Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 73

Meanwhile, on my other blogs… May 6, 2012

Don’t read all the sites I blog for? Here’s what you missed in the last week outside of HillaryDePiano.com.

E-Commerce & Social Networking Week in Review May 5, 2012
Straight from the source, here’s what happened in the world of e-commerce, social networking and selling online in the past week: Reminder: Category Changes Coming May 1st! As Spring continues to roll along and April comes to a close, we wanted to take a minute to remind our partners that category changes will go into [...]

When eve...

My 2012 Screnzy / April writing stats

For posterity, here’s the official record of my Script Frenzy 2012 win and the little chart of how my writing month shaped up.

Average of 5 pages a day? That’s about 1,250 words a day so I’m pleased about that. I owe you a post on my yearly writing goals but that will be for another day. All you need to know for now is that I’m still behind and, as usual, wondering if I made my goal too hard or if I’m a whiner. I can never be sure.

As for the month of April, I wrote a total of 33,207words. This...

In which Script Frenzy 2012 comes to a close…

One of the strangest things about these month long writing challenges like NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy is how, at the end of the month, you find yourself simultaneously completely sick of it and keen to get your normal life back and a little sad to see it go. There’s that feeling of relief from being finished while you still miss the frenzy of all that writing. You’re sick of doing all that work but once you get your normal life back, you wonder what you ever did with all this free time.

Scren...

Script Frenzy ends tonight! What to do if you haven’t hit 100 pages yet?

Book photograph with flipping pages. Français : Un livre dont les pages tournent. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To everyone who has already crossed the finish line by writing the 100th page on their scripts, I offer a hearty congratulations!

But if your page count is still a little bit less than 100 pages, you shouldn’t feel left out. There are still many hours left in the contest, plenty of time to add some more pages to your count. But even if you are at page 1, you definitely don’t want to quit...

Meanwhile, on my other blogs… April 29, 2012

Don’t read all the sites I blog for? Here’s what you missed in the last week outside of HillaryDePiano.com.

Be aggressive about finding passive income
You find a great item to sell either in your own website or on a platform like eBay. It sells well and you get a big payout. But then… that’s it. No matter how much money you made from that sale, once it’s done, so’s the income. If you want to make more money, you’ll [...]

That time I was punished for working too smart and too hard
While we’re talk...

Using ManicTime to discourage distractions, edit, find time to write & what’s holding your writing back

[image error]I want to talk about a very powerful and tool called ManicTime. This slick little program is free (with a paid version that gives you additional features) and has a host of practical applications no matter what you’re doing on your computer. But it can be a particularly useful tool for writers of both fiction and non.

Before I begin this little guide for making the most of ManicTime as a writer, I want to specify that I have only ever used the free version of this program and have found it mor...

So you’ve changed your mind after offering to be a beta reader or critique someone’s book

Image via Wikipedia

You offered to read your friend’s book. Or maybe it was a short story. Or a play. Either way, your friend wrote something and you promised to be a beta reader and give them some feedback.

Except that now you’ve changed your mind. Maybe you’ve since realized that you’re too busy and won’t have time to read it. Maybe the project is awful and you just can’t get through it. Maybe you just plain old forgot and now you’re totallyembarrassed to admit it.

Hey, you know what, it happe...

Meanwhile, on my other blogs… April 22, 2012

Don’t read all the sites I blog for? Here’s what you missed in the last week outside of HillaryDePiano.com.

In honor of the My Little Pony wedding, which of your ponies were married to each other?
Back in the early days of My Little Pony, Hasbro gave us all those brides and wedding dresses… you better believe we had some weddings. Summer did a great post tracing weddings, brides and wedding dresses throughout the history of MLP here. In honor of the Wedding of the Century on My Little Pony: Fri...

Grammar FAIL

[image error]Two women at the [a place I frequent] are making a sign & they’re trying to figure out the correct grammar of some awkward phrasing. They call me over and ask for my writer perspective. Both are retired teachers so I start (jokingly) giving them a hard time saying stuff like, “Aren’t you teachers?Shouldn’tyou know this?”

After we go back and forth for a while and decide which version is correct, one finally says, “I don’t know why I bother worrying about it. The way kids today write on their c...

What is hopefully the last post on my whooping cough…

Coughing flower! (Photo credit: Lucia..)

I was just looking over our monthly credit card statement and it tells a sad story. With the exception of Long Suffering Husband’s weekly trips to get gas, every single transaction we’ve had in the last month is either aprescriptionfrom CVS for or food. We’re both very busy at the day jobs with lots of late hours and my body’s been playing its own private version of Oregon Trail so we’ve been eating a lot of take-out or similar (such as...