Back From the Dead

Life has been pretty hectic for me since the last time I blogged. Mostly, I’ve been trying to keep my head above water. In addition to writing fiction, I am a freelance writer. Though I enjoy being able to work from home and according to my own rules (for the most part), I have to work extra hard to make sure there is money in the bank to pay the bills. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging, social networking, or writing sexy stories.

Thankfully, though, I got a little bit of breather this weekend so I could write a blog post.

The first interesting thing happened just recently. Like this morning. I was doing my regular Google check and found that I’m back in the index. Yay me!

I haven’t done anything differently. In fact, I’ve been too busy to do any kind of SEO/SEM or marketing. I had submitted a “Please look at my site” ticket to Google when it first happened. So I think maybe someone finally got around to looking at my site and decided I was worthy of being readmitted into the club.

Nail Polish, Gender Identity, and the Idiocracy

I’m convinced that my fellow Americans have gone insane. More specifically, the whole right wing conservative, anti-sex, anti-woman, anti-minority, and homophobic portion of the population that is taking up precious space in the media of late.

I’m pretty certain that most people in the United States are not like this. In fact, I would say that people in this group are a minority. But since they have such big mouths and their form of crazy is…well…crazy the media can’t help reporting on it because crazy gets people buying newspapers.

A week or two ago, J. Crew sent out a mailer that contained a picture of the company’s president, Jenna Lyons, with her son Beckett spending time together. The controversy? Jenna painted her son’s toenails hot pink.

To the extreme conservatives this was the equivalent of the Romans nailing Jesus to the cross, or calling a room full of black people the n-word, or going to lemonparty.com. The brouhaha that erupted over this picture was so ridiculous that it warped the word and made it redonkulous.

Google’s Farmer Update Kicked My Site Off the Search Engine

When it comes to internet marketing, I’m pretty well versed in the different tactics you can use to increase website visibility and generate traffic. Several years ago, in fact, I had a website where I wrote about internet marketing, web design, and article writing. Even though this is an erotic fiction story site, you can find many of these articles in my archives from when I moved them from the original sites.

Anyway, everyone is up in arms about the Google Farmer update which was supposed to address the problem of spammy content and content farms. I didn’t think anything of it because all of the content on my blog is original even if it is a few years old. But if Google’s update managed to deindex popular sites like the Cult of Mac, then I should not have been surprised to find that this blog no longer ranks for my name Daria Black.

Some People Suck and Some People Rock

Behold the light of Elendil, our most beloved star. May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out. [Galadriel - The Lord of the Rings]

I haven’t been feeling well for the past week. The weather changed so quickly here in Maryland that I caught a mild cold. Long before that happened, however, I had a member of my family tell me that my dream of having a home based business was stupid and that I needed to get a real job.

This came from someone who opinion I respected so of course it hurt my feelings. After feeling like pond scum for about two days, I shook it off determined to persist but a strange thing started to happen. Every time I would sit down to work, their words would come back to haunt me leaving me uninspired to do anything and I would end up aimlessly surfing the internet.

So I’m not getting any work done which is frustrating me and the frustration turns to a feeling of helplessness and the inevitable happens. I fall into a depression.

To help combat this, I decide to email my good friend, Katie, for an ego boost and as always she comes through for me (well, actually she and her husband). Therefore just for listening to my drama queen meltdown and assuring me that I have what it takes to be successful I give both Katie and Jim the best friend award.

For everyone else I offer you this advice. It doesn’t matter what your dreams are or what goals you are pursuing in life. You will always run into people who, for whatever reason, will attempt to be a roadblock on the path towards success. You job as the dreamer is two fold.

The Scarlett Letter “P”

Do you think pedophiles and child molesters should be publicly branded?

I had an interesting discussion with a co-worker the other day about this idea. It was her opinion that pedophiles should be made to wear something that tells the public what they are.

On an emotional level, I agreed with her. I don’t have children but nieces and nephews and don’t ever want anyone to victimize them like that. People who commit sex crimes against children are the lowest form of scum in existence. In fact, it is an insult to scum to even call pedophiles that. I think these animals should be blasted off to another planet where aliens will molest them all day long.