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My life seems to have become increasingly pointless lately.
I haven't been out on any more cruises since October. Not because there haven't been any, but because for the few that have happened, apparently my employer's employers keep choosing staff based on who would cost them the least in salary. -.- That's the great joy of being in my field. At the moment I'm either underqualified because I don't have a PhD or any kind of career interest in Academia... or I'm overqualified because they want entry-level people who are on their way to getting a PhD and a career in Academia... or I'm qualified, which means I "deserve" a pay rate that nobody can afford.
This had better turn around in March like everyone keeps saying it will, when spring sampling starts up and there are lots and lots of cruises, and they need everyone they can get. I don't know what I'll do if that doesn't materialize. Get another job, I guess. Back to last year's grind of sending out apps and collecting rejections. Woot. Except I'll be doing it while living in half a room in someone else's house. Soooo very tired of not having my own place.
I'm really hoping the above is just the three months of sitting around twiddling my thumbs talking.
But I really don't know what else I'd do with life. I'm having a good time at Bright Hub, but I don't write fast enough to make a living there, which makes it hard to justify writing more there when I could be doing something else that makes me more money in less time. I'm also getting increasingly dissatisfied with the amount of pay I do get, to the point where I tried the freelance equivalent of asking for a raise a month ago, which I haven't heard anything about since.
And, as much as I enjoy it, a life that consists of writing intro science articles for a content site in exchange for ad revshare just sounds ... pointless. Like I should be doing something more ambitious than that.
But unless the worst-case scenario does happen in March, which it darn well better not, I don't want to commit to any other jobs that require me to have specific hours per week either. So I guess I'm still going to twiddle my thumbs through all of February.
Moving on to the writing update...
Well, fiction happened a little bit this past month. I got started on the second draft of my Fortress Launne series. I basically know what I need to do, I just need to get going. It's more about edits and revision than new writing.
I also outlined out an idea for a sci-fi story of undetermined length. The plan is to try to make it short (I don't need any more series-sized WIPs o.o). It's basically ready for the "start writing" phase of the proceedings, so I need to get going on that, too.
I was hoping to spend more time on fiction this month than I did, but then Bright Hub introduced article adoption. Basically, abandoned articles from past writers who have left the site and closed out their accounts. If the articles are good, they bring in quite a bit of extra revshare money with minimal work on the part of the adopter. If the articles are bad, well, basically it's the same as writing a new article in that slot without the upfront pay - but if the slot was created before 2010, the revshare rate is higher. The other big downside is that the adopter's name goes at the top of the article. I'm not actually sure how copyright works for these, but it most definitely feels like plagiarism that way.
Naturally, because I easily succumb to temptation, I picked up a bunch of them on topics I actually knew something about or was interested in, regardless of the above considerations. :p There doesn't seem to be any kind of formalized deadline for getting the adoptees up to my standards (my standards are a lot higher than base Bright Hub standards, and by golly anything with my name on it is going to be up to my standards, yes I don't care if it's a fake name), which is probably a good thing, because I picked up a lot. The ones I'm done fiddling with are:
The Genetic Code
... which coincidentally appeared right while I was in the middle of writing The Degeneracy of the Genetic Code. Yay for some easy links back and forth.
Mechanical Weathering
Chemical Weathering
... at a guess, these were originally by the same guy whose native language is probably Indian. I made moderate edits to the former, heavily revised the latter, and linked them together into a series. If all goes according to plan, next month there will be a third article about soils to go with them too.
That's actually it for stuff I consider "done." There are others. The main reason the "not quite done" ones are already up in my name is because I needed to see the keyword reports to figure out what direction I should be going.
Autosomal Dominant Inheritance
Autosomal Recessive Inheritance
... so far I've made minimal changes to these. They read like they were written by an American black woman. I'm planning to broaden their focus away from genetic diseases at some point, but they seemed to fit in well with a basic inheritance series I wrote this month:
Mendel's Law of Segregation
Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment
What is Marine Biology? - How could I not pick that one up? T.T Unfortunately, whoever wrote the original (my guess: American white woman) has clearly never actually set foot on a boat. I made a few moderate changes (got rid of the worst omg embarrassment section, added a blurb that seems kind of extremely essential and omg how can you have an article about this without mentioning nets!) and will have to go back and heavily revise it later.
Phylogenetic Trees - This was one of several equally abysmal articles that were all obviously written by the same guy, because whole swaths are copy-pasted between them. Upon close scrutiny he sounds like he does know what he's talking about, but he's just incredibly bad at organizing his thoughts into clear writing. I've done nothing so far but break it into sections - it was originally one big block of text. The others are also like that, and although I've made initial noises about claiming the whole lot and making a four-part series out of them, I haven't actually done it yet. It's near the bottom of the to-do list because it would take an enormous amount of work for no upfront pay. It's only on the to-do list at all because they're dated 2008. I can't imagine that anyone else is going to steal these though, especially since they're classified under Homework.
Speaking of which. You have no idea how depressing it is to me that half the basic science articles are classified under Homework. T.T Astronomy is under Space, which makes sense. Geology is under Environmental Science, which quasi-makes sense. Biology is half in Environmental Science and half in Genetics (which is under Health). Chemistry and physics are in ... Homework. T.T I mean, I knew that the only people who actually look up science on the web are students (half of whom are probably trying to cheat), but actually having it explicitly in my face like that is really depressing. I'm kind of hoping advanced math is scattered amongst the various Engineering channels, but they probably aren't.
Then there's a couple more that aren't in my name yet, one about sloths that was reasonably good, one about El Nino that needs a lot of work. I'll probably mention them again next month, or whenever they're up.
Also, a couple new space articles this month:
Rotation and Revolution
Causes of Seasons
Pretty basic stuff, and I have a couple more planned, which would make a nice series. I guess I'm big into making series lately, even though it doesn't seem to have much effect on anything - each individual article still has to sink or swim on its own merits with Google.
The other big thing that happened this month was Bukisa. A month ago they decided to go with Google Adsense as the main revenue source for writers. Well, that's bad news for gaming articles, which tend to get lots of views but don't make much in ad revshare. Worse news, the default is to make every article CC-A-SA, and toward that end they'd installed a button to allow people to just steal any article they wanted off the site and republish somewhere else. I'd set mine to full copyright, but at some point last year they'd gotten changed to CC-A-SA. How the hell am I supposed to make money under those conditions? -.-
Anyway, I only had two up, so I moved them both over to Bright Hub in the Hubfolio section. New locations are:
How to Plan Your City in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom
How to Set Up Housing in Emperor: RotMK
I added a bunch of pictures to them, and also wrote a third article to continue the series:
The Palace Menagerie in RotMK
I'd originally planned to do a 4-part series but never gotten around to finishing it. So there's one more in the works about trade and resource management that'll eventually be up. I wasn't expecting them to do much - the game is several years old - but surprisingly they seem to have an established readership, because when I pointed to them from their Bukisa slots, the viewcounts started jumping way up. Hopefully that means they've been successfully transplanted and will keep doing that after I remove the Bukisa slots later.
There are other gaming articles I want to move off eHow at some point, but at the moment it doesn't make as much sense to. Bukisa is a lightweight in the Google rankings at only half a million visitors per month. Bright Hub is rapidly gaining weight with about 8 million per month and was almost into the Top 300 sites last I looked. eHow, meanwhile, is an 800 lb gorilla that gets something like 17 million per month and has a ranking in the low double digits (at one point they were #4). Even so, eHow doesn't pay by viewcount, so the gaming articles aren't making a whole lot. I just need to get around to it. There's also the fact that fiddling with eHow might be a bad idea all around, considering all the transgressions they've done to the WCP writers in the past few years. Most of the time I think it's best not to touch anything and hope they keep paying me, because the money is still pretty good overall.
Okay, done rambling. Hope I didn't bore everyone to tears, if anyone made it all the way to the bottom. ;)
I haven't been out on any more cruises since October. Not because there haven't been any, but because for the few that have happened, apparently my employer's employers keep choosing staff based on who would cost them the least in salary. -.- That's the great joy of being in my field. At the moment I'm either underqualified because I don't have a PhD or any kind of career interest in Academia... or I'm overqualified because they want entry-level people who are on their way to getting a PhD and a career in Academia... or I'm qualified, which means I "deserve" a pay rate that nobody can afford.
This had better turn around in March like everyone keeps saying it will, when spring sampling starts up and there are lots and lots of cruises, and they need everyone they can get. I don't know what I'll do if that doesn't materialize. Get another job, I guess. Back to last year's grind of sending out apps and collecting rejections. Woot. Except I'll be doing it while living in half a room in someone else's house. Soooo very tired of not having my own place.
I'm really hoping the above is just the three months of sitting around twiddling my thumbs talking.
But I really don't know what else I'd do with life. I'm having a good time at Bright Hub, but I don't write fast enough to make a living there, which makes it hard to justify writing more there when I could be doing something else that makes me more money in less time. I'm also getting increasingly dissatisfied with the amount of pay I do get, to the point where I tried the freelance equivalent of asking for a raise a month ago, which I haven't heard anything about since.
And, as much as I enjoy it, a life that consists of writing intro science articles for a content site in exchange for ad revshare just sounds ... pointless. Like I should be doing something more ambitious than that.
But unless the worst-case scenario does happen in March, which it darn well better not, I don't want to commit to any other jobs that require me to have specific hours per week either. So I guess I'm still going to twiddle my thumbs through all of February.
Moving on to the writing update...
Well, fiction happened a little bit this past month. I got started on the second draft of my Fortress Launne series. I basically know what I need to do, I just need to get going. It's more about edits and revision than new writing.
I also outlined out an idea for a sci-fi story of undetermined length. The plan is to try to make it short (I don't need any more series-sized WIPs o.o). It's basically ready for the "start writing" phase of the proceedings, so I need to get going on that, too.
I was hoping to spend more time on fiction this month than I did, but then Bright Hub introduced article adoption. Basically, abandoned articles from past writers who have left the site and closed out their accounts. If the articles are good, they bring in quite a bit of extra revshare money with minimal work on the part of the adopter. If the articles are bad, well, basically it's the same as writing a new article in that slot without the upfront pay - but if the slot was created before 2010, the revshare rate is higher. The other big downside is that the adopter's name goes at the top of the article. I'm not actually sure how copyright works for these, but it most definitely feels like plagiarism that way.
Naturally, because I easily succumb to temptation, I picked up a bunch of them on topics I actually knew something about or was interested in, regardless of the above considerations. :p There doesn't seem to be any kind of formalized deadline for getting the adoptees up to my standards (my standards are a lot higher than base Bright Hub standards, and by golly anything with my name on it is going to be up to my standards, yes I don't care if it's a fake name), which is probably a good thing, because I picked up a lot. The ones I'm done fiddling with are:
The Genetic Code
... which coincidentally appeared right while I was in the middle of writing The Degeneracy of the Genetic Code. Yay for some easy links back and forth.
Mechanical Weathering
Chemical Weathering
... at a guess, these were originally by the same guy whose native language is probably Indian. I made moderate edits to the former, heavily revised the latter, and linked them together into a series. If all goes according to plan, next month there will be a third article about soils to go with them too.
That's actually it for stuff I consider "done." There are others. The main reason the "not quite done" ones are already up in my name is because I needed to see the keyword reports to figure out what direction I should be going.
Autosomal Dominant Inheritance
Autosomal Recessive Inheritance
... so far I've made minimal changes to these. They read like they were written by an American black woman. I'm planning to broaden their focus away from genetic diseases at some point, but they seemed to fit in well with a basic inheritance series I wrote this month:
Mendel's Law of Segregation
Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment
What is Marine Biology? - How could I not pick that one up? T.T Unfortunately, whoever wrote the original (my guess: American white woman) has clearly never actually set foot on a boat. I made a few moderate changes (got rid of the worst omg embarrassment section, added a blurb that seems kind of extremely essential and omg how can you have an article about this without mentioning nets!) and will have to go back and heavily revise it later.
Phylogenetic Trees - This was one of several equally abysmal articles that were all obviously written by the same guy, because whole swaths are copy-pasted between them. Upon close scrutiny he sounds like he does know what he's talking about, but he's just incredibly bad at organizing his thoughts into clear writing. I've done nothing so far but break it into sections - it was originally one big block of text. The others are also like that, and although I've made initial noises about claiming the whole lot and making a four-part series out of them, I haven't actually done it yet. It's near the bottom of the to-do list because it would take an enormous amount of work for no upfront pay. It's only on the to-do list at all because they're dated 2008. I can't imagine that anyone else is going to steal these though, especially since they're classified under Homework.
Speaking of which. You have no idea how depressing it is to me that half the basic science articles are classified under Homework. T.T Astronomy is under Space, which makes sense. Geology is under Environmental Science, which quasi-makes sense. Biology is half in Environmental Science and half in Genetics (which is under Health). Chemistry and physics are in ... Homework. T.T I mean, I knew that the only people who actually look up science on the web are students (half of whom are probably trying to cheat), but actually having it explicitly in my face like that is really depressing. I'm kind of hoping advanced math is scattered amongst the various Engineering channels, but they probably aren't.
Then there's a couple more that aren't in my name yet, one about sloths that was reasonably good, one about El Nino that needs a lot of work. I'll probably mention them again next month, or whenever they're up.
Also, a couple new space articles this month:
Rotation and Revolution
Causes of Seasons
Pretty basic stuff, and I have a couple more planned, which would make a nice series. I guess I'm big into making series lately, even though it doesn't seem to have much effect on anything - each individual article still has to sink or swim on its own merits with Google.
The other big thing that happened this month was Bukisa. A month ago they decided to go with Google Adsense as the main revenue source for writers. Well, that's bad news for gaming articles, which tend to get lots of views but don't make much in ad revshare. Worse news, the default is to make every article CC-A-SA, and toward that end they'd installed a button to allow people to just steal any article they wanted off the site and republish somewhere else. I'd set mine to full copyright, but at some point last year they'd gotten changed to CC-A-SA. How the hell am I supposed to make money under those conditions? -.-
Anyway, I only had two up, so I moved them both over to Bright Hub in the Hubfolio section. New locations are:
How to Plan Your City in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom
How to Set Up Housing in Emperor: RotMK
I added a bunch of pictures to them, and also wrote a third article to continue the series:
The Palace Menagerie in RotMK
I'd originally planned to do a 4-part series but never gotten around to finishing it. So there's one more in the works about trade and resource management that'll eventually be up. I wasn't expecting them to do much - the game is several years old - but surprisingly they seem to have an established readership, because when I pointed to them from their Bukisa slots, the viewcounts started jumping way up. Hopefully that means they've been successfully transplanted and will keep doing that after I remove the Bukisa slots later.
There are other gaming articles I want to move off eHow at some point, but at the moment it doesn't make as much sense to. Bukisa is a lightweight in the Google rankings at only half a million visitors per month. Bright Hub is rapidly gaining weight with about 8 million per month and was almost into the Top 300 sites last I looked. eHow, meanwhile, is an 800 lb gorilla that gets something like 17 million per month and has a ranking in the low double digits (at one point they were #4). Even so, eHow doesn't pay by viewcount, so the gaming articles aren't making a whole lot. I just need to get around to it. There's also the fact that fiddling with eHow might be a bad idea all around, considering all the transgressions they've done to the WCP writers in the past few years. Most of the time I think it's best not to touch anything and hope they keep paying me, because the money is still pretty good overall.
Okay, done rambling. Hope I didn't bore everyone to tears, if anyone made it all the way to the bottom. ;)
