Is Your Manuscript Perfect? Striving for Perfection ...

Personally, I think perfection is overrated ... an unachievable goal. Good-enough is plenty good enough for everyday consumption and me. Of course, if someone is going to invest money in your writing, the manuscript better meet their idea of perfection ... or at least be revisable to some semblance there of.

These thoughts popped into my head when I came across a post of Justine Musk's blog on achieving perfection: how to make mistakes + be imperfect like a badass. Musk is a gal with attitude and confronts the idea of wanting perfection and wanting it now ... like with your current draft.

Think she has something important to say about writing here ... even though the insight percipitated in a yoga class. Given some of the people I've seen doing yoga, I can understand where one might get an inferiority complex watching graceful "benders" do their thing.

My version of yoga looks more like a fish flopping around out of water -- no rhyme or reason -- but I mange to get some static exercise in. A helpful activity if you've got a foot of snow outside.

The one graceful "bender" I know is my daughter, a harpist in New York City. Mia was recently interviewed by Columbia Television News. I shared this on Facebook as a proud mommie. I'll share here too. While Mia works for perfection in the area of music, especially on coming in right on the beat, she is just a quick to say "Art never stops". You can never become proficient in everything. The learning process never ends.

I'd add: If your are pushing the boundaries of your skills, you'll always discover something new you must accomplish.

On a Different Promotional Note:

Discovered perhaps a "perfect" way of helping your friends increase their Amazon rankings on LinkedIn without them spending a dime more than they already have.

Tod A. Fonseca blogged on "What is Tagging". What he discusses is a way of increasing your book rankings using Amazon's rankings without having to beg your friends to buy your book. If you've ever bought something from Amazon, you should be able to like and tag books -- go down to the subject areas the book falls in and click the little boxes showing the keywords.

What I'm pulling out of the things I'm reading on promotion: If you click those likes, tags, and say a review is helpful to you, it all helps your book's ranking on Amazon.

Hint: the Amazon page for Troublesome Neighbors. I would appreciate all the likes, tags, and sales I can garner. Thank you for your help. Of course, there's my author's page and my other "books". Did I mention I wouldn't object if you bought my book?

*smile* Do I sound like a needy writer? 

[I don't consider myself an author yet. I'm not perfect enough yet.]

Blog, Blogged, Blogging

Have been thinking, a lot, about blogging the past couple of days. Partly, because I haven't been blogging much. Partly, because I'm thinking of ways I might change this. Partly, my link to the blog about making money by turning your blog into a book. -- Not that I think I'd ever spend the effort to do that. Still, I've been blogging for maybe three-four years. Maybe it's time to do things a little differently.

Perhaps the best advice would be to write a better blog. Julie Rosen at Social North wrote about "The Art of a Well-Written Blog". You might take a peek. I found it useful. Hope you do to.

Of course, when you've written the blog, you want someone to read it. Don't you? Looking for some new ideas to mine, I put "improve blogs" into Google. The #1 listing was a blog by SEOMoz : 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic [Updated 2012]. The blog is a revision of a blog written in 2007 and prints out a small binder full of pages, if you print it. There's a lot of technical info which I think might even help me understand what's going on.

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Yeah. The need to market is ever-present. Twitter. Blogspot. Facebook. I'm on all of them with varying degrees of success. My "eh" factor usually turns my attention to other efforts, but still, I try to be more efficient about marketing. 

Sometimes, I even give myself a chuckle. Recently, read an article by Jeff Bullas on how to run a successful Facebook page promotion. Since my Far Isle Half-Elven page is so anemic, I thought it was worth a look -- even though I had other things to do. Result: They discussed the campaigns of Kohl, Target, Southwest Airlines, and Corona beer among others -- all of which spend millions on marketing. ...

Yeah, some self-published writer is going to be as successful as them.