My friend suggested I submit Burdens of Improvement to the Reader's Digest. I did look over some of their pages but I found that a true story submission had a limit of 1000 characters. I'm not adverse to publishing nor to making money. But they are not my goals. Writing daily gives me purpose and focus. Doing so gives me a strong incentive to regularly ask myself what is happening in my life and what I thinking about these days.
Google blogs (blogger.google.com) provides blog opportunities for free. Anyone can create a Google account for themselves. If you have a Gmail account already, you have a Google-in-general account and the same logon and password will get you into all Google services without further ado. I view my main blog, Fear, Fun and Filoz, as a daily column such as I might write for a local paper but blogs can be used from a wide variety of purposes.
Once you sign into Blogger, you can create a blog in just a few minutes. If you wake up tomorrow thinking it was a bad idea, you can delete the whole thing, forget about it or start over. One of the many setting options is "monetize", which is basically accepting ads on your blog, just like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Don't expect to be flooded with offers, though. In fact, with 100 million blogs on the internet, don't expect to even be noticed. But that is okay. Your writings will be there for people to see and you can direct family, friends and associates to the site when and if you want. You do have some control over who can view your pages.
The book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely has a good chapter on the difference between social and financial credits and currency. The basic idea is the reaction you could expect if you had a good time in bed with your favorite lover and as you two got up, you held out a folded bill and said,"Thanks". Or maybe, "I had a good time" or "I will call you". If your lover really loves you, you can expect outrage. Switching a social event to a financial one can devalue it quite seriously. Here you think you are doing something from the heart and somebody tries to change the basis to the purse. Attempting such a switch may damage your relationship irreparably. It is not the same thing as offering to share resources with a loved one. Proposing that something based on affection, mutuality and sharing be instead put on a cash basis is proposing to make a relation less personal and more mechanical and calculating.
I write to see what I think and so far, I have to consider only the social aspects of my comments. I try not say that your political ideas are wrong or that my religion or choice of music are right. I try to say something fairly original and possibly useful clearly and succinctly. I think it is big advantage not to be selling or advertising beyond saying that my writings exist and are available.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
