The Blog in the Forest

If you posted a Blog on a avatar of a tree in a virtual forest and no one reads it, is it a blog at all?

Well, it is now.

Those of you have visited before--you don't have to raise your hands; I think I know you all pretty well--you will note that this blog site is kind of mucked up with commercialism.

Sorry about that.

Life is no day at the beach.  But the Haitians already knew that. The truth is, it's hard to make any money as a writer who does not have a current novel to sell or does have a screenplay about eggs that are neither robots nor primed to explode after the opening credits.

My mother had always wanted me to be a surgeon/columnist.  But I hated the idea of putting my opinions in writing less I decide to run for President and I literally could not pith a frog in high school bio.  My middle school aptitude tests told my guidance counselor that I was best suited for farming potatoes and, after shipping most of the spuds during a blight to England, swapping sacks of them for babies in the dead of night, all the while operating from a Gypsy caravan.  Maybe, the Irish-Romanian heritage thing trumped my uncanny skill with long division and isosceles triangles.

So, I had to pursue other work, with screenplays and/or fiction getting some limited attention.

Along comes Blogging and those maternal dreams may be partially fulfilled.  At least, it is fun.  Of course, the gods who oversee jobs and executive compensation do not figure that doing something you like is acceptable homage to them.

I guess Google operates in a cloud above those gods.  Google's Blogger told me I could "monetize" my blog.  That sounded really good since I am not monetizing anything else at the moment and Christmas is taken.

So, Google was nice enough to place some ads on my Empty Glass Full blog site.  If enough people click on the ads, I get about 30 cents a month in nano-dollars.  Hey, more than I had coming in.

Then there was Amazon.com.  Great place.  I use it all the time and their Kindle operation was the first place to offer ebook versions of my, uh, twentieth century novels.  So very yesterday, I know, but I appreciate their willingness anyway. When Blogger offered to monetize my site further via an Amazon associates program, I figured, Wow, maybe, 60 cents a month.  And I may get to share my page with Taylor Swift.

So there it is, off to the side, but real obvious and... colorful.  Amazon access through my blog site.  Pretty cool and very convenient.  It ain't pretty, but making money usually isn't, unless you're, say, Megan Fox.