Social Media of the Future

Note: Today’s post is courtesy of a prompt from “642 Things to Write About“. Today’s prompt is: “Write Facebook status updates for the year 2017.”

For the sake of having a nice number, I figured I’d do one for each month.

January

Happy New Year everyone! My resolution is to write more this year than ever before! Woo!

February

Final Fantasy OhMyGodHaven’tWeRunOutOfNumbersYet from my hubby for Valentine’s Day…he knows me so well. ❤

March

Anyone want to line up some March Break play dates? I am SO not used to having the whirling dervish in the house 24-7.

April

Thanks for all the birthday wishes everyone! I’ve gotta be honest though, 33 doesn’t feel much different than 32. 😛

May

Goddammit, why are we still running our pellet stove? Come on, Spring, where the hell are you?!

June

Congratulations to all the little rugrats on their Grading Day! So proud of my little missy for acing the 2nd grade!

July

Big Summer Sale, everyone! For one week only, get the ebook version of Book One of the “Other World” series for FREE! Get it now because Book Two will be available before you know it!

August

Oh man, we’re more than halfway through the year and I have amassed twice as many new goals as I have finished old ones. Will I never get the hang of this nonsense we call life?

September

It’s Day One of the third grade! Good luck little missy! I know you’re gonna do just as great as usual. ❤

October

Joining our Halloween decoration family this year is Michael Myers and Pinhead. Hubby, dear, I think we’re starting to run out of room for this stuff.

November

Damn you and your strange, masochistic allure, NaNoWriMo…don’t you know I have a book release to deal with? Only 30k words to go…@_@

December

Happy Holidays everyone! Some wonderful presents in the Tobin house today! I think my little missy will be quite well to do with until 2018….next month. XD

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 37

Well, I’m a week into my shift, and believe me when I say that I’m ready to go home. No offense, Alberta, but your bone dry air and ridiculous temperature swings are getting on my nerves, just a little bit. I’m longing for the salty East-coast air and the not-quite-as-unreliable weather patterns. Also, I’m dying for a garlic fingers. Man, am I dying for a garlic fingers.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Let’s get on with it.

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

As per usual I can’t really comment on anything this week because I don’t have a scale. I can tell you that I’ve been pretty good this week for a lot of things. I’m still drinking lots of water (although I caved twice, but I don’t think two cans of pop in a full week is really so bad, do you) and I’ve been eating fairly healthy considering that I have to deal with camp food all day every day. I haven’t been able to get any exercise, because, you know…ridiculously unfit work hours…but I’ve been trying to move and stretch a lot throughout my shift instead of sitting on my backside all day every day. So there’s that, right?

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my author platform.

It hasn’t been too bad of a week for this one either. I posted an extra video on YouTube to review the contents of my first Ipsy Glam Bag, and I’ve been trying to make sure that I tweet at least once a day. Facebook has been a little slow, but I’m okay with that because I’ve been noticing a slow-but-steady increase in followers and interactions via the other platforms. Long story short, thumbs up for this week.

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

Guys…guys…guys…I’m getting super excited. My beta-reader recently got back to me and she had only a short list of minor issues that she thought could use addressing. I’m now in the process of compiling those issues and doing a last run-through of the manuscript to make sure there are no hidden typos. By this time next week I will be fixing those last issues/typos in the main manuscript file, resubmitting to CreateSpace, and from there it will be only 24 hours before I am able to order my proof copies. Those will take five business days to come, and assuming that they look okay, I will then be able to flip the switch, so to speak, and make the book available for purchase. You have no idea how pumped I am. In two weeks my first book could be for sale. I may never sell more than a handful of copies, but you have no idea how fulfilled I will be just to have my book actually be a book. AHHHH!!!!

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

Unfortunately as I am writing this I realize that I forgot to go through and keep track of what I wrote this week, so I’ll have to do that later, but I can tell you that it’s probably somewhere in the range of 2000. I’ve been taking it a little easy this week partly because I think I deserve it and partly because I know that once Nowhere to Hide is set up for sale I’ll be putting my nose to the grindstone and working hard on my next venture. So with that said, look forward to the future! There are great things on the horizon!

Blogging 101, Day Eighteen: Plug into Social Networks

There’s no doubt about it…particular sites may come and go, but social networking is here to stay, and it can be a very useful tool for accessing new readers. Appropriately, today’s assignment is if you’re active on a social network, set up Publicize to link the account to your blog or widget highlighting your profile. If you’re not, explore your social options to see whether one might be helpful.

Let’s face it: websites that allow us to interact with each other socially have become a huge part of life on the Internet. Chances are that almost everyone you know has a Facebook or Twitter account, if not both, Even work mates and employers have created an enormous network out of LinkedIn. In the world in which we live today, everyone wants to be connected to everyone else all the time.

So how does that help a blogger? Well, let’s look at it simply. Do you have a Facebook account? Yes? Okay, how many “friends” do you have on your account? Let’s modestly say 100? BAM! 100 potential readers. Every person attached to your social account is a potential reader if you allow your blog to be showcased on that account. All you have to do is share your blog posts the same way you would share anything else on your social feeds, and bada bing bada boom, you’ve made your blog accessible to tons of people who may otherwise never have come across it.

It’s as simple as that. If you connect your blog to previously established social accounts, you’ve opened yourself up to a whole other world of viewers who may see your post and decide to check it out. And WordPress makes this even easier with their Publicize options, which allows you to link all of your different social accounts to your WordPress one, thus allowing WordPress to automatically post status updates/tweets/etc for you whenever you publish a post. Awesome, right? So what are you waiting for? Get out there and publicize!

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 28

It’s another week and I’m back out West, working my 15-1/2 hour days and trying to figure out how I’m going to get anything else accomplished over the next two weeks. Fun times! Thank goodness I’m making good money, because otherwise my head may have already exploded.

On the upside of things, I did manage to record my two Nerd Block unboxing videos and get them uploaded to YouTube before returning to work. I’m not the most comfortable person in front of a camera, but I don’t think I did too badly. My only concern now is that now that my husband knows that I’m recording I’m going to have to find a way to lock him out of the room so he doesn’t torture me mid-taping. 😛

(Shut up, Jason, you know you’re going to do it.)

If you’re interested in Nerd Block, or if you just want to see how awkward I am on camera, please check out my unboxing video for the original Nerd Block for June:

…and my unboxing video for Nerd Block Jr (for Girls) for June:

And now on to the usual stuff.

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

I’m just gonna go right ahead and say it: I’m failing miserably at this goal for a number of reasons (some of them good reasons, some of them bad). The upside is that my bad habits haven’t actually caused me to gain any more weight, but of course the downside is that I have effectively accomplished nothing toward this goal in over six months.

It’s a combination of things, but the major contributing factor is that this just isn’t as much of a priority to me as it should be. Blogging is very important to me. Writing (and, to a lesser extent, editing) is very important to me. Spending time with my family and taking small opportunities to relax are super important to me. Losing weight and getting healthier should be important to me, but they’re significantly less important than the other things I listed, so this goal continuously gets thrown on the back burner to slowly burn away into charcoal. I eat crappy food because cooking healthy takes time and energy that I use on other things that are important to me, and I avoid exercise for the same reason. It’s terrible, but it’s the truth.

So with that in mind, if anyone knows how I can somehow either double the hours in the day, or make it possible to function without sleep…feel free to let me know any time.

On the positive side ofthings, I’ve been using an iPhone app to remind me to take my stomach pills and thus far it seems to be helping. I actually think these meds might really help if I can continue to remember to take them properly. Further updates to come.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my author platform.

I’m calling this one a win for the week. I wasn’t overly active on Facebook or Twitter, but I did become a member of the International Bloggers Association, and I also set up my new YouTube channel for subscription box fun. I think that counts as pretty productive as far as social media is concerned.

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to find the time during my days off to work on this. Just as unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to print off anything to work on while out West. So this is going to be a bust for a couple more weeks. On the upside, my next days home shouldn’t be nearly as busy as the last ones were. My revised mini-goal for the next fourteen days is to get as much blogging scheduled as possible between now and then so that when I get home I can focus entirely on Goal #3. Since that means trying to blog around my 15-1/2 hour work days, please send me good luck (and lots of caffiene).

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

Unfortunately (which is becoming my most-used word), I can’t give you a real report this week because I forgot to make a copy of my spreadsheet before coming out West, so I have no idea what my numbers are. I can tell you that I believe it to be somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words. I hope to put that number to shame this following week, but again…15-1/2 hour days…so don’t hold me to it, okay? Ha ha…

As a final note before I sign off today, I’m just going to mention that to avoid diluting my weekly schedule any further, future subscription box reviews are going to be posted on the weekends as they pop up. Look forward to them! ❤

Blogging 101, Day Ten: Dress Up Your Sidebar

We’ve done a fair bit of personalizing on our blogs so far, and today we’re going to talk about a little bit more, specifically with regard to our “sidebar”. Depending on the theme you chose for your blog, your “sidebar” could be in a number of places, but a rather large number of themes involve said “bar” being either the far right or the far left of your blog. It is a spot where your posts do not reach, an empty slate that you can fill as you so choose. So today’s assignment is to add and/or customize two widgets, one text-based and one image-based.

Now, as with many of these assignments, this is something that I’ve already done since I’ve already been around the block a few times. Therefore, instead of adding or changing anything, I’m going to explain why I chose the widgets that I chose.

The very first widget on my sidebar is a simple photo. I chose that widget because, as a writer, I want people to be able to instantly recognize me. Eventually (based on my own cursed willpower) I will have published books, and those books will have a photo of me inside their covers. If the people who read my books choose to seek out my blog I want them to be able to immediately know that they’ve got the right place. Additionally, a photo is a nice thing to have on a professional blog (not that I think my blog is professional…haha) because it gives visitors that instant feeling of having made your acquaintance, which might help them decide to stick around.

The second widget on my sidebar is an invitation to “Like” my Facebook Author Page. This is a newer addition, as it took me a while to finally decide to actually make a Facebook Author Page. In the end I decided that it was an important step, and the widget reflects that. Facebook is a big deal these days, and while not everyone who stumbles onto my blog may be the kind of person who follows blogs, there are plenty of people out there who might click the “Like” button and thereafter return to my blog as Facebook lets them know what I’ve posted recently.

Thirdly, we have a Twitter widget. I’m not a huge Twitter user myself, but it’s another one of those “important” sites that can be very useful for networking. I chose to add the type of widget that shows the last few things I’ve “tweeted” along with the ability for visitors to tweet directly to me without having to open a whole different browser page to go directly to Twitter.com. Though it is not used as often as I thought it might, I think that it’s nice to give people the ability to speak to me without having to comment on a particular blog post.

The fourth and fifth widgets are organizational in purpose. They simply give visitors the option to browse my blog posts via the full archives, or the categories that I place my posts under.

The sixth widget is a simple “Follow Via Email” button, important for visitors who are neither members of WordPress, nor choose to use the Facebook link.

And the final widget is your basic search which, while not necessarily very useful to visitors, is important for helping me to go back and find things that I wrote about in the past.

Do you see a pattern? Most of my widgets are based around the idea of gathering a following and networking various aspects of my “author platform” together. The widgets I chose are the kinds of widgets that a writer should have in order to effectively use social media to her advantage. However, each individual blogger has to decide for themselves what will work well for their blog. If you’re a private person who wants to talk anonymously you’re probably not going to want to use things like Facebook and Twitter, but if networking is a major part of your platform you might want to add even more social site widgets to your sidebar. If you’re a member of any clubs, challenges, blogging circles, etc, you might want to post your badges on your sidebar. If you’re into any kind of marketing, there are “blog stats” widgets that would help let potential buyers know how popular your blog is. If you hold events via your blog, there are widgets to help you organize and display them. Take a look through all the available widgets and determine what would work best for you. 🙂

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 23

A couple of things to say before we get down to it this week. First of all, I know I’ve been rather slow when it comes to responding to comments and the like lately, and I apologize. I’m having one of those times when it just seems like there’s a million things to do and I can’t concentrate, so I’ve been a little lackluster when it comes to responding to the various forms of internet communication. I tried to catch up yesterday, but if I missed anyone I apologize, and feel free to shout at me. 🙂

Second, as of this coming Monday I will officially be at my new job in the Alberta oil sands. That means that for two weeks at a time I may be fairly absent online. It all depends on what the cell reception is like where I’m going. So if it seems as though I’ve disappeared (except for scheduled posts), I haven’t…I’m just having a difficult time communicating.

Okay, now that I’ve explained that, let’s get down to brass tacks.

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

I must admit that I had a rough time this week. Part of the problem was good old fashioned being too busy. On Wednesday I had overnight visitors, then on Thursday I had to do a 3-hour round trip for a doctor’s appointment and a visit to my sick grandmother, which was punctuated by an almost five-hour trip to the circus with the daughter and the niece, and then hubby and I took the niece to our house for two nights, which just always wears me out even when the kids are really good (which they were). So all in all, I ended up missing all my workouts for those days, plus ate a ton of junk like pizza and pancakes.

I totally planned to make up for those lost workouts early this week, but somehow it just never happened. I managed to fit in the one run that I missed, but I never made up for the strength training sessions that I missed, and as of a strangely exhausting day today I’ve managed to get another run behind. I’m just all kinds of screwed up, and to make matters worse I’ve been reverting to bad habits like drinking pop constantly.

On the positive side of things, I finally got a medical diagnosis on my stomach problems. It was the one I was dreading, because it involves a lot of work to figure out your triggers (of which there could be many), but there’s an upside to it. Given my descriptions of the problem the doc thinks that my biggest (maybe only) trigger is anxiety, so he’s given me a prescription to hopefully help with that. I’ve only been taking it for a couple of days so I can’t really tell if it’s helping yet, but I should know pretty soon since my worst times are when traveling to and from work. Everyone keep your fingers crossed for me, okay?

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

As mentioned above, it’s been a really bad week for this kind of stuff. I haven’t touched Twitter once, and have only been on Facebook in order to link to my blog posts. There’s not much more to say about that, aside from that I’ll try harder next week.

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

You can probably guess based on everything else what I’m going to say here. Like everything else, it was a bad week for this goal, but I am at least able to say that I got one more chapter done. Along those lines, I can tell you that I’m starting to understand that “kill the little darlings” thing that everyone is always talking about. The chapter I was working on was one that my beta-reader said dragged a lot, so when I was going through it I was trying to find ways to shorten it or speed up the action, and it was harder than I would have expected. Every line seemed important and well-written, so it was really difficult to cut anything. In the end I managed, but it really gave me an appreciation for how hard it is to cut stuff that only you feel is worth leaving in.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

Surprisingly, this is the one goal that I’m not too disappointed in this week. It was definitely a weaker period than the previous few weeks, but it was still pretty good overall. Honestly, I’m not even sure where these words came from, but somehow I wound up with a total of 5198 words. Not too shabby for such a busy and confusing week!

All in all, I would have to say that this week was frustrating in a great number of ways, but at least I can say that I kept writing, right? Right.

 

5 Things Nobody Says About College (Until It’s Too Late): A Response

Last week I did a response to David Wong’s 6 Reasons the System is Rigged (the name of which later got changed, but I’m sticking with the original one because bugger it all). Writing about my own personal thoughts and experience into the points on the list was so much fun that I decided to do another one for another Cracked.com article that caught my eye. This time Mr John Cheese writes about the post-secondary education situation in 5 Things Nobody Says About College (Until It’s Too Late). Every entry made me nod my head enthusiastically and cry a little for my own four years of wracking up debt, so of course I had to share with you. Be sure to check out the original article as well!

“I went to Cape Breton University and all I got was this stupid t-shirt.”

#5. The First Two Years of College Are a Repeat of High School

The first entry doesn’t apply to me as much as it might apply to some people because I took a trade, which involved a whole lot of stuff that the high school education system does not deem to be important, but even so I do have to agree that there was a lot of crossover. For instance, the degree that I took involved a four-part math program – that is, four semesters of math classes, labeled 1 through 4. I ended up opting for two semesters of Calculus because it was quicker (and thus, cheaper), but not before going through the entirety of “Math 1”, so I can definitely tell you, without exaggeration, that this was basically a repeat of high school math. I absolutely understand the need for halfway-decent math skills if you’re going into a technology-based program, but a lot of it was stuff that you literally cannot graduate high school without having done, so it definitely felt like a huge waste of time and money. And, of course, that’s the point, right? They tack on a bunch of extra courses based on stuff you should (and usually do) already know, because more money for them! It’s not evil at all. No, really. Totally on the up-and-up.

For myself, the math thing is the best example, but for a lot of my friends it was a lot more like what the title of this first entry implies: the first two years of their four-year degrees were almost entirely things they’d already done throughout high school. BA students were re-taught all the language skills they’d been practicing for years, science students had to spend a ton of time and money on the same basic concepts they’d chosen to study in high school, and the technical/engineering students spent their first several semesters doing the same old mathematics before eventually moving on to stuff they’d never seen before.

I’m not saying that college students should be immediately dropped into a shark tank of 100% brand new and confusing information, but those first few semesters really make you feel as though you’re wasting your money on stuff you spent three years learning for free.

#4. You’ll Be Forced to Take Classes That Have Nothing to Do With Anything

Even in my case, taking a trade, this was absolutely true. As near as I can figure, every single college program out there is inflated with courses that you would otherwise have absolutely no reason to take, simply because they need the program to have the “proper” number of courses and they ran out of stuff that made sense before they were finished.

The best example of this in my particular program is the two “Communications” courses I was forced to take as part of my degree: Communications 101 and Communications 201. Knowing that I took a trade based in electronics and industrial instrumentation, you might assume that my “Communications” course would probably have something to do with technical communication…phones and the internet, and stuff like that. You might assume that, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. This particular pair of courses was based on business communication. So, okay, now you’re probably thinking that it has something to do with learning how to properly communicate within a business setting, deal with customer relations, or how to appropriately commerce with employers and coworkers. Sorry, wrong again. We may have spoken about that kind of thing for a single class or two, but that wasn’t the main premise of the courses.

So what did we do in these particular courses? Well, we learned how to write a resume and a cover letter. Oh, and we were taught the proper way to use things like footnotes…that is, if by “proper” you mean “totally-ass-backwards” because our professor for these particular courses was a bit of a lunatic who liked to make things up and tell us that it was the “correct” way to do things. One notable piece of information that she imparted was that your name is the most important part of your resume (I’ll give her that one, but just wait for it…) and thus you should make it as visible as possible. Her suggestion was to make your name a font that allows it to take up the entire width of the page, and to make it bright and colorful so that it’s more noticeable. She actually told us, with a completely serious look on her face, that it would help you get hired if you made your name on your resume bright, fuchsia pink. The woman must have never actually had to apply for a job in her life.

Long story short, other than the different acceptable formats that a resume can take, these courses taught us absolutely nothing that we would ever need to know. Those two courses were $600 each. I spent three hours a week for 24 weeks and $1200 to be told that I should add bright fuchsia pink text to my resume.

#3. Failing Will Cost You Severely

It should come as no surprise that failing a college course – which you had to pay through the nose just to get into – will cost you to fail. You pay for the course before you’ve ever gone anywhere near the classroom, and that money becomes the college’s whether you pass the course or not. That’s the system, and we all know how it works.

But there’s more than just a monetary loss involved in such a failing.

Remember earlier when I mentioned that I chose to take two Calculus courses instead of four more basic math courses? I chose to do that because of the money I’d save and because I was always good at math so I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. Unfortunately the university that I attended has the market cornered on terrible Calculus professors. There were three to choose from, one of whom was out right off the bat because of the timing of his courses. Of the two who were left, one was lazy as hell and genuinely didn’t give a rat’s ass if a single person passed his course, and the other was an evil bastard who had tenure and used that sense of security to actively attempt to fail as many of his students as possible. I had the first prof. A friend of mine had the second.

My prof never explained anything anymore than he personally felt he needed to, and never answered questions. By the end of the first semester, almost exactly half of my classmates had flunked out of the course. By the end of the second semester I literally had an anxiety attack that found me in the emergency room of the nearby hospital. It was the night before the final exam and nothing made sense to me. I’d failed a ton of the course’s homework assignments and all I could think about (while I was trying so hard to study) was how if I didn’t make at least a 70% on this exam, I was going to flunk the course. I’d never flunked anything before in my life, so the disappointment was pretty bad. That alone didn’t cause the anxiety attack though; it was a combination of the disappointment, the fact that failure would mean I’d completely wasted $600, and the knowledge that if I did fail I would have to do the whole goddamn thing over again. When you fail a college course you don’t just pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and move on with your life. If you want to continue on with your chosen program you have to take the failed course all over again, which means paying for it again, as well as trying to figure out how to fit it into the schedule – because it might fit into year 2, but there’s no time slot available for it in year 3.

My friend with the devil professor experienced this several times over. He had gone into engineering, and because of the schedule of the courses the evil prof was his only option. He failed the course three times before finally managing to weasel his way into a different prof’s course. He spent $2400 on that one course, and had to deal with a hell of a lot stress in the process.

It’s no wonder that so many college students find themselves having a breakdown at some point.

#2. The New Friends You Make Will Be Temporary

I was never the kind of person who made friends really easily. I was shy and a little odd from other peoples’ viewpoints. That got a little easier when I started college because these were people who were interested in the same things as me, headed toward the same goal as I was. My classes were not huge ones, because the trades don’t attract enormous numbers around here, but the guys in my classes became quick friends. We were buddies, for sure. My husband – who was a year behind me when we attended the same college – had his own set of classroom friends, and I became friends with many of them as well. It was a great time. We spent a couple of good years partying with friends every weekend and just generally being more social than I had ever been in my life.

You know how many of those college friends we still keep in touch with? I have, like…six of them on Facebook. Know how many of them I’ve actually seen, face-to-face over the past year? Two. And only them because it so happened that they were out on the same job with me while I was out West.

The fact of the matter is that college is a stepping stone for most people. The majority of the people you go to college with will move away after graduation (or else return to where they came from, if they moved for college). You might keep in contact with some of them, since social media is such a basic concept of life these days, but chances are you’ll never actually see most of them ever again. It’s just one of those things. Sorry.

 

#1. College Isn’t the Booze-Fueled Orgy That Movies Depict

At first I actually wanted to dispute this particular entry, but when I really thought about it I realized that, yeah…it’s true. I mean, there’s no denying that a certain amount of boozing and sexing goes on in college. That’s part of the experience. For some kids those are the only reasons to even bother going to college. But it’s not even the tiniest bit close to how movies depict it. The guys I hung around with during college loved to drink, but they saved that stuff (for the most part) for the weekends; we weren’t drowning ourselves in cheap beer in between classes and doing shots out of hot girls’ navels every evening. And I honestly don’t know anyone who drank like that, even when considering the people who were obvious party animals. As for the sex part…yeah, college is an excellent place to meet people, share experiences, try new things, and I definitely know some people who took major advantage of that. But it wasn’t a hedonistic den of sin by any stretch of the imagination. Even the guys I knew who were major dogs managed to keep it in their pants the majority of the time.

The simple fact is that college isn’t the enormous party that people imagine it is. There’s tons of fun and friends and being the biggest idiot you can be just for the hell of it, but that’s a byproduct, not the normal flow of things. College students simply are not drunk and having sex 100% of the time. To think that they would be is actually pretty foolish.

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So now that I’ve shared my side of the experience, how about you guys? What was college like for you? Did you have to put up with courses full of material you already knew, or even worse, courses that were undeniably useless to you? Did you ever fail a course, and what did it cost you? Have you managed to hang on to any of your friends from college? And be honest…how much boozing and sexing did you really do? I wanna hear about it! Please share!

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 20

Whenever I can think of something quick and interesting, I try to share a little something at the beginning of all my accountability posts, as a little bonus to the people who bother to read them (and as an incentive to the people who really couldn’t care less about my goal progression). This week I just had to share this article, which I stumbled across on Business Insider. It explains, quite simply, that the same researchers who initially provided evidence of gluten-sensitivity have now published follow-up papers that show that they were totally wrong and there is no such thing as gluten-sensitivity. (This is not to be confused with Celiac disease, which is an auto-immune condition that is triggered by gluten and is, in fact, a very real disease.) I have to be honest, this amuses me a great deal because I know a few people who actually have Celiac disease and have to deal with all that that entails, and then I also know quite a few people who have used the term “gluten sensitivity” to give them an excuse for everything from why they’re overweight, to why they need to have a ton of special instructions for every meal, to why they just refuse to stop farting every five seconds (yes, that’s an actual conversation that I’ve had to endure with a coworker).

One less thing to blame all your troubles on, people. Sorry, try again. XP

And now to talk about my troubles, which I’ll readily admit are entirely my own fault.

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

Not a great deal to report here. As usual exercise hasn’t been on the top of my priority list. I will say that I’ve been eating a little better, although that’s objective. I’ve been forcing myself to have breakfast in the morning, usually in the form of a bran-dense cereal of some kind, and at the advice of a couple of readers I’ve been trying to force more liquids down my throat to keep the hunger at bay. I have a really hard time drinking plain water, but I’ve been drinking a lot of caffeine-free tea and juices. There’s also the occasional glass of pop, but I’ve been trying really hard to restrict that to one glass a day. I will admit that it’s helping. I’m still snacky (I’m working on that, I swear), but not nearly as bad as I was a week ago. I’ve been managing to keep the constant random grabbing of easily-shoved-in-my-mouth foods to a minimum.

On a related note, can being a little dehydrated actually make you a little bloated? I’m just wondering because since I’ve been forcing more fluids into me I’ve noticed that my pants don’t feel as tight. I haven’t lost any weight or inches; my pants just feel a little more comfortable. Does that make any sense at all?

Oh, also, I’ve now been on my trail medication for my stomach problems for a week now. I kinda thought they might be helping, but then this morning I had some major gut rot for no reason that I could discern…I didn’t even eat anything out of the ordinary. So, I dunno. I have an appointment to see the gastroenterologist again in two weeks, so maybe he’ll have something else to say, or want to put me on different meds, or maybe he’ll just tell me that I’m psychotic. We’ll see, I suppose.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

Things are going as well as always on this front. I’m still trying hard to keep up with the blogging community, and I’ve been making an effort to drop a tweet every now and then that isn’t a link to the blog. I’ve noticed a couple of new followers to the blog, as well as a couple of new likes on my Facebook Author page, so that’s awesome. Hi everyone! *waves*

Another silly thing that I’ll mention because it’s technically kinda “social”…last week the hubby and I re-watched Tropic Thunder (a ridiculous comedy about a bunch of actors making a war movie, if you didn’t know). There’s this one scene that involves Robert Downey Jr in an inception-like levels-deep role, and I thought it was so silly that I made this image about it:

I then posted the pic on 9gag.com, because what the hell, right? Well, apparently over 23,000 people thought it was amusing as well, because BAM. Hot page. It’s not exactly the crowning achievement of my internet career, but I have to admit that it pleases me that 23,000 people “liked/upvoted” something that I came up with.

Now if the image would just find it’s way onto Robert Downey Jr’s Facebook page, I could die a happy fangirl. lol

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

I’m gonna go right ahead and put this out there: I’m going to get something done on this during this following week, or I am going to find some way to severely punish myself. The floor is open for suggestions, people. Give me some motivation by telling me how I can torture myself if I don’t get some work done.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

All other things aside, it was a pretty good week for this goal. It wasn’t quite as good a week as week 19, but still an excellent one at a total of 8240 words. I expect to get at least that number in again this following week because I’ve got a lot of blog-post planning to do. You see, I’ve gotten word that I shall be returning to work in just under a month, and I want to get as much work completed and out of the way as possible before that happens. So look forward to another excellent word count next Wednesday. ^_^

And don’t forget: if you haven’t been officially diagnosed with Celiac disease, all that super-expensive gluten-free stuff is a complete waste of money. XD

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 19

I’m just gonna put this out there, on the off-chance that someone actually responds. If there is anyone out there who has the secrets on either, a. turning off your stomach so that it stops feeling hungry all the time for no reason, b. learning how to happily exist on less sleep, or c. getting stuff (work/exercise) done in your sleep, I would greatly, greatly appreciate a heads up.

Moving on.

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

As you may have already discerned from my little passive-aggressive rant up there, this goal is still not going so hot. I had really, truly hoped to have a good doctor’s appointment on Friday…a revealing one. Unfortunately, it was more along the lines of, “Well, we know there’s something wrong because you’re telling us that something is wrong, and also your blood work is telling us that something is wrong, but…we don’t know what is wrong.” Basically, none of the tests show anything. I have a ton of symptoms, but they can find no signs of any kind of condition. My family physician is convinced that my problem is the same as one that my mother has, but again, no proof. I left my doctor’s office on Friday with a vague sense of doom and a prescription for a trial run of some meds that may help, but may also make my problems worse. Oh, and it may take up for a month for me to even notice if they’re making a difference, and they cost $80 for a month’s supply. So yeah. I’m not in the best of moods concerning that particular aspect of my life.

Several times in the past week I’ve tried to convince myself to get up and go for a run in the morning, but it hasn’t happened yet. A combination of straight-up laziness and fear that my stomach will fall clean out of me the second I try to move has kept me from taking the leap. To make matters even more fun, I’ve crossed back over into the “ravenous hunger” part of the strange hungry/not-hungry cycle I go through for no discernible reason (see request a.).

All in all, just feeling horrible about myself. There’s always next week, I guess.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

I suppose I can give myself some kudos on this one. My Facebook time has slowed down a bit, but I notice I’ve been doing a lot more consistent interaction with other bloggers, plus I’ve actually been dropping in on Twitter every now and then. I’m also proud to say that I’m THIS CLOSE (*imagine me holding my fingers a really short distance from each other*) to hitting the 200 followers mark on this blog. Since I entered April of this year with somewhere around 150 followers I’m pretty excited about that. Go me!

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

As mentioned last week, I took a break on this one in order to beta-read a manuscript for a friend because I didn’t want to be trying to divide my attention between the two different stories. Well I’m happy to be able to announce that I managed to get the beta-read out of the way this past week. It was the first one I’ve ever done, and I believe I did a pretty good job, so yeah…pride. The story was also a good one, so that helps of course. XD

Point: I didn’t get anything done on this goal this week, but now I have no excuses. Nose to the grindstone time, baby.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

Finally something I can feel really proud about. Mostly all the words that I wrote this week were for the purpose of scheduling blog posts ahead of time, but it was a lot of words written for the purpose of scheduling blog posts ahead of time. All together I would up with 9785 words for the week, which is almost as much as the last three weeks combined, and also the most I’ve written in one week since March. Now if only I could keep that up for a few weeks, am I right?

You know I’m right.

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 18

Before I get started today, I have a quick question for my fellow WordPress bloggers. Are any of you having problems with lost comments/notifications? Since April was such a busy month with the A to Z Challenge and all, I think I may have missed this problem until just recently. Basically what is happening is that I’m getting notifications through my iPhone app (for instance, “So-and-So has left a comment on your post, Such-and-Such”) and I’ll glance at them just to see what they are and then forget about them for the time being because I find it too cumbersome to do a lot of comment replies and the like on my phone. So later, when I’m on my computer, I’ll go to WordPress to reply to the comments, but it won’t be in my notifications. It’ll be on the post, if I go to my blog manually, and it’ll be in the “Comments” tab of my account dashboard, but it won’t be in the list of most recent notifications. Since that notification list is what I normally use to interact with comments and the like, I now find myself in the frustrating position of having no idea how many comments I may have completely neglected to reply to. And since I’m the kind of blogger who likes to respond to everyone who interacts with my blog, this is really really bugging me, but the only way I can know now is to go to that “Comments” tab and scroll through every single one to see what I’ve missed, which I totally do not have time for.

So, in conclusion, I’m asking if anyone else has experienced anything like this, and also issuing an apology to anyone who may have visited me during the A to Z Challenge and not gotten a reply. I swear I made every effort to interact with everyone, so if I didn’t reply to you, this is why. Sorry!!

Moving on…

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

Okay, so two weeks ago I said that I had a plan and that it was going to be put into motion within the following two weeks. I’m going to go right ahead and say that that did not happen. However, hear me out. Last week I got a C.T. scan done on my abdomen. This Friday I have a doctor’s appointment to talk about that scan. I’m really, really, really hoping to get an answer, or at least a better guess, about what might be wrong with my guts. And since, for the past year or so, exercise has tended to make my stomach problems worse, I figured that it couldn’t hurt to wait until I get to that appointment first. I’m not sure what I’m going to find out (if anything), but it would be nice to get an idea about what’s going on before I put my guts through that extra strain. Hopefully we’ll finally have some real idea about why I get the way I do, and I’ll leave the appointment with meds or a diet plan or something that will help avoid the issues, thus making exercise less of an anxious ordeal.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

Things have slowed down a lot this week now that the A to Z Challenge is over. I’ve been keeping up with Facebook, but that’s about it. Trying to keep in touch with all the awesome bloggers I met in the last month, but I also kinda wanted a week of silence after all the business during the challenge. I’ll do better next week, promise. ^_~

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

This seems completely illogical, considering that I just got myself moving on this goal, but I’ve put it on hold for a short amount of time. The reason is that a friend of mine has given me her manuscript to beta-read and I want to give it my full attention. To be reading someone’s manuscript while also editing my own, I just don’t think that would be kosher. She’s relying on me to give her honest notes about the state of her manuscript, and I want to make sure that I’m able to focus on that without my mind wandering over into the problems that I have with my own. I’m hoping to get the reading done and the notes off to her as quickly as possible, so check back with me next week for this goal.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

Beyond everything else, I was really hoping to get a good, high word count this week, but it didn’t really happen that way. There were a few distractions, such as a birthday party that took a giant chunk of my day away (hour and a half drive down, two hour party, hour and a half drive back), a few crappy days (miserable, rainy grossness makes it impossible for me to concentrate), and a variety of other things I had to do (take the daughter to playgroup, house stuff, major grocery runs, etc), and when you add in the fact that I’m just sometimes lazy as all hell, I only ended up with a grand total of 4297 words this week. The good news is that when I happened to glance up at my grand total for 2014 thus far, I found that I’ve surpassed a hundred thousand! My official number at the moment is 103,552 words since January 1st. It definitely would be nice if it were higher, but still..that’s over 25,000 words per month so far, so go me. ^_^