Before I wax poetic about EzineArticles, I want to say a great big thank you.  In marking a milestone the other day, I never expected the outpouring of kindness, support, humor, and wisdom that I received. What a rare community this is.  Thank you for all of your comments.  Heck...thanks just for reading. 

Now...back to Ezine.  Since publishing my one Squidoo lens, I've been fighting the urge to just go on to the next thing I want to write.   EZA, bless its little hearticles, has been playing coy with me.  (Didn't get approved until this afternoon.)  And, to make matters worse, my lens that I SWEAR was indexed in Google as of Thursday, mysteriously disappeared into the swirling, sucking vortex of a Google singularity.  (Oh, go index y'self, Google!)

So there I was like, eh,write that one off as a loss--and go on to the next interesting idea.  Nooooooo, not going to let myself do that.  THAT is the self-defeating behavior that I am trying to...well, defeat.  I'm going for consistency, not mere volume of writing.  Zen Master Dusan gave so much creative problem-solving attention to my dilemma that I would have hung my head in shame and gone off to sit in the dunce corner of the WA classroom if I had punted my own rewriting/backlinkiing/bookmarking responsibilties.

EZA approval, as I mentioned, had proved harder than I thought--so I made that my first priority.  I reworked and resubmitted.  (Later in the day, I had the most glorious elation of my first EZA approval--oooh, and they even gave me "expert author" status.  Uh, I don't get it.  After being told three times to rewrite/resubmit, why in the world would I quality for any extra credit?  I think they were trying to soothe my tender feelings and jolly me up to write again.  Aw, come on, little newbie.  It's all right--we still wuv you. Go get 'em, tiger....

And then a-backlinking I went.  I did what I could today--some article rewrites, EZA commenting with Squidoo link, social bookmarking submissions,  I was intent on getting all of this done before the kids got home.  The contractor was here finishing up a little carpentry while I worked.  

"Hey, look at you on your Mac all serious with those heavy-duty glasses.  Y'know, kinda like Murphy Brown.  HA HA HA...that would make me ELDIN.  Cool, right?  Want me to keep coming back to paint the same room every day?"

Oh dear.  Can't you see I'm involved in some serious BACKLINKING here?  I don't want to go sit in the virtual corner with the virtual dunce cap on!

But I digress.....It's when you're doing all of that grunt work that you appreciate picking a niche you actually enjoy.   I'm doing my little article description thing over and over thinking, "Heh-heh, yeah, I really do get a kick out of that whole dating profile thing.  If I don't make any money in IM, I could always do a whole lot more of THAT."

And then it's off to soccer and swim team practices--and the usual bits of gossip and commentary. My good friend Gina has a clipping to pass along to me--from yesterday's Washington Post. 

"Hey Maureen, did you see this article about the online dating profile writer who's rakin' in the bucks?  I saved it for you."

(Yeah, I wrote a  sassy-but-classy Craigslist ad for Gina a few months ago.  She even got a local celebrity respondent--though he did commit the unpardonable sin of taking her to Applebee's. Ahh, Craigslist.  The true test of one's art.  It is to dating profiles what free verse is to poetry.)

So, long story short--I'm digging the initial niche I chose.  Even though I am eager to go off and tackle another juicy little niche, I am going to follow through on the first one.  I am gaining more and more appreciation for sheer methodology.  One valuable thing this curriculum and this community are teaching me is, the details, the sequence, and the follow-through MATTER.   A whole lot.  The devil is in the details, as they say.

On the most practical level, I am trying to make my computer desktop organization work better for me. Everything that involves a list of links gets saved as a PDF or Word document.  I'll pull up the same document over and over and click on the links.  No more hunting around for whatever it was I saw online....  All affiliate program details are in an Excel document.  As are articles written and submitted. My favorite Wordpress plugins are in a separate folder--unzipped for quick FTP'ing.  Notes on WA lessons are copied from my site notes and saved as properly labeled Word docs.  I have flown by the seat of my pants far too often.  I need routinized workflow.

I need community too.  Thanks for offering me that!  Here's hoping I can give as much as I am getting.