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Disclaimer: I have not spent days looking about Associated Content and reading reviews and pages they host.  I am simply noting my initial reactions to the site based on the fact that I saw it listed among some of the better online sites to write for.
I’ve been tossing around the idea of actually trying to write for pay for quite a while.  Scary thought, I know.  I barely keep a consistent blog.  Whatever would I do with an editor waiting for my next clip?

I actually work better with a sense of a deadline.  From what I’ve read, a lot of people work well this way (these nifty writing sites use the technique:  NaNo, ScriptFrenzy) .  Deadlines and expectations add to one’s priorities (and allow one to learn what really matters to him/her).  A deadline also give a sense of completion, whereas a project such as a novel can seem ongoing with its many revisions and submissions.

But take an article or an assignment and go past the deadline?  For good or ill, the deadline is gone.  (Yes, I know that deadlines aren’t always craved into the bedrock of the earth for all time.)  Yes, there might be a sense of success or failure for making the date or for missing it, but there is always another assignment out there.  And someone out there is probably doing work on the same topic you are….  So you miss a by-line.  Someone else gets one.  And the world moves on.

So I haven’t been moving too fast on the idea of writing clip-sized pieces.  While I do read a lot of articles and snapshots, I read them with the goal of learning that little extra that will add some depth to the characters, worlds, and scenes in my fiction.  Alien worlds are both becoming more, and less, alien from our own.  Often I find it easier to suspend my own disbelief in a story the bigger the “bug” eyes that are in it.

(The newest version of Battlestar Galactica with its reworking of the Cylons plays on this well.  And it’s cool to see stories that are getting into my head finally in the same way that Dr. Who always did by having aliens who are human…and not.  I want to write the types of fiction I enjoy watching and reading.  Doesn’t everyone?)

So last night and this morning I took a stroll around the web after one of those ever present Examiner.com advertisements showed up on my Facebook screen.  I tend to not click the “Like” button or the little X in the corner of the advertisement without at least Googling it.  Some sites I’ve been pleasantly surprised by, and it costs me very little save a few moments of time to make a more informed decision.

As some have already written, using Examiner.com is little better than blogging.  There might be some money involved, but as you are also giving up your rights to to your work, it didn’t seem to be much to recommend it to me.  Not for the momentary glory of saying I’d gotten a by-line.

However, in reading some of these reviews, I found a few bloggers posting their own suggestions of sites they liked.  Associated Content was discussed several times (including this lovely note here by Anne Wayman which she also follows up on through her blogs).  I was intrigued enough to at least peek at the site.  Figuring that one’s blog is hardly a private project (though WordPress has some lovely privacy features built in that I have been using for some time), I started to reconsider my view on the issue.  Why not be paid to write things like this?

Well, it all comes down to Rights:

1. In Associated Content’s Master License Agreement read section 2a. Exclusive License
2. Read the Terms of Use (carefully), particularly section 4. Rights You Grant to AC

Still not completely discouraged, as many said AC paid well enough for their articles and knowing that some articles aren’t worth saving for another day, I decided to at least sign up.  If I never made a dime or even glanced at the assignments page, signing up at least game me comment rights to other people’s articles.  Since this really wasn’t about the money (yet), I chose “to learn something” as my reason for signing up.

It took me to the assignments page immediately.

The assignment list was short: 13 possible pieces, with several based on last week’s episode of American Idol performances and two on Steampunk designing

Since podcasts and videos would require more equipment than I have at the moment, I was able to eliminate five potential pieces immediately.  Then, as I haven’t actually seen a single episode of American Couch Potato, I was able to eliminate six more.  The other two pieces on Steampunk certainly had my interest, but as I’m just a Steampunk voyeur, I had to just sigh and close the page wistfully.

I did however take a moment to peek at one of the American Idol performer via Youtube.  Mr. Michael Lynche during a March performance

Not too bad, but really, not my thing.

But it might be just right for Marcus…..

A small note to a friend of mine inspired this…  She and I haven’t been that close of late, but today, for all the distance or time, miles, and disagreements, I feel so much closer to her than I have for a long time.

It comes down to trusting instincts.  It’s harder than it should be.  To trust comes hard enough for me.  I have trouble trusting myself, let alone most others.  The world seems so very big to me; I seem so very small…  It’s silly really.  I am really that small.  The world doesn’t care one toot about me.  Hooray for me!

I’m starting to see this as a good thing.

Bear with me.  My joy probably seems strange, but it’s real.

It comes from accepting that no one really should care about me either.  Nor should I care about them.  I can choose to care.  Others can choose to care.  Making such a choice gives me something, fulfilling me and my needs, gratifying my own self-interests.  Enlightened self-interest makes the world go around, so to speak.

What does this have to do with trust, or my friend’s note?

Well, I was considering why I keep trying to stay in touch with this friend of mine, even though we are so often at odds.  And the only answer that ever really comes to mind is that I really trust her.  She may piss me off, she may bore me, she may be off on another planet somewhere (figurative speaking — sort of), but barring some stupid crap in high school that all kids try to pull, she’s always done her best to keep her word.  And since I’m a stickler for justified faith ;-D , I like that in a person.

So, when my friend was having troubles with someone in her family — someone that she should be able to trust and feel secure around — because of her choices as a mother,  it brought to mind some similar issue I am having with my own mother.  And how I feel about my own mother….  (this is where instinct come in).

I don’t really like my mother.  My mom is a very standoff-ish type, with strong views on things that she isn’t afraid to forcefeed to you (for your own good of course) if she feels the situation deserves it, but mostly she would rather make faces and scoffing and grunting noises (somehow that just feels so much better to write than “shows her disdain“).  But she is my mother.  And despite the unease she inspires in me, years of reinforcement makes me continue to try to build our relationship.

I say “try” here.  Truth is–I have to try to do it.  Otherwise, I tend to just forget she’s still alive.

I don’t forget my father.  For all my father’s flaws, I knew what to expect from him.  He terrified me, but if I ever needed help from him, he was right there fumbling alongside me (or at least offering advice over the phone).  With my father, I always had a sense that he wanted to do the right thing and the best thing, even if he didn’t know often what it was.  And oddly enough, I always knew I mattered to my father.  Or maybe it isn’t all that odd.  All the pictures of my childhood show Dad carrying me on his shoulders.

Or it could be that I’m a mother myself now and I see things in my own mother’s behavior that I’m afraid of in mine.

This is, after all the woman that chase away the horrid “lactation consultant” that I was given at the hospital, when both my son and I were so very frustrated by the “expert’s” poking and prodding and hovering.  My mom was at that point in time my greatest savior, and I was amazed by how she stepped forward and protected us.  Both Dan and I were too tired and emotionally battered by the whole experience (I swear, four full runs of Pitocin should earn a woman an Olympic medal, and her partner a bronze).  Nothing had gone the way we’d wanted, except that we had this beautiful little boy to care for, and this so called expert who had never nursed (let alone have a child) was giving me a guilt trip because she’d never dealt with size J-cups before….

For a time Mom and I were close, but….  maybe there was more unease there than I knew?  maybe because my son hadn’t had the emotional flash of joy and relief that I had he was better able to sense what I’d always felt before about Mom?  Whatever the cause, Marcus was never comfortable around my mother.  Yet, I still felt I should make sure they spent time together.  I tried to bring him to meet with her–he cried a lot whenever she was around.  I tried to let her touch him–he cried more, and I felt queasy.

Only a few months later…  my three month old son, my little snuggle boy….  At one of those little lunch meetings that were usually the only place I felt comfortable meeting Mom with Marcus, we were saying good-bye’s in the parking lot.  I was just getting ready to put Marcus in his car seat, and my mom asked if she could hold him for a moment.  He didn’t want to go and squawked to high heaven.  And after a few seconds, only a few seconds, of “oh, come now, let Grandma hug you” and “Shush“, she slapped him.  I was staggered.  I was horrified.

And worse yet, I knew in my gut that this was wrong, and all I was able to do was take him from her and set him in his carseat….  Heck, I didn’t even cuddle him, stunned little thing.  All I could think of was that I needed to get away from her, and the fastest way to do that was get him buckled in and say “Good-bye.”  I don’t remember exactly what I said.  I know it was along the lines of “I’ve really got to go.  I’ll talk to you later.”  No scolds, no accusations…  I didn’t really know what to say.

So, instincts….  I should learn to trust them more.  But even more than that, I want to write this because there is a woman who I’ve never doubted was a safe person to leave my son with, who in some ways, I trust even more than myself at times with him…

I wanted to write it for a friend.

I’ve been having a delightful time of late reading (really catching up because so much is already out there) other people’s blogs.  The Blogosphere is quite the happening place of late and since I’ve always loved to “People Watch” my PC seems to be the next best thing to sitting in the mall with a pen, paper and a Chai latte.  And I get to do my laundry and dusting too!

Of course, the people I find in the mall are people who tend to be the kind who like malls.  Good for me, since I really hate malls and this opens a new window to the world for me.  Of course, I do love Chai, and spending time in places that sell great lattes tends to lead me to the kind people who like tea and books and pens and paper….

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts by people who are in the Unschooling community (if such thing really exists).  I know I’ve mentioned this before, since I have a friend who is actively and radically unschooling her two children and we’ve come to verbal blows about how my fascination of her lifestyle flows.  I do think we both have a better understanding of the differences in the ways our minds work now. but it was a long hard road.

Anyway, the truth is I do see what these people are saying in my own experiences with my son.  Marcus is constantly amazing me with the things he does.  His delight with languages and with numbers, with writing…  I truly must get the scanner hooked up and post of some thing things he’s done, if only because I’ll be able to enjoy the time looking over his creations.  And if anyone wants to help choose some good Spanish — English readers for him, I’ll head over to the bookstore in an instant.  French, Spanish, German, Japanese…  He’s already moved onto the For Dummies series just because he read the titles on the bookshelf.

We certainly practice strewing here.

However, we did still choose to send our son to Early Childhood Schooling at Doane Stuart.  And that doesn’t really fit the model of the Unschooling lifestyle as I’ve seen it.  My reasons were many at the time.Here’s a few:

1) I was feeling overwhelmed at the time and felt I could not be the mother my son needed without risking real harm to him (I had, and still have, a lot of childhood issues to deal with that I didn’t want to subject to; fortunately we’ve both grown and changed over the year).
2) All my attempts to really connect with the local homeschool groups seemed to work well in the Ether, but never in person…after the umpteenth time of telling Marcus we would be meeting some other kids at a playground or a park or a restaurant, only to find no one there, I felt so frustrated and depressed.  Yes, we still had some fun, but I could see that how much it was hurting him and how much he was beginning to doubt it when Mommy would make plans.  A school setting gave my son a security I was clearly failing in giving him.
3) Silly as it may sound, I just couldn’t bring myself to see my son risking himself learning some of those basic skills (scissor use, playing on monkey bars, etc) that so many kids do without freaking. And yet, I knew I should not let my fears for him rule his life.

I could go on, but except for the yearly decision to continue at DS or try something new, the reasons aren’t interesting to most people.  The effects perhaps are.

Truth be told, it was a rocky road.  I now am sure that my fears of Marcus being too young to be away from home so long were founded.  If I’d had to send him to a school that wasn’t as open about parental involvement as DS, I’d have pulled him out  early on, and the expense be damned.  Fortunately I was able to have those special Tuesday Concert days with him, take him out early for special Mommy/Marcus times on Fridays, come into class and read and paint, go to the theatre and on field trips with him, smile at him through the window, be there for his nurse visit.  Heck, on my “in the city” days, I’m as likely to be on the campus as off it.  I’ve even written some of my story in there.

Parenting is letting go.  I’m convinced of that, and I had to let go of my son a lot this year.  But in letting go, no matter how one does it, I feel the goal is to allow the child we are raising to go out and take the world into his/her hands and say “This is mine, I love it, and I want to experience it fully!”

Our own journey is an ever changing one that we continue to look at with considering eyes, adjusting our course to see what direction we feel will best get us to that goal.  Will we send Marcus to school next year? As I’ve told him, if he wants to go, we’ll make it work.  If not, we can find other options.

And just for the record, and in honor of those “cow trails” that Dee and I love to follow…  This was not at all what I intended to write about.  But clearly it is what I needed to write about.

Maybe I’ll even get back to the in depth analysis of this delightful Blog post that had inspired me to pick up the keyboard and stop crocheting that blanket I’m trying to finish making.

I really need to stop spending time reading the news.  It’s too depressing to have all my horrific visions of the past, the future, and most of all, the present proven true.  My mother was right about so many things, and if anything, that’s even more terrifying than most everything else.  Good thing that even when I hated listening to her, I did, and when I didn’t want to believe her, I didn’t just throw all she said into my personal \dev\null file.

Today a friend of mine of Facebook posted one of those links.  You know the kind.   Those links that make you sigh, think, ponder, nod your head, and want to throw up.  For me, the effect of this post was doubly nauseating, since I have one of those “loves” for England and Classical music.  I am not wholly blind to the horrible behavior of the British government (one cannot spend any amount of time studying world history and not know a bit about the sheer terrible-ness of England).  Nor am I such a rabid Classical music fanatic that I cannot appreciate how some might dislike it so much that their dislike becomes a tool in the hands of another.  After all, I remember my own father trying to “teach me” to like Classical, Talk Radio and what he called “Real Country“.  Eventually, he did achieve his purpose.  I cannot imagine limiting my musical tastes to just what was popular in my youth.

In any event, my real dismay wasn’t from the police state that England becoming.  It was … well, as I was growing up my mother always used to warn me to be wary of times of peace and prosperity.  Not because there must eventually be a fall; though I can only assume that she meant that as well.

Mom saw the use of people by governments and the abandonment of people by their own communities.  She saw wars being driven by a need to (as she put it so very many times) “give the young men something to do besides hang out in the streets and get girls pregnant”.  She saw the bread, the circuses, the ways Rome tried to hold on to its burgeoning empire, and she would warn me over and over that we were ripe for another war.

I remember talking with my mother-in-law about how there are no places for young people to gather anymore.  To my embarrassment, I confess to being disturbed (momentarily, thankfully!) last week in Panera when a group of teens walked in during “School Hours”, simply because it wasn’t what I was used to.

But really, if kids or adults or elderly people or… can’t hang out and talk with each other over a drink, then what?  Most, I would warrant, teens just want a place to spend some time, talk, have fun and simply “Be”.  Yet, that insidious little voice that has seen bad behavior from one (it would behoove us to remember that history and the news reward the “bad guys” with attention, not the plenitude of “good guys” out there), and it says “Beware” without proof.

Quite the commentary on the human condition…  I’m still puzzling out what it means, but I think I’d like a new commentator.

There was a lot more in my mother’s words of wisdom, stuff I’m still trying to gather up the self-comfort to admit I believe and consider on a daily basis.  I do know that the world isn’t any less lovely for her reflections, but only because I can at times see a pretty sunset and remind myself that all is going to be what it will be, no matter what, so I might as well enjoy myself.

—————————————–

And I do so wish my mind wouldn’t walk out the door whenever I start typing one of these pages….  *sighs*

Inanity seems to be spreading.  I keep trying to sort through all the twaddle and detritus that had taken over my daily affairs, but the more I clear, the more I find.  Quicksand of the mind….

I just finished an amusing jaunt through Dustin Curtis‘s Blogzine–a fun place to spend some time and consider design issues.  I also have been spending far too much of my energy studying NYS vaccine law and what the requirements are for possibly getting an exemption.

Ah, yes…  I hear it now.  She’s one of THOSE people.  Well, not really.  I’m not categorically against vaccines;  I just have watched my son have reactions two times now that increased in severity each time, and I would like to avoid a worse reaction.  The problem?  Well, my son goes to preschool, he LOVES preschool, and without a medical exemption (his reaction wasn’t labeled as “severe enough” to warrant not giving him the full spectrum of vaccines at his next appointment), it’s pretty much an all or nothing situation.  All vaccines and admission in school…or no vaccines and possibly no admission in school.  And as I said, I’m not against vaccines in general.

To top it all off, I don’t like the “one size WILL fit all” mentality that is part of vaccination.  The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics likes to play the benefits outweigh the risks, but as a friend of mine could tell you, being the 1 out of the 1 in a 1 million still sucks.   And I’m selfish enough (and, according to some, immoral enough) to think I want my son to not suffer, even if it might mean someone else might someday suffer for it.  But then, this is the not-quite 4year old who just came up to tell me he is an “ent-to-mologist: that means I study insects, Mommy”, taught me the 4 extra letters in the Spanish alphabet versus the English one, can do his multiplication tables up to 12×14, and likes to tell us what fraction of pizza or pie he has gotten…

And throughout all this, I’m still working on my various character sections of Courting the Swan Song.  Lately I’ve been trying to merge Atyr and ‘Listii’s stories.  The weaving of these two characters is both pivotal and intense, as well as a bit hard to picture, since they spend so much of their lives being controlled (directly) by others.  Yet whenever I try to imagine a break from their stories by writing about Alanii, the story gets harder to visualize.  I see Alanii as the man he’s become, not the youth he was (-is- in CTSS), as Kieri’s counter in Release, a man already weary and jaded by all he’s seen and done.  His POV should be easier than the other two, yet he’s the one I can’t get close to anymore.

Ah, well…  Pen to paper time.