzley

I've only written one article there so far: How to Write an Essay. That was mostly to try out the formatting and to see if this was the sort of site where I could fit in. I was very pleasantly surprised.

In all of my past writing platforms, I've been confronted with a single blank page, which I then have to fill with words. This is fine. I'm a writer and I enjoy filling blank pages with words. Wizzley is different. It employs a series of modules to fit together in order to create a page. The modules can include anything from videos, polls, content lists, RSS feeds, images, the list goes on! And, of course, text boxes, which is where I really come into my own.

It took me three hours to write that article. That wasn't anything to do with content, as I was relying upon personal experience. It was also nothing to do with actually writing it, as I can produce something of that length very quickly. The culprit was enjoyment. I was having so much fun working out what all of the modules could offer me and my readers! I inserted things, checked the page view, took them out again; inserted other things... Yes, I was playing very nicely. The geek in me was enthralled.

Of course, future articles there won't take half as long. I've checked out all of the pretty possibilities now, so I know what I can use in the future.

I should also note here that the user interface is very easy. The text boxes have standard controls, both in rich text and HTML (the former is the default). The potential modules work on the drag and drop principle.

Reasons That I Love Wizzley So Far

Bear in mind that I've only been there a day, with just a single article to my credit, so this really does reflect initial impressions only.

• The fun aspect. Who can't love building pages by dragging and dropping a choice of modules into the main event?
• The presentation potential. I've been slightly frustrated in the past, because I've wanted to insert items that would inform my readers a little better. For example, when I was writing about My Tram Experience, it would have been nice to insert the YouTube footage that I was discussing. On Wizzley, I can.
• The page view. On many sites, you just have to write and hope it looks good when it's published. On Wizzley, you can do that before it's gone live. The author flits between page view and edit view, so it can be seen in all its glory before anyone else has to spot your typos.
• The admin. I had a query almost as soon as I signed up. I'd discovered that you can get commission for referring people there (cheekily ninjas in a referral link). This isn't unusual and I should have checked that before I signed up, because Christian had recommended the site. He should have got the credit for that, even if he hadn't provided the link. I asked about it on their forums and, within a few minutes, one of the site's owners had replied. He told me who to e-mail with the name. I did that and he responded to the e-mail immediately. Christian was now credited with bringing me on board.

That last point might not seem like a lot to many people, but it made a very refreshing change to me. A lot of sites that I've signed up for ignore this aspect entirely. Wizzley's administration seems geared towards its writers (we're called authors there) and readers, rather than some distant business model. In this world of harsh, cold recession and dehumanisation of the masses, being simply treated like a valuable asset nearly brought me to tears.

This is why, out of all of the sites on which I've created accounts recently, I'm singling out Wizzley to big up in this blog.

Edit: Ooops! I forgot to mention something important for writers earning a living here - yes, you can insert adverts. They have their own module. You can put in Chikita, Amazon, Zazzle, AllPosters, Ebay and Adsense. You have the revenue on that. Wizzley also have adverts, from which you get a commission. But there are strict rules on the number of adverts that can be placed. They shouldn't be the main event here.