Many of us use a variety of social media outlets for self-promotion or to promote assorted businesses, clients, and products to the online world at large. Some of us also use social media for advocacy.

First and foremost in my mind is 12for12k, which did an amazing job raising money for charity throughout 2009. On a more personal note, I am very impressed with the work Kristine Brite-McCormick has done with Cora’s Story to raise awareness about Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) after her five-day-old daughter died from the birth defect that she learned about from the coroner.

And then there are all of the other causes I care about, the countless newsletters I receive urging me to take action about this workers’ rights violation or that new educational legislation they’re trying to get passed. The email can be overwhelming, and I admit to deleting a fair amount of them more often than I’d like to. But once the action groups caught on that they could reach their members on Facebook and Twitter, that was a big help. Now I can tweet or post to Facebook when I take  part in an action campaign, encouraging like-minded people to do the same – and my friends and acquaintances can do the same. They’re meeting me where I am.

And that’s why I’m going to be speaking at the 2010 Empowering Communities for Successful Aging Conference at the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road in Albany, New York on July 28. I’ve generally been more of an advocate for children’s issues since becoming a mother, but I can’t ignore the importance of taking care of our seniors. Along with Paul M. Bray of P.M Bray LLC, I will be presenting on Community Building and Advocacy: Using Media to Gain Community Support.

As I understand it, Paul will be speaking about using traditional media outlets (print, TV, radio) while I’ll be discussing how to use new media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and more. I am trying to remind myself that this will be nothing like speaking on the Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley 4 blogging panel, where most of the room was tweeting and texting throughout the presentation.

If you are interested in attending the event, the cost is $40 for the one day I’m speaking or $70 for both days, July 27 and 28.

I would be very happy to include more examples of organizations who are using social media for community empowerment, so please feel free to share your story with me if you’ve found success in this arena by leaving a comment. I can always use more case studies!

Using Social Media for Community Action is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I started getting pingbacks from sites like Topsy a few months ago whenever I tweeted to promote a blog post I’d written on my mommy blog. I checked out Topsy and saw that it only showed a brief excerpt of my posts with a link back to my site along with all of their little bells and whistles that justify the site’s existence.

I thought that the pingbacks from Ubervu meant that they were the same sort of deal. I was wrong.

I don’t know what compelled me to click the link yesterday, but I went to see what Ubervu had to say about one of my posts yesterday…

And I found my post there in its entirety. With the entire comment feed as well.

The one thing I can say for them is that they’re taking me seriously about taking my content off their site as requested. I’d sent them an initial email yesterday about the problem, and they responded that they would remove me from their site, but I still found some of my pages there this morning, as recently as 5 minutes before starting this post. After a second email and some tweets back and forth, the posts were removed before I could go back for screenshots.

Their justification for this content theft is astounding.

So they think it’s cool to scrape your blog posts and your comments to build a conversation on their site. A conversation that started when you wrote a post, tweeted about it, and elicited comments from your own readers. A conversation which Ubervu thinks they can just swipe and continue over on their site.

I was told via email that there was some sort of glitch that made the full text of my post available on their site instead of just an excerpt. But the fact that my comments were there, too, really got me. And the comments were there intentionally.

I don’t spend my intellectual energy writing a compelling post that inspires people to comment just to let some automated content scraper come and take the conversation over onto their site.

I highly recommend you search their site for your blog listings. My search for [cutestkidever.org site:ubervu.com] returned 375 results, so their scraping was quite extensive. Then you can use Ubervu’s handy contact form to request removal of your site from their index. For good measure, you can tweet a warning about @Ubervu to your followers on Twitter so they can check it out for themselves and decide whether or not they want their scraped content to remain on the site.

Update: Scroll down to see Ubervu’s response from Dragos. I appreciate the quick response and the willingness to make things right.

Ubervu Steals Your Blog Posts AND Your Comments is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I’m an avid reader, and my favorite genre is fantasy. Most recently, I devoured the Mistborn trilogy (Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages) by Brandon Sanderson. I never would have picked them up if Sanderson hadn’t been chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series after the author’s untimely death to amyloidosis, but I couldn’t put the books down once I started.

There was a major problem, though. The books made me angry.

And after finishing the third novel Friday night and finding myself unable to fall asleep for two hours because of how much I hated the ending, it got me thinking about why it bothered me so much. These are things that writers really need to keep in mind. (With an actual book review at the end that many of you will choose to skip. And psst… that image is an Amazon affiliate link in case you’d like to buy the set and see what I’m talking about.)

You need to relate to your audience.

This is something that Brandon Sanderson got right. In fiction, relating to your audience is done by creating characters that your readers can become invested in. I was sucked in to the strange world of the Final Empire because I was so drawn to Vin, even though the setting was so completely foreign to me. (And as a fantasy reader, it takes a lot for a setting to just seem so odd.)

If you’re not writing fiction, this rule still applies. You have to give your readers a reason to care about what you’ve written, or else they’re just not going to bother with it. Writing to promote a product? A news story? Make sure people see why they should care about it in the first few lines. If they’re not feeling it, they’re not going to continue reading.

Once you know the rules, you can break them. But only in moderation.

I just broke one of the rules of writing up there with a sentence fragment. Sentence fragments may be grammatically incorrect, but they have a place in novels, blogs, etc. But if you start using them all the time, people are going to think you just don’t have a clue about sentence structure, and it may become distracting enough that they just give up trying to read.

Sanderson got this one wrong. Fantasy authors can get away with a lot, since they don’t have to create worlds with the same physical rules as our own. Readers have a pretty healthy suspension of disbelief, but there are still certain conventions that we expect to be followed. It’s great to try a revolutionary new way of doing things, but if you go too far off in left field, you’re going to lose people.

Make your point, but don’t be repetitive or beat people over the head with it.

In Web copy, it’s easy to get this wrong. Sales copy can be overhyped, repeating the same things over and over in order to convince readers that they just can’t live without some new product. SEO writers try to cram the same tired keyword phrases into a 300 word article, making it appear unnatural and not intended for human eyes. You can use those keywords a few times, but remember the readers – and it’s far more user-friendly to use synonyms every once in a while.

There was one page in Mistborn where Vin, the female protagonist, was learning how to use the Final Empire’s version of magic… But I swear I read the word burned 12 times in just two or three paragraphs on a single page. There weren’t any synonyms because Sanderson used the term to explain how the magic worked. It was so frustratingly repetitive and hard to follow.

And then there was the whole theme of religion and faith in the book. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the end of the third book, I just didn’t want to hear about it anymore. It had been beaten into my skull for two books, and I’d had enough. (Wheel of Time readers may sympathize with me about the countless descriptions of Nynaeve tugging her braid, or the maddening politics surrounding Elayne’s claim to the Lion Throne of Andor over the last 12 books.)

There are red herrings, and there are big scarlet sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads.

No one likes a story that is too predictable. Readers like their surprises. But if they discover they can’t trust a single clue you’ve left for them because everything is some form of misdirection, that’s just uncool. There was one particular mystery I figured out without having a single clue given to me – and it was one of those things like when you watch a crime drama and try to pick the least likeliest suspect to be the offender. I was right about it, just because I had a hunch that I was intentionally being led astray. But I was wrong about everything else. And it’s very unsatisfying to learn that nothing has turned out the way you expected it to.

It took me a little while to figure out how this could apply to non-fiction writers. I think the main thing to remember is that – when you’re not writing an epic novel where readers have invested in 100k+ words for the long haul, say what you mean. Don’t keep people guessing too much, because if they never finish the piece, they’re going to come away with the wrong idea.

Be compelling.

Sanderson got this right. I am fully admitting that the end of all three books in the series made me incredibly angry, leaving me very unsatisfied. Maybe it’s still too soon to process my post-reading emotions, but I really did not like the trilogy.

And yet… I couldn’t stop reading it. I kept reading because I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to see if it really would turn out alright in the end. I wanted to Sanderson to prove me wrong, that I would finally be able to forgive him after all for putting me through such torture in the first two books.

But I can’t currently forgive him for that. I’m left unsatisfied by the plot resolution. I needed a good ending, and while some people may think they got it… I did not.

If you can write something so compelling that people can’t stop reading despite their dislike of the subject matter or the way things turn out… You’re a freaking great writer. But that doesn’t mean people will keep reading what you write, if you can’t eventually satisfy them. Even great writers can learn how to be better.

And that, my friends, it what Mistborn taught me about writing.

Spoiler alert.

If you just wanted the writing tips, you probably want to stop reading here. If you ever plan to read Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy but haven’t gotten around to it yet, you definitely want to stop reading, because I will ruin the end of the series for you.

What I loved.

I loved Vin. She was flawed, but that’s what made her endearing. I loved Kelsier. I loved Elend, Breeze, Spook, and so many of the other supporting characters. They were all so well developed, not just two-dimensional heroes or villains. I loved the relationship between Vin and the other characters, particularly Elend.

I loved the idea of Allomancy. It took me 75% of the first book to be accustomed enough to it that it was no longer tedious to read about, but I think the invention of a system of magic involving metal was brilliant.

And that’s where I get off the love train.

Religion.

Okay, Brandon Sanderson. I get it. The whole thing was about dogma. It wasn’t about the characters at all. But the characters were what I loved. I didn’t love Sazed’s 700-page long emo crisis of faith. I could appreciate the parallels to real world religion – the deification of the Survivor after his apparent resurrection, the manner of his death becoming a symbol for the Church of the Survivor. But the third book’s heavy religious content was just so unlike the first two books, it just  felt wrong to me, like I’d been betrayed. (Oh, and by the way? I thought it was the “Hero of the Ages” until halfway through the last book. It just sounds weird the way it was actually written.)

Red herrings.

The whole freaking trilogy was one, long red herring. Alendi. The Lord Ruler. The Well of Ascension. The Deepness. Hell, Vin herself was the biggest freaking red herring of the whole thing. She’s on the cover of all three books, and she wasn’t the Hero of Ages? Are you kidding me? I read the series because of her. I became emotionally invested in her. Sure, she was deified for about 10 minutes at the end… but to make the culmination of the trilogy, the subject of the entire thing ended up being a secondary character who did nothing but sulk for the last 700 pages… NO. Just no. That is not a satisfying end. I felt sorry for Sazed when he lost Tindwyl, but I didn’t care about him the way I cared about the other characters. I wasn’t invested in him. And for him to become God? NO.

I felt cheated that I’d been misled the entire time. (Much like Vin must have felt when she realized Ruin had been manipulating her all along, but that’s another story.)

The one thing I did figure out? Who the kandra had replaced in The Well of Ascension. The whole time Vin was trying to figure out which member of the crew had been  replaced, I was suspicious of the suddenly friendly wolfhound at her side. I was onto you, TenSoon!

Breaking the rules.

One of the testimonials at the  front of the book mentions how Sanderson used so many archetypes and fantasy standards in such an unconventional manner, praising his genius at doing what’s never been done before. In my opinion, he crossed the line. He was too revolutionary.

Fine. He killed the male protagonist at the end of the first book. I guess that wasn’t so new… Galdalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi – the master sacrificing himself is an old standby. Killing other secondary characters the readers had grown attached to? Bold. Many authors have a hard time killing beloved characters. Repeatedly telling the readers that everything from the previous book was a lie? Uncool. Killing the main character who appeared on all three covers in the trilogy? Whoa there. Replacing her with a character who hadn’t been given much more attention than any of the other secondary characters? NO.

There’s thinking outside the box, and there’s totally disregarding the “natural” order of things. Readers have expectations, and we crave resolution. To resolve everything in a manner that goes against everything we’d been built up to hope for is a set-up for a big let-down.

I can’t get over Vin not being the Hero of Ages. Yeah, she was Preservation’s champion, and she defeated Ruin in the end… but she wasn’t the Hero of Ages. Up until the moment she died and her body fell into the ash, I had been expecting her to defeat Ruin and go on to re-create the world. Not Sazed. He didn’t earn that place in my heart.

Maybe I just get too emotionally involved in my books. I do tend to get depressed when I finish reading a particularly good book and I have to say goodbye to the characters. But this is really the first time that I was so involved in a book and it actually let me down. I’ve been disappointed by books before, but until now, they were books that I’d never really been able to get into in the first place.

I am very grateful that Robert Jordan left detailed notes about the end of the Wheel of Time series before his death. I can see that Brandon Sanderson has a lot of talent, but I do not trust him with developing his own plot.

5 Things Mistborn Taught Me About Writing is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I just received a press release in my email for a product that urges me: “Turn your dud into a dude.”

We’re going to gloss over the fact, for the moment, that this was sent to me as a press release I’d like to “share with my readers.” We’re going to gloss over the fact that I am a blogger, not a press release distribution service.

No, we’re going to focus on the bad copywriting involved in just the subject line of this email.

I hadn’t even opened the message, and they had already rubbed me the wrong way. I clicked on it just to see what this was all about. I’m not going to out the product being pitched to me via a press release template that didn’t even have the courtesy of prefacing itself with my name, though I’m sure you could Google it if you really wanted to.

There are two basic things that the tagline got wrong here:

1. Don’t ever refer to my husband (boyfriend/significant other) as a dud. I may complain about his flaws sometimes, but you’re not allowed to do that. Only I am.

2. The word dude is seriously 20 years outdated. Despite the fact that it’s re-entered my vocabulary thanks to Hurley always saying it on LOST, dude really isn’t the description of a man my man should aspire to be. (Now, the man my man could smell like is another story…)

Copywriting Fail

You can avoid alienating people like me by watching for bad copywriting traps. You may think that dud/dude is a clever play on words, but you have to make sure your play on words actually says what you want it to say, conveying the tone you want people to get from it. This particular play on words made me bristle because it implied that “my man” is a dud. (Would I have married him if he was a dud? What does that say about me?)

Once you’ve made sure your clever copy isn’t going to offend anyone – and to check this, you may want to run it by someone who’s not in marketing or PR – you need to make sure you’re not making yourself sound lame. Even using the word lame is pretty lame, but I think it gets my point across. Don’t use words that were “cool” 20 years ago (like cool). Or even 5 years ago. Unless you can pull off comic irony – which most people can’t – you just sound tired, dated, and out of touch. Is that really the impression you’re trying to make?

Clever copy isn’t really clever if you miss the mark with your target audience.

Friends don’t let friends settle for bad copywriting. If you need to dump a bad copywriter, I’ve got some phenomenal copywriters who would love to work with you to make your Web copy better.

Bad Copywriting: Turning Your Dud into a Dude is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

In case you haven’t heard of Silkfair, they pitch themselves as a friendlier alternative to eBay and Etsy, though they do allow sellers to integrate their listings from both of those sites. “SILKFAIR makes buying and selling fun and easy.”

The Silkfair Twitter Party

In order to get the word out about their online marketplace, Silkfair hired Amy Lupold Bair – the inventor of the Twitter Party, aka ResourcefulMommy – to host a sitewarming party for them. Amy created a lot of buzz for them. She held an hour-long hashtag party, during which time partygoers were given the opportunity to win prizes. Silkfair was offering free custom stores to the prize winners. There were no qualifiers to this when I found myself a prize recipient. I was getting a free custom store on Silkfair!

My “FREE” Custom Store

It took forever for Silkfair to set up the free stores for all of us winners. And by the time it happened, our free custom stores turned into three free months of having a custom store. Custom stores generally cost $24.99 per month.

With my store set up, I decided I should list all of my old Tupperware from my Tupperware lady days… but life got in the way, and I only listed three things. One of them sold in December. I forgot about Silkfair. I thought my store would revert to a free membership once my prize ran out.

The Catch

Imagine my surprise when I was printing out all of my financial information to prepare for tax season, and I discovered that there were THREE separate charges – $24.99 each – to my credit card from Silkfair in December. When my prize period expired. I thought it might be a glitch. After all, I’d gotten an email from them stating that I owed them nothing for the month of December. It didn’t occur to me that the email also didn’t mention the 24 cent transaction fee for the Tupperware colander I’d sold.

So I checked it out this morning while looking for Silkfair’s contact form on their Web site. By the way, they don’t have a contact form, and their email addresses listed are not clickable. Not very user-friendly. It took me about 10 minutes to find where on the site my invoice for December was even located. And this is what I found:

So not only were they acknowledging by invoice that I was a winner from the Resourceful Mommy party, but they were indeed charging me for the three months that were supposed to be my free membership.

Much to my chagrin, I learned that my account also did not default to a free membership…I was charged another $24.99 – only a week after the other charges – for my continued membership.

I admit that I did not read the part on their site where it said it would bill me automatically each month… but it was NOT easy to find. I only found it after hunting for where  in the world I could cancel this subscription I didn’t want. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to screenshot the location when I found it, since it has now been replaced by a giant “UPGRADE YOUR ACCOUNT” graphic. Hint: It was NOT on the Fees/Billing page, where one would intuitively think to find how to cancel the recurring subscription fees.

I have canceled my subscription as of this morning, and I’ve sent them a sternly but politely worded email requesting that the charges be reversed. If the nearly $75 in charges from December are not reversed, my next step is to contact the Better Business Bureau and the Attorney General. In no communication was I ever told that I would be retroactively billed for my FREE 3-MONTH MEMBERSHIP. I have also requested that the charges from January be reversed as a gesture of good faith, since I was also not made expressly aware that I would be charged automatically if I did not cancel. (Who knew I should have hunted and clicked on every tab and sub-tab on the navigation menu to find this out?)

I will happily post an update about this Silkfair FAIL if and when they contact me to resolve this matter.This was a massive fail of communication, ease to find information on the Web site, use of social media to get good buzz, and just business practices in general.

How  Silkfair Could Have Avoided This Mess

• Emailing all prize winners to let them know expressly that this was not a free membership, but that we would be charged for the full amount if we  did not cancel our memberships prior to the end of the three-month period.
• Emailing all prize winners to let them know that they would be charged automatically on a recurring basis for the membership, and that it did not default to a free membership after the trial period had ended.
• Itemizing all charges – not just amount outstanding – on email invoice notifications to account holders. An actual detailed receipt of charges made to our credit cards. Account holders should be able to trust that email notifications concerning money are complete and accurate.
• Following good business practices and not trying to pull a bait and switch on active social media users who can – and will – easily expose shady business dealings when they could have been cheerleaders of the business instead.

Updated January 27: The  Silkfair Twitter account has told me that “We personally want to apologize to you for incorrect billing, & refunds were applied to your acct.” As of 5:17 pm, nearly 27 hours after that tweet, my Silkfair account reflects no refund, and my bank account has not received any refunded money. Also, despite the fact that I canceled my custom store subscription, the Fees/Billing page still tells me that I am going to be auto billed for $24.99 on February 5.

The Silkfair Social Media FAIL is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I’m happy to say that I’m doing fairly well here for myself. Santa was good to my son this year. But we had a major disappointment hit the family when my brother couldn’t get my sister-in-law and niece here for Christmas as they’d planned. It would have been the first year they’d made it up for Thanksgiving or Christmas since our grandpa died in 2006. The economy wasn’t really to blame for their inability to make it here… the snowstorm that hit the East Coast was responsible. They only made it six hours into the drive from Georgia to New York before the snow hit and they were stranded in Virginia on I-81. They slept in the car that night and ended up turning around to go back home.

But the real downer was that – not only did they lose their house – but they can’t even rent a new place. I’ll try to make a long story short. My brother was in real estate. He got his realtor’s license and was working in the booming Georgia housing business. Then the economy tanked and no one could get financed. My brother was working but didn’t get paid for about a year. My sister-in-law got laid off from her job. They had an infant daughter to raise and no income. They fell behind on their mortgage payments while my brother looked for more work.

He got a new job. A great job as a financial planner. But he was supposed to get his first paycheck on June 1, and he was still waiting for it on July 1. We helped him out with a loan to pay his mortgage while he waited to get paid. Then the bank (understandably) told him they wanted the money. My brother sent them a check to cover a little more than half the amount. They sent it back to him; they wanted the whole amount or nothing at all.

They started working with a bankruptcy lawyer to sort things out so they could work out a payment plan and not lose their house. On a Friday, they were told that everything was going smoothly. On Monday, they were told that their house was being foreclosed on and it would be up for sale the next day. It sold in an hour. They lost their house despite all of this money the government gave the banks to stop this sort of thing from happening. Banks suck.

So then they started looking for a place to rent. My brother had $5,000 in his hand to pay five months rent up front… and no one will rent to him because of his credit. So let’s get this straight. He sent the bank a check for several thousand dollars, but they sent it back because it wasn’t enough. He has a good job now, but they didn’t care. They told him they’d work out a payment  plan, but they lied and foreclosed on him anyways. So he needs a new place to live, but no one will rent him a house because the foreclosure ruined his credit.

If you forcelose on someone’s house and no one will rent to them… where are they supposed to live? On the street? Bah humbug. Give me a freaking break!

Thankfully, they’ll be able to move in with his in-laws until someone decides they’ll rent a house or an apartment to him… but it’s going to be a tight squeeze for everyone. The in-laws have two adults, three kids, and now they’ll also have two more adults, a baby, and a dog.

If they didn’t have her parents down there, where would they go? He has a good job that pays well, so it’s not like he can just uproot everyone and move… there’s no guarantee that he could find another job in a location where someone would be willing to rent to them. Not to mention that moving is expensive, and he’s still paying things off from the year where he didn’t get paid.

What is wrong with this country when the bank kicks someone out of their house when they have money and they are trying to pay, and then no one will let them rent a place because their credit sucks from the foreclosure? The system is broken. Why did we bother bailing out the banks if they’re not using the money to keep homeowners in their homes? Wasn’t that the point?

This is a rant. I’m angry at the situation. I’m angry at the bank. I’m angry at the landlords who won’t accept $5,000 up front from a man who is working to support his family. Nothing like kicking a man when he’s down. Then again, that’s what it seems we do best here. “Merry Christmas,” indeed.

How the Economy Stole Christmas is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I’d like to thank The New York Times for my chuckle of the morning. Apparently, tech blogger Damon Darlin and his editor needed a little more coffee before publishing this post today about banning the words “nerd” and “geek.”

And by the way, Professor David Anderegg… I’ve embraced my inner geek. I think geek has become acceptable now. Nerd, however, still has rather negative connotations. Unless you’re talking about the Willy Wonka candy Nerds, because YUM!

New York Times Needs Remedial Link Help is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

In case you haven’t heard, Amy Mengel managed to convince me to get up in front of people and talk about blogging at the fourth installment of Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley, which is being held at the headquarters of the American Red Cross of Northeastern New York in Albany. Thankfully, it’s not just me up there in front of a sold out audience of 150 people… I’m part of a panel that includes Lara Kulpa of Gingko Consulting and Problogger.com, Amanda Magee of Trampoline Design Studio, and our moderator Greg Dahlmann of Uptown/Downtown Media and All Over Albany.

Here’s what other people have been saying about the upcoming blogging panel at SMBTV4:

• The #smbtv4 Eventbrite listing, with guest list
• Social Media Breakfast – Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley #4
• Bounce – Talkin’ Turkey
• Metroland Online – Social Studies
• Tech Valley Computing Culture – ReBlogging: Talkin’ Turkey

Can’t be there? The event will be live-streamed on USTREAM from 8:00-10:00 am on Friday morning, December 4. If you watch, though, remember that there’s a reason I’m a writer instead of a speaker. I hope I don’t stutter, ramble, or turn so red that I actually emit radiant heat.

Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley #4 is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, you’re obviously not a writer. NaNoWriMo is the shorthand term for National Novel Writing Month, an annual event where aspiring novelists gear up to write an entire 50,000+ word novel in the month of November. It’s something I’d tried doing before, but always ended up dropping out before I’d really gotten started.

This year? I did it. And I feel like a masochist, especially since I started over on November 14. My first attempt had hit a dead end. I reached 50,086 words at 11:39 pm last night with 21 minutes to spare. So what have I learned?

1. Fiction is hard.
2. Characters don’t always do what you want them to do.
3. Knowing how the story ends doesn’t really help you get through the middle any easier.
4. The built-in thesaurus feature is awesome.
5. It’s insanely difficult not to edit as you’re writing.
6. It takes longer to write 1,000 words of fiction than 1,000 words of non-fiction.
7. Family members need to disappear when it’s writing time.
8. Asking me “How’s it coming?” when I’m in the middle of typing will make me lose my train of thought – and then get very angry at you.
9. Writing 5,000 words in a sitting turns your brain to mush.
10. It feels good to be done!

How about you? If you participated in NaNoWriMo, what did you learn – about writing and about yourself?

10 Lessons I Learned From NaNoWriMo is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I can’t help it. Every time I see the cover of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, I’m reminded of Steve Carrell’s movie poster for The 40 Year Old Virgin.

I had to flip Steve Carrell’s photo around to get him facing in the same direction, but I’m sure you can see it now, right?

If you want to pass this around, use the short URL: http://kl.am/SarahPalin

Sarah Palin, the 40 Year Old Virgin? is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC