IT MIGHT BE A PYRAMID

I've been thinking about this post recently. It's because, while half-heartedly browsing the internet for reasonable writing jobs the other day, I once again stumbled into the bizarre world known as online marketing. That's actually kind of a deceptive name, because mostly it seems like a pyramid scheme.

Maybe.

Specifically, I found a link to Wealthy Affiliate, with the promise of a free starter account. That doesn't really sound like my kind of thing, except...well, I'm an internet content writer. I mostly write for Demand Studios, which I don't hate as much as some people do, but it's pretty dumb and scary to be a freelancer with one client. I'm always looking to branch out.

Also, it's pretty well known among content mill writers that we could cut out the middle man, make our own niche websites, pick our own titles and keep all of the profits. It's a pretty sweet deal except for the part where you have to get motivated, be decisive, learn about marketing, etc. Also, of course, there's a ton of overhead and some risk involved.

So, Wealthy Affiliate. The good news is that their site building and promotion tools really work. While I learned some new things about SEO and so on, the single biggest thing they've done for me is actually get me started. Within an hour of signing up, I had clicked through a bunch of their step-by-step training materials and ACTUALLY BUILT a new website in a new niche that they helped me pick. By the next morning I had decided to upgrade to their premium membership so I could build on my own domain and get more training courses.

A week later I've written fifteen articles, learned a ton about marketing, increased my traffic and gotten on the first page of Google results for several of my search terms. (I also shot up from my starting rank of over 100,000 on WA to around 500, which makes me wonder whether the zillions of people who seem to be joining are doing any of the work at all.)

On the other hand, I haven't made a single cent yet, and this is my biggest concern about WA. There are a lot of people making a lot of money on the site, which I find really plausible based on what I've seen. What I would love to know, though, is how much of this money is coming from promoting WA itself, vs other types of advertising or personal sales revenue. Because if it's the former, then, yeah...that's a pyramid scheme.

I just can't tell, though. I know there are exceptions. Someone sells refrigerators, for example. It happens, but how much? Just enough to make the whole thing seem borderline legitimate, or quite a lot? Personally I'll be happy to endorse them wholeheartedly if I end up making a non-laughable amount of money through a different revenue stream.

At the moment, though, I can't. I know WA gave me the push I needed to start my own niche website, but I have no idea if the whole thing is legit or not. The SEO works but the money might not, etc. Still, I'm glad I found it, and if anyone wants to join me, just click the link above. Yes, I will get a tiny commission even though you won't be charged. Unless you get sucked in, like me.

THEY DRAW AND COOK: WILD VIOLET SYRUP

I've been meaning to submit something to They Draw & Cook, and I realized that my violet syrup from last spring would be a great candidate for illustration. I'm waiting to hear back from them, but I'm auctioning the original of this drawing off on my Facebook page now.

DRAWING LAB #11: KIND OF BLIND

I'm not going to lie, I have sort of been putting off working on Drawing Lab.

Actually, that was technically a lie. I've been massively, completely putting it off. I blame exercise number 10, which was drawing blind contours of random people in a coffee shop. For one thing, I pretty much hate blind contour drawings of anything, and for another, staring fixedly at someone you don't know while blindly marking in a book is kind of creepy.




Seven months later, I decided to skip exercise number 10. It's just my luck that exercise 11 is also about blind contours -- sort of.

The book calls this exercise cheater blinds. You do a blind contour with a black marker, but you can look a couple of times to make sure you're not completely overlapping or anything. Then you fill in some detail with a smaller pen. To be honest, I looked a lot more than twice for each drawing, but I tried to stay true to the spirit of the idea.

I filled two pages in my sketchbook, but unfortunately this is the only image I can share without horribly insulting members of my family. James still looks pretty weird here, but I think I've almost perfectly captured Violet's skeptical baby expression.

I still don't like blind contours, but I do like the line-weight variation that this exercise gets into. I can see applying that kind of technique to drawings where people have all their fingers and everything some day.

POST-NATAL YOGA

I don't tend to make New Year's resolutions just for the hell of it. Who needs another obligation, especially right after Christmas? But this year it was unavoidable, because of yoga.

Yoga and I have a history. At this point it's actually ancient history, or pre-kids anyway which is pretty much the same thing. I still tend to think of myself as a yoga person, though, which got a little awkward when I realized that almost three years post-last-baby I still couldn't really touch my toes. Then I started to get weird joint pains. "Isn't yoga supposed to prevent this sort of thing?" I asked myself as I blissfully continued to not practice.

In a different part of ancient history, I was once staying in a cheap hostel outside of Boudhanath, Nepal. It was easy to hear other residents through the walls, including an irate American woman who was very displeased with her accommodations. "There's a pipe in my room," she complained, "and I can hear water running all the time." Could she move? No, there were no other rooms, and anyway she had made a reservation. The conflict escalated. The last thing I remember was her yelling, "BUT HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DO MY MEDITATION?"

My point is, yoga at my house is kind of like that. Today January 24, during yoga session number 19, a cat sat on my chest during fish pose, and on my back during cobra. Luckily (and atypically) no one else needed anything else until I was in the middle of final relaxation.

I read an article a while ago about meditation for parents, which I wanted to link to because it had some really good suggestions, but I couldn't find it again. The gist was that you have to go with the flow, deal mindfully with interruptions, and be committed to the practice without attachment to the sensation of concentration that you can only achieve in your wildest fantasies of not being interrupted for twenty minutes.

Anyway, that's where I'm trying to be, and to some extent it's working. I'm certainly in a different place with yoga than I was five years ago in a variety of ways. For example, I now put a blanket under my hip bones for face-down poses, because I'm sick of feeling them grind into the ground every time I practice. Amazingly, it works!

I can't say I'm unattached to the fact that I can finally touch my toes again, though.

REBLOGGING

I haven't blogged in over three months. When that happens, it's always harder to start again.

I feel compelled to apologize or explain, even though I know no one minds but me. Actually, it might even be me that I feel like apologizing to - to my concept of myself as a blogger, maybe. Bloggers don't just disappear for three months. I feel like I need to legitimize myself with promises for the future.

The thing is, five years or more in (I don't really remember) I still don't know exactly what this blog is about. I think I worry about my audience too much, which is funny, because I hardly even have one since my last address change. I worry about being a mommy blogger and then writing something scary about Dark Rituals. I worry about being a "serious" blogger and then boring people with pictures of my kids. Mostly I just worry about not posting for three months, and then I don't post anything because I'm worried.

A lot has been going on for me recently, in a mostly good way. It's nothing super huge, but it's felt kind of chaotic. I'm not great at focusing, or juggling. Sometimes I feel like a super lucky unschooling mom, sometimes I feel like a serious artist and sometimes I even get around to thinking deep thoughts. Rarely two or more at the same time, though, not to mention things like having a sudden whim to learn to program, keeping my hand in at natural medicine or having a house that anyone can ever see, ever. Five years in, I still have no idea how these things are supposed to work together. It's kind of like my blog.

CROW PRAYER FLAGS

I'm really excited to be sharing this project, because it's something I've been thinking about for over ten years. Actually, when I started thinking about animal prayer flags, it was seahorses... but now I couldn't really imagine choosing anything but crows.

Anyway, I drew these crows and made them into a Spoonflower design, which people can order and use to make their own DIY flags. You get twenty different combinations of crow and color per yard, which makes a banner about thirteen feet long. (That's pretty long. It's hard to photograph.)

In case you don't feel like sewing, I'm also offering ready-made banners at Etsy.

STREWING: MINECRAFT

So, we've been playing a lot of Minecraft around here. By we I mostly mean River, but it does rub off on everyone. Violet really likes to sing the song TNT, for example.  There is a fair amount of staring at the computer, but it's not just staring at the computer (it pretty much never is). We get huge murals of the Minecraft creatures on a near-daily basis, for one thing. We've also delved into Minecraft papercraft, and James even helped River make a couple of creatures from wood.

Since everything in Minecraft is made of blocks, lego is another very compatible medium. There is an official lego Minecraft set, but because the price went up so quickly, we've decided to stick with simpler lego tutorials for now. River even made a video of his own to show his creations! (We've discovered that you can buy legos by the piece if there are particular blocks you're missing.) River also likes to create things in the game itself. He's used tutorials like this one to teach himself to build epic sculptures of mobs like the skeleton, which involve a lot of memorization, digital navigation and general spatial skills.

Since the blocks in Minecraft are perfectly regular it's pretty hard to avoid the math implications, beginning with measuring length, width and height in block units. River often comes up with multiplication questions based on problems like "how many blocks do you need to make four legs that are three units tall?" As my mom pointed out, they are a lot like the cubes often used as manipulatives in math classes. I wanted to link to some Minecraft math demonstrations, but there are so many that it's hard to choose. Here's a search for "Minecraft math" with some interesting links, but the best bet would probably be to search for a topic of particular interest like addition - for example, this addition gate combines Minecraft, math, and basic programming concepts.

There is actually a lot of computer and tech stuff in Minecraft play. River has built some pretty impressive double-switched gates and similar machines, which I don't even completely understand. James likes to point out that he (River) has learned most of what he knows about Minecraft from other kids, both in person and on Youtube videos. Just last week we logged on to a server with other local homeschoolers, who were able to help us figure out the rules of the social game, while River was thrilled to get a  chance to share some of his technical knowledge. We're thinking of checking out the Snap Circuits Jr. kit to see if he has any interest in exploring similar concepts in three-dimensions.

In the meantime, there's a whole world to explore, full of different biomes, cities, people and materials. A world which is, apparently, larger than the whole earth. No wonder it's taking a while.


(post image from the Paradise World blog)