Thus endeth December
Alas, no fiction this month after all. T.T
It's been a busy Bright Hub month though. I wrote seven new articles and two more guide blurbs. Also, all the articles from the beginning of the year have started coming back to haunt me en masse. Bright Hub has a "stale" feature, where each article has a 9-month timer on it. At the end of the countdown, it appears in a stale queue, and we have to reread them, make updates and/or tweak the SEO if necessary, etc. It's a good way of making sure everything on the site is up-to-date, so I'm in favor of it in the abstract, but actually having to wade through them - especially old gaming articles for games I haven't thought about in months - is kind of a pain. >.>
Anyhoo, the articles...
How Igneous Rocks Form: Bowen's Reaction Series - this is the sequel to last month's Types of Igneous Rocks. Originally it was a tangent in the middle of the chemical composition section, but the editor was right to point out that it was off-topic. Now it's its own article. :)
Bubble Island Strategy Guide - it's a puzzle game on Facebook that bears a striking resemblance to Snood. Since I've played Snood for decades, coming up with a bunch of pointers was pretty easy. ;) I suppose for my next trick I ought to write about Snood itself, but I've now used up all my thunder...
Scientific Classification of Insects - this one nearly killed me. It sounded like a great idea back when I thought of it several months ago, right after I wrote the blurbs to Scientific Classification and Insects. But man, there are a LOT of insects! T.T Still, I managed to be both concise and comprehensive, and there are lots of pretty pictures.
Why Zynga Games Suck - Basically this is me ranting about the downward spiral of Cafe World, Treasure Isle, and Frontierville. All games I started out liking until they became stupid in all the same ways.
It's a new article in the real-world sense, but the main reason I wrote it (aside from needing to rant) was to fill a slot duplicate that had started out being a repeat of my Yakuza Lords article, then inadvertently became a repeat of my History of Facebook Farm Games article. I'd written the latter to replace the Yakuza Lords repeat, and the editor told me to pitch it as a new article and quit messing with the old slot. But then he must've forgotten the whole thing because he sent my edits through. So I had to write this one to replace that one. :p Luckily, he didn't argue about it this time around, so now I have three articles where there was only going to be one. ;)
Yakuza Lords, meanwhile, is scheduled to die at the end of January. It was a good game at the time I reviewed it, but they doubled the friends-needed requirement just days after the thing was published, and that caused a lot of people I knew to stop playing. Oh well.
Backyard Monsters Strategy Guide - This one was also semi-unplanned. The two main articles about the game were already written (a "guide" and a "review"), but I had all sorts of stuff I wanted to say about camp building, so I found a couple likely keywords and wrote it anyway. Lo and behold, it's taking off in exactly the same way as my Kingdoms of Camelot article - which I'd also written from exactly that same mindset. Clearly I should play more PvP games with camp building. ;)
Right now it's in second place, viewcountwise, right behind the KoC article. It'll be interesting to see what happens when next month starts and all the counters go back to zero. Which article will reign supreme? :D
The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium Theorem - A basic mathematical concept from population genetics. I go over how the math works, what the theorem is for, and why it's important.
There's a followup keyword I could use for a third article in the series (first was What is an Allele? which I wrote several months ago and which basically sank like a rock... all of my genetics articles seem to do that. Luckily, now that they're getting into the stale queue, I can get a good close look at their SEO to see why that is.) The sad thing is, I'm generally not that interested in the details of genetics as a whole. My main motive for writing this was just to have something in the Genetics section that isn't about medicine. All the article suggestions in the list are always about obscure human genetic diseases, which annoys me. Anyhoo, so I'll probably get around to writing the third one at some point, and then maybe I'll brush up on quantitative genetics too, to see if there's anything basic to write about there. I suspect I have this particular market cornered, at least.
What is an Ecosystem? - I have high hopes for this one. Basically I wrote down the basic general definition at the top, then went through and expounded at length on each of the individual parts. The main editor liked it. We'll see how it does next year. ;)
Guide to Geology - My intro blurb about geology. :) I have a degree in it, I ought to know what I'm talking about, right?
Guide to Evolution - This one was kind of tricky. My first thought was "evolution by natural selection and all its splendiforous wonders!" Then I looked up the SEO, and everyone searching about it was interested in either human evolution or evolution vs. creationism. T.T Then I looked up the existing articles on Bright Hub, and I saw stuff like "evolution of human resource management." TT.TT So I ended up trying to be as broad as possible... At the time it went up, the page didn't exist, so it was just the intro with nothing linked. Now there's actual articles, and about half are actually science-related, so yay. ;)
I guess that pretty much covers things, writing-wise. Next month? Who knows. I need to find out just when the spring sampling cruises are starting up. I'm kind of burnt out on nonfiction writing too. Maybe if I've got nothing else going on, I'll focus on fiction instead.
It's been a busy Bright Hub month though. I wrote seven new articles and two more guide blurbs. Also, all the articles from the beginning of the year have started coming back to haunt me en masse. Bright Hub has a "stale" feature, where each article has a 9-month timer on it. At the end of the countdown, it appears in a stale queue, and we have to reread them, make updates and/or tweak the SEO if necessary, etc. It's a good way of making sure everything on the site is up-to-date, so I'm in favor of it in the abstract, but actually having to wade through them - especially old gaming articles for games I haven't thought about in months - is kind of a pain. >.>
Anyhoo, the articles...
How Igneous Rocks Form: Bowen's Reaction Series - this is the sequel to last month's Types of Igneous Rocks. Originally it was a tangent in the middle of the chemical composition section, but the editor was right to point out that it was off-topic. Now it's its own article. :)
Bubble Island Strategy Guide - it's a puzzle game on Facebook that bears a striking resemblance to Snood. Since I've played Snood for decades, coming up with a bunch of pointers was pretty easy. ;) I suppose for my next trick I ought to write about Snood itself, but I've now used up all my thunder...
Scientific Classification of Insects - this one nearly killed me. It sounded like a great idea back when I thought of it several months ago, right after I wrote the blurbs to Scientific Classification and Insects. But man, there are a LOT of insects! T.T Still, I managed to be both concise and comprehensive, and there are lots of pretty pictures.
Why Zynga Games Suck - Basically this is me ranting about the downward spiral of Cafe World, Treasure Isle, and Frontierville. All games I started out liking until they became stupid in all the same ways.
It's a new article in the real-world sense, but the main reason I wrote it (aside from needing to rant) was to fill a slot duplicate that had started out being a repeat of my Yakuza Lords article, then inadvertently became a repeat of my History of Facebook Farm Games article. I'd written the latter to replace the Yakuza Lords repeat, and the editor told me to pitch it as a new article and quit messing with the old slot. But then he must've forgotten the whole thing because he sent my edits through. So I had to write this one to replace that one. :p Luckily, he didn't argue about it this time around, so now I have three articles where there was only going to be one. ;)
Yakuza Lords, meanwhile, is scheduled to die at the end of January. It was a good game at the time I reviewed it, but they doubled the friends-needed requirement just days after the thing was published, and that caused a lot of people I knew to stop playing. Oh well.
Backyard Monsters Strategy Guide - This one was also semi-unplanned. The two main articles about the game were already written (a "guide" and a "review"), but I had all sorts of stuff I wanted to say about camp building, so I found a couple likely keywords and wrote it anyway. Lo and behold, it's taking off in exactly the same way as my Kingdoms of Camelot article - which I'd also written from exactly that same mindset. Clearly I should play more PvP games with camp building. ;)
Right now it's in second place, viewcountwise, right behind the KoC article. It'll be interesting to see what happens when next month starts and all the counters go back to zero. Which article will reign supreme? :D
The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium Theorem - A basic mathematical concept from population genetics. I go over how the math works, what the theorem is for, and why it's important.
There's a followup keyword I could use for a third article in the series (first was What is an Allele? which I wrote several months ago and which basically sank like a rock... all of my genetics articles seem to do that. Luckily, now that they're getting into the stale queue, I can get a good close look at their SEO to see why that is.) The sad thing is, I'm generally not that interested in the details of genetics as a whole. My main motive for writing this was just to have something in the Genetics section that isn't about medicine. All the article suggestions in the list are always about obscure human genetic diseases, which annoys me. Anyhoo, so I'll probably get around to writing the third one at some point, and then maybe I'll brush up on quantitative genetics too, to see if there's anything basic to write about there. I suspect I have this particular market cornered, at least.
What is an Ecosystem? - I have high hopes for this one. Basically I wrote down the basic general definition at the top, then went through and expounded at length on each of the individual parts. The main editor liked it. We'll see how it does next year. ;)
Guide to Geology - My intro blurb about geology. :) I have a degree in it, I ought to know what I'm talking about, right?
Guide to Evolution - This one was kind of tricky. My first thought was "evolution by natural selection and all its splendiforous wonders!" Then I looked up the SEO, and everyone searching about it was interested in either human evolution or evolution vs. creationism. T.T Then I looked up the existing articles on Bright Hub, and I saw stuff like "evolution of human resource management." TT.TT So I ended up trying to be as broad as possible... At the time it went up, the page didn't exist, so it was just the intro with nothing linked. Now there's actual articles, and about half are actually science-related, so yay. ;)
I guess that pretty much covers things, writing-wise. Next month? Who knows. I need to find out just when the spring sampling cruises are starting up. I'm kind of burnt out on nonfiction writing too. Maybe if I've got nothing else going on, I'll focus on fiction instead.