writing

Castration, tax dodgers, flowers & Assange – strange search terms that have brought people to my website

If they're looking for info on these, they've come to the wrong website! Pic by me.

It’s fascinating to look behind the scenes at a website to view the search terms that have brought people to visit.

Of those visitors to my site that were the result of a search engine search, the single biggest number came via searches for the name of the person who produced the vulgar T shirts I blogged about on a couple of occasions. That topic also provoked the largest single number of comments on any blog posts I’ve done, not all of them pleasant.

The second single biggest number of hits has come, not surprisingly, from searches for F Words – though I suspect some of these visitors may have been looking for something rather different!

The third biggest number of visits resulted from searches on my name. Again, some may have been hoping for something else – other Sue Fentons are available, so many, in fact, that I did a blog on the subject. http://fwords.co.uk/2011/06/23/me-myself-and-i-%E2%80%93-and-the-other-ones-%E2%80%93-how-i-found-i-wasn%E2%80%99t-unique/

A huge variety of search terms have brought other visitors. Some of the terms are really rather bizarre. I blame myself for this – it’s all because of my tendency to chunter on about random topics instead of sticking to the initial purpose of my blog, which was to promote my skills and knowledge as a freelance journalist. It’s funny – you start off with a policy of earnestly discussing missing apostrophes and bad spelling and before you know it, you’re rambling on with tongue in cheek about bacon sandwiches, corporate tax dodging and fantasy dog breeding. That’s the beauty of blogging, I suppose – it brings out the true inner writer – but of course Google and the other search engines are always lurking about taking notes and suggesting you as a source of fascinating information on subjects that (in my case) include: 

Bagology

American death penalty

Greek flowers

Assange

Coastal pathway

Ode to a Nightingale translated into Arabic

Some are really rather bizarre, since I don’t remember having actually written anything on these specific topics – still, Google appears to think I’m an authority:

Lapland immigration strategy

Hairy arms

William Hague fascist

Chihuahua fights

Indecent behaviour within the British Army

Naked lady jumping into water

Ugly gorillas

Topman tax dodge is quite a favourite term – I show up well on this one due to a couple of posts I did on the subject a while back.

Another favourite one is piglet castration and I wasn’t even responsible for this one – it was a guest blog written by a college friend who breeds pigs. Another guest blog, by an journalists’ union official, got me hits from people searching on sacked for Twitter comments and similar phrases.

Other phrases that have brought visitors here include:

Crap press releases

Dogging

Obnoxious responses to Facebook misspellings

Larry the prime minister’s cat

Jane Asher

Commas

Daddy long legs porn

Space Hijackers

Italian tableware

Swearing

Arms trade hoax

Circumcision

Troy David

London protest

Bad English.

Of course, it’s even nicer to be found through searches that are actually relevant to my work as a journalist. One visitor today found me after searching “I want to find a freelance journalist in Surrey”. They (or someone) even looked at my online CV, details of qualifications and clients and fees. My curiosity is now piqued – who are they, and did they find what they were looking for, or did my chunterings on about bacon and Lapland send them scurrying off to get the Yellow Pages?

Lazy writers who produce shit because they just don’t care about getting it right first time

GUEST BLOG BY MICHAEL LAROCCA, http://www.editormichael.com/

I was editing a company’s bid on a project, and they were inconsistent in how they spelled the potential customer’s name and their own company name. I am not making this up.

I’ve said this before. If I’m reading or editing something, and I get the urge to ask the author “Do you even care?”, that’s bad. Very bad.

If you’re writing a letter or bid, I suppose you can get away with slapping any damn thing on the paper and saying, “My editor can fix it. That’s his job.” But really, why would you do that? If you don’t care about the damn thing, don’t write the damn thing.

In this case, I suppose someone (not me) could approach the owner of the company and say, “Your bid writer just doesn’t give a shit. Fire his ass.” But since this bid was written by the company owner, kicking her onto the unemployment line probably isn’t an option. I’ll just fix the damn thing.

If you’re an aspiring novelist, you don’t have this luxury. You’d damn well better care.

Seriously. Many would-be authors send me half-ass shit, and they send major publishers half-ass shit, as if they’ve done enough and are entitled to be lazy about making it readable because it’s just soooooo fucking great and they are ARTISTS.

Nope. Not on this planet, son.

Do you know what happens to people who write shit, but care enough to make it the best shit they can write? The shit gets better, one day it isn’t shit, and one day it’s published, and one day it’s even read.

Do you know what happens to gifted artists who are too lazy to improve? They get rejected, they get mocked on Slush Pile Hell and/or my blog, they pay to self-publish or fall for a Publish America scam, and they wonder why nobody reads their shit. Shit they couldn’t be bothered to read themselves after they slapped it onto the paper any old way.

I can’t believe I’m even writing this shit. How can you NOT care about your own damn writing?

People are crazy.

P.S. The customer in the first paragraph is also too damn lazy to run a spell checker. I’m gonna raise my prices on her ass.

Michael LaRocca is an American book writer and editor and blogger who currently lives in Thailand. He has written nine published books and edited more than 300. 

Exhausted but still writing: the happy fatigue of an up-at-dawn blogger

GUEST BLOG BY LORA ROSSI, http://www.thehugginghome.com

OK, I admit it. I am exhausted. I am tired. I am overwhelmed. In short, I need to take more of my own advice.

I started this blog as a fun little hobby because I felt I had a lot to say and I tend to express myself best through the written word. Simple, I thought. And it is simple. But it has now taken on a life of its own. Or perhaps more accurately, I have breathed life into it and my readers have breathed life into it and now it has become something that people – friends, family and strangers – actually follow. Cool!

But I have always been somewhat of a perfectionist. A little anal retentive, if I may. If I do something, I like to do it to the best of my ability and when I see momentum I don’t want it to let up. I don’t want to let anyone down. I don’t want to let myself down.

So I push. I push and I market and I social media like a madwoman sometimes.

Because I have discovered that this writing thing…this blogging thing…this connecting with others thing…well…I love it. I think I have found my calling in life – besides being a mother. That – I know – has always been a calling. And Lord knows I answered that call people!

But that is really all part of what I am oh so un-eloquently (is that even a word??) trying to say here. My callings intertwine. Being a mother and reaching other people – especially moms – through my writing. Writing about motherhood. About how wonderful and frustrating and magical and difficult it is all at the same time.

But as I sit here writing, it is just after 7:00am, my baby boy is playing happily in his crib and my other two sons are still sleeping. I got out of bed when my husband rose for work because I wanted to write. I needed to write. I actually need to sleep…but I felt I needed to write more. And let me tell you peeps, anything that gets me up in the morning like that…well…I must either be passionate about it, have no choice about it, or be getting paid for it.

These days, what gets me out of bed is my kids and my writing. Pure love and passion. I do get paid for some of my writing, and it is my goal to get to the point where this is happening more…but for now, I will just keep wagon-training.

Ahhhhh…but I digress. I am famous for that. Maybe if I stop getting so off track people would pay me more for my writing.)

So, yeah, I am exhausted. So much so that I had to look up “exhausted” because I can’t remember how to spell it. Actually, for someone who loves to write so much, I can’t spell to save my life. Honestly, I am better at math. And I know I have not caught all the little mistakes here on my blog and that bugs me. It bugs my parents too because they like to point out typos. If my mom could get in and fix my typos she would.

My parents are pillars of support. They are not telling me to be reasonable. They are not telling me to stop this writing silliness and go back to my nice comfortable life as an Association Executive making a very decent, reliable salary. No. They are actually telling me they have never seen me so happy. Too bad I may have to go back. At least for a while. We will see how that unfolds. But my parents are telling me to follow my heart. They always have and they always will. My parents are awesome.

So Mom…Dad… I konw tihs is sepelld wonrg, but you can raed it awynays, rirhgt? Isn’t it cool how out brain works? How, as long as the first and last letters are in the proper place, the rest of them can be jumbled up and out brains can still read the words?

I guess that is kind of related to what I am saying. Things in my life seem jumbled up. So much is going on. I need to take better care of myself. But, all this extra “work” I am doing..my writing, promoting my writing…it does not feel like work much of the time. It somehow makes me feel happy. Overwhelmed, but in a good way, if that makes sense.

But I do need to be careful to remain balanced. I sometimes get so wrapped up in being a mom and this writing thing that things like eating right, getting enough exercise, getting enough sleep…they fall by the wayside a bit and I have to watch it.

But I continue on, riding the wave, sometimes falling, always getting back up. Hugging my kids tight, playing my keyboard like a piano, sharing my heart with whoever wants a little piece.

And now, time for breakfast.

Lora Rossi is a writer, artist and blogger based in Canada. She specialises in parenting, family, kids and authentic living. Lora describes herself as “a rule breaker, a cookie baker, a lawn raker, an earth quaker, a morning waker, an ass shaker, a for heaven saker, a home maker and most of all a hug taker”.

Nominations for the crappiest press release headlines & intros of the week

Good headlines and intros are vital to a press release’s chances of making it into print. A good headline sums up what the story is about, enabling the editor to decide whether or not it’s worth reading on.

A good intro encapsulates the gist of the story in one paragraph. This saves the editor from having to read the whole thing to find out what the story is. It also means that if there’s space for only one or two pars, a time-pressed or lazy journalist doesn’t have to sub too heavily to express the key facts concisely.

Writers of press releases often forget – or ignore – these basic principles; they write irrelevant, punny headlines or put the gist of their story half-way down the release, where it can be overlooked.

Their aim seems to be to entice the reader with flowery language, to charm them with linguistic creativity. Wake up! This isn’t romantic fiction, to be lingered over and savoured in the bath – editors haven’t got time for that kind of thing. What they want is relevant, to-the-point information, and quickly.

Writing a press release isn’t a creative writing competition; it’s about conveying the most important and relevant facts as quickly and concisely as possible.

Editors make snap judgments on press releases. What is the story here? Is it relevant to my readership? Tell me NOW.

If the crux of the story isn’t clear from the headline, the email might not even be opened. Then, if the relevance isn’t immediately apparent from the intro, the release will get trashed. Or the editor will waste time ploughing through flowery prose to discover what the point of the story is, then have to rewrite it, and get so pissed off in the process they’ll be prejudiced against that particular company in future.

Here are some examples from the past week.

Consider this headline:

“Falling leaves announce the seasons [sic] of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.

What’s that about? Any guesses? This release is helpfully telling us it’s autumn. But we knew that, so why bother issuing a press release about it? It’s also telling us the writer knows Keats (though not well enough to quote him correctly). So what? Of what possible relevance is that to an editor?

The writer doesn’t get to the point until paragraphs 3 and 4, when he/she reluctantly reveals the information that increasing numbers of gardeners are using machines to clear fallen leaves, leading to record sales for a manufacturer of garden equipment. That should have been the intro; and there’s really no reason for quoting 19^th century poets in a story whose most likely outlet is business or gardening publications.

That one isn’t the only company yearning to convey the astonishing news that autumn is coming. This is the opening para of another release: “Soon summer draws to a close, the temperature drops and we get the urge to create a warm atmosphere indoors.”

So bleeding what?  Are you a PR or a weather forecaster? The story, that a well-known designer is launching some coffee cups and candle-holders, seeps out eventually but you get the feeling the writer would rather be doing Mills & Boon than this kind of thing.

The basic principles of writing press releases are similar to those of writing news, so many of the best PRs have come from a newspaper background. Others have not experienced the discipline instilled by journalistic training; they’re possibly the ones who try to attention-grab with a “creative” (long-winded and irrelevant) approach.

Sometimes, though, it’s the client’s fault. They love the idea of “getting into print” and they get all carried away and fancy themselves as JK Rowling, and the PR is too weak-willed or jaded to argue about it.

One can imagine the conversation:

Client: Not sure I like that headline – “Company XYZ invents cure for all known diseases and wins Nobel Prize for Medicine”.

PR: What don’t you like about it?

Client: Well, it’s not very imaginative, is it? It’s not going to win us the Nobel Prize for Literature, ha ha.

PR: Er, what would you suggest?

Client: Well, how about a few romantic allusions to falling leaves and damp weather; you know, let the reader know autumn’s coming?

PR (rocking, and moaning softly): Whatever.

Here’s another headline, from a telecoms company, that leaves us in the dark about what the story is:

The Smartphone fear factor

What does it mean? All this tells us is that someone, somewhere, is scared of telephones. Not so, as it turns out. The story is actually about mobile phone companies missing a trick by making their products too complicated for the needs of an increasingly important demographic, the over-65s. The old dears aren’t actually frightened of smartphones – they simply find them unnecessarily complicated and are quite happy with a simple, cheap, pay-as-you-go phone. The only fear factor operating in this scenario is the writer’s fear of of the effort involved in coming up with a meaningful headline.

Here’s another one that won’t get to the point:

Warning! Is Killer Water Hiding in Your Household?

I don’t know. I have no idea. What are you talking about?

Another daft question is used as the opening sentence. When is Water in Your Home at its Most Dangerous? For goodness’ sake! I don’t know! Why don’t you tell me? Go on, you’re obviously longing to!

The story here doesn’t start emerging until paragraph 4 and isn’t fully out of the closet until para 6. It’s that a London man has invented a device that prevents dangerous mould from growing in houses and infecting people with respiratory ailments. Could be interesting to business and technology journalists and local papers as well as health and science reporters – but would they bother reading the release having seen that headline?

Examples of good press release headlines and intros to come in another post!

Pic credit: Salvatore Vuono, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=659

In which I wonder if social media is really for me…

Parts of this great big interweb intrigue and absorb me. I love the randomness of Twitter. Among the rash of posts about the Norwegian massacres and Amy Winehouse’s death, everyday life went on as normal. Metrobus announced that a new route would be in effect from August on Route 93 in Surrey, Leyton Orient Football Club (according to a retweet) has completed its summer signings. And a BBC travel reporter described being stuck in a “mahoosive” traffic jam on the north circular.

Young people, we’re told, stay in and do social networking because they like it. Old people stay in because they like watching the telly – they’ve heard of social networking but don’t like it. I’m in an awkward kind of middle ground; I’m doing social networking in a sort of half-arsed way, because everyone says I should, but I’d secretly rather go out and talk to human beings.

The pubs are consequently only half full, their populations consisting of middle-aged people talking to other middle-aged people and tutting about the few under-25s who’ve not understood the “social” media rules and hence sneak into the pub but spend the evening ignoring their companions and poring over their mobile phones.

Apparently, fooling around on the computer is the only way to get work these days. In the old days, getting work was all about personal recommendation. Imagine the scene. Two journo types in a pub, 10 years ago.

Bloke A: Crap, I need to get someone to do that 2,000-word feature by Thursday. Know anyone?

Bloke B: Mm, I used to work with this bird called Sue Fenton. NCTJ-qualified, knows what a deadline is, good at research, can understand a brief – even her spelling’s not bad if you can catch her sober. And she’s desperate at the moment, I gather. Here’s her number. Your round, anyway.

Bloke A: OK, I’ll give her a ring. Same again?

Picture the scene today. Two journo types sitting in their respective living rooms.

Bloke A: Crap, I need someone to do that 2,000 word feature by Thursday. Know anyone? Preferably someone you’ve never met and never worked with, of course? If you haven’t got the first idea who they are, all the better.

Bloke B: Mm, well I’ve got 214 friends on Facebook and about double that on LinkedIn. Why don’t you trawl through the lot of them and see if any of them have failed a Meeja Studies degree? Cheapest way of doing it. Take you all morning, of course.

Bloke A: Oh, bollocks.

Maybe I’m just bitter because I’m not down the pub on a Saturday night disapproving of the young people.

The tragedy of drugs and the creative personality

A bloke I was chatting to at a house party last weekend, at which most of the guests were musicians, told me he used to be a prolific songwriter, but had barely written a word since giving up marijuana two years ago. His skill for creative expression had disappeared, along with the drugs in his body.

The link between creativity and addiction is a common one. The Romantic poets of the 19^th century are a case in point, with their penchant for laudanum. Samuel Taylor Coleridge apparently dreamt 100 or so lines of his epic poem Kubla Khan while in a laudanum-induced sleep, but most of the words never made it to paper, because while trying to scribble down what he remembered from the dream he was interrupted by a knock at the door. The “person from Porlock” who disturbed his work subsequently became a byword for anyone who interrupts important work, in particular of a creative nature.

Coleridge’s death in 1834 is believed to have been connected with his opium addiction and there have been many more cases since then of creative types meeting their ends as the result of drugs and alcohol.

Today’s tragic death of Amy Winehouse is just the latest, with many of the zillions of Tweets flying about this afternoon commenting on the connection between her creative success and her addiction problems.

My house party bloke – albeit with a drug of choice that was not likely to prove fatal – is one of those who has opted for health over the tempting attractions of a creative lifestyle.

I wondered, is there a choice? Can creativity come without the presence of artificial stimulants? A friend of mine who’s in Alcoholics Anonymous says there are some well-known names in the music industry who attend meetings locally. Maybe they’ve got to that place where they can produce good material while staying clean. As another friend, who’s himself a musician, pointed out, the prodigious work churned out by creative types while under the influence might, actually, be not as good as what they might have done had they taken the giant leap of faith to do it sober.

Why a writer should never be her own sub-editor: going crazy over a conflict of interest

It’s unusual, to say the least, for one person to be both contributor and editor, at the same time, on the same publication.

But I once found myself in the situation where I was both editing an industry yearbook (in my capacity as an editor for one company) and writing a submission for publication in that booklet (in my capacity as public relations consultant for another company).

It was a situation fraught with interest. There was the obvious issue of whether there was a conflict of interest. I consulted with the other parties involved and we eventually decided that there probably was, but that it didn’t really matter, since no-one else could be bothered doing any of the work involved. The job had to be done, so I – and I – might as well be the one/s to do it.

So I was left to baffle myself with the resulting dilemmas, such as having to convince myself that I should carry in full the article without editing it too much, and having to rebuke myself if the article was not up to scratch, or not in on time.

The article I wrote was rather over-long, coming in at some 2,200 words against a limit of 1,800 stated in the brief that I’d written and sent to myself. But I was rather pleased with the end result and felt it couldn’t possibly be bettered or shortened – every syllable was good stuff and surely the editor could squeeze in the extra 400 words, perhaps by using fewer images? Those word counts that editors give you are only guidelines anyway, and I didn’t really have time to go through it trimming out bits here and there – that would only have spoiled a perfectly good article.

You can imagine how annoyed I was when I received that article from myself. What is it with these hack journalists that they can’t stick to the word count? I’d specified 1,800 words as a limit for a reason, and here was this person merrily sending in 2,200 despite what she’d been told. Use fewer images, she suggested – well sorry, lovey, but as editor I have to strike the right balance between text and images and I can’t just ‘squeeze’ in an extra 400 words without the finished page looking unattractively text-heavy. I was sorely tempted to send the piece back to myself with instructions to cut it to the word count specified, but time was getting on, so it looked like it would be down to me to do the job – golly how I fumed!

It was the same with the deadline. I couldn’t get the article to myself exactly on time but it’s well known that deadlines are moveable feasts, not set in stone as it were. After all, the booklet wasn’t due to go to press for weeks, I had loads of other stuff on – and I had a bit of a drinking sesh on at the weekend so couldn’t do it then.

Well, when I eventually received the piece from myself three days after the deadline I’d stated, I was a bit miffed to say the least. There’s this assumption that when you set a deadline you don’t really mean it – I swear that contributors look at the deadline and deliberately add on a few days just to annoy, as though to show how much in demand they are elsewhere. They forget that a publication date of May means everything’s got to be in the design studio at the start of April to take its place in the queue for the overworked designer, and then wait its turn at the printer and then the mailing house. When stuff comes in three days late, it’s no skin off the writer’s nose – bloody woman was probably down the pub when she could have been working on the piece! – but it means three days less for me to turn the whole shebang around.

But I’m sure you’ll appreciate my pique when I saw, on seeing the finished page, that some of my best sentences had been chopped out by the editor. What is it with these red-pen merchants that they can’t tell good literature from a sprig of parsley, and go blithely hacking their way mercilessly through someone else’s hard-written work?

In the end I went quietly out of my mind and, meeting myself in the bathroom mirror one afternoon, exchanged unforgivable words with myself. We weren’t on speaking terms for ages afterwards.