Conversations At Wormhole Electric: If I say it out loud and other things

Don:
Twain-ism: 136 kinds of weather in 24 hours! Sounds like Colorado! Yesterday was hot and uncomfortable, today is cool, blue sky, smell of rain. Tomorrow is slated to be cooler with a possibility of snow on Thursday... Spring is definitely here.

I've been playing with keyword optimization and Google Keyword planner as part of the copy writing and marketing that I do for Wormhole. From there I'm developing a keyword effectiveness index. It is an interesting process! Some words that work better than "coming of age" (words to describe Tammy's Ursa Major story) are social misfits, outcasts, refugee, peer pressure, bullying. This is helping me to better describe the stories in terms that people use. Our number of hits each day has increased 100%. However, the site stickiness is not there yet. I'm working on it!

This is where applying the online marketing to Wormhole Electric comes in. We finally got the right code on the right pages and I'm now able to figure out basics about the audience that bounces into Wormhole and immediately bounces out again. We are lacking what the experts call "stickiness". People drop in and move on out. Most go to the home page and never go any deeper. I'm thinking about moving the Books for Sale page to the home page...

We are featuring Tamara Narayan this month and 3 other stories... and I've had one of those runs of weeks where I can't seem to get the editing right: I'm not seeing what needs to be edited, or I'm making assumptions that if the first 8 pages look good, then everything is alright throughout the rest of the 100 pages of manuscript. I have made mistakes or missed mistakes that I would have seen before. I'd like to blame it on technology, but I'm afraid the missteps are within my own technology. I've lost my process list and I don't seem to work well without it even though I've done this for the last 50 months, every month. Tammy's piece on dementia (Ghosts of a Beneficial Place) has me a bit spooked. (This story goes up for Free April 17th - for now, enjoy Ursa Major for free.)

According to psychologists, this is normal. With all that I'm doing and have done to my brain (changing hand dominance 2 times in 6 months), the brain is going to be confused and tired for a while. Tired I am – too tired to really know whether or not I'm confused. This is not a normal I want to get used to. It has also been pointed out that I've probably read all the stories at least 5 times each and my brain has become familiar with the text – I could probably take a test over each story and ace it. Apparently, familiarity with written text (and not just my own stories and books) means that the mind stops paying attention to the details and starts thinking about dinner instead.

A friend, a massage therapist, has suggested that it might be due the constant changing of the barometric pressure. In Colorado, the pressure can start out high and drop what feels like a bizzilion degrees in less than an hour.

I've had a sit down talk with my brain about this after all, I'm an editor! I need to step up and do more than just content and story flow! I should be catching the mistakes, looking deeper into the text, making sure that all is well - paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence! Word repetition by word repetition! My brain yawned, complained that it was tired and slowly sank back into the stupor of "Just get this Done! I'm hungry..."

Really? Is this what I become in Spring? A manic energy swinger who can't figure out whether to go to work or curl back up and sleep a bit more? The energy I use to kick-start myself in the afternoons could probably light our house for a couple of hours! That might not be so bad actually, at least I'd know where and how the energy is being used!

I'm still writing for Nanowrimo each day. However, the writing is every night just before I go to bed, and I have yet to catch up with the typing! I'm averaging about 1000 words a day. By the time I get it all fleshed out when I type it, the word count goes up. I have found this process of saying out loud to God and everyone that I'm writing daily seems to make me do it. If I whisper it to myself so no one can hear me, I don't get around to doing it. I'm better at keeping my word to others than I am keeping my word to myself.

Speaking of robins, Don ... we seem to be overrun by rock doves and woodpeckers. And then we need to consider the convention of rabbits that we saw just before Easter. My neighbor swears they were dividing up the egg duty for Easter.

As a tangent...I remember an Easter back when I was raising chickens, the kids were little and we were running late! And of course the kids wanted an Easter egg hunt, but we were already an hour behind. I noticed that somehow the chickens had gotten out into the yard. While I was chasing them back into the chicken yard, the kids found 10 eggs the hens had laid next to the porch and the well house... I'm sorry! The Story: The kids found 10 eggs the rabbits had taken from the hens and hidden by the porch. The hens, upset that their eggs were missing, figured out how to open the chicken yard gate and came to claim what was theirs!

And with that, I'm going for a walk.

Have a great week everyone!

Carolyn

Have a great week everyone!

All images downloaded from Google Images:

Fig 1 – Mark Twain retrieved from Mark Twain Quote (About age, aged, birthday, old)

www.celebquote.com

Fig 2 -- Top 10 Site Analytics Plugins for WordPress retrieved from tech.gaeatimes.com

Fig 3 -- Over 101 Internet Marketing Tools (Free & Premium) You'll Ever Need retrieved from

www.minterest.org

Fig 4 -- Left Brain Right Brain Myth, Brain Hemispheres – Posit Science Brain Myth Retrieved from

www.brainhq.com