Hey, everyone!  Notice the snazzy, yet austere, new look?  It’s not permanent.  My wonderful webmaster, Terry Trippany, is trying to figure out why, occasionally, all you see at my site is a string of advertisements.  There’s obviously something nasty buried in my theme’s coding.  After fruitlessly looking through endless lines of code, Terry realized that the only way to deal with the problem is to throw everything out and start anew.

This is a really nice, clean-looking theme, but it has some deficits, most notably the fact that it’s two columns, not three.  And although all the ads were irritating, I want them back, because I was earning money off of them — at least enough to keep the dogs in kibble and the mice in mouse food.

So, expect to see some changes over time as Trip works to get rid of some nasty malware that took up residence at the Bookworm Room

I hate autoplay videos as much as I do — but some of the videos I posted seem to have had autoplay code in them.  I’ve deleted the videos that I thought were the problem.  Please let me know if the problem persists — and,  most especially, which posts have that problem.  Since I’m not much of a code person, I’ll just delete them.

Here’s an update on the new gig I told you about.  For the foreseeable future, I will be the main original content provider at Mr. Conservative — a site that, unknown to most people by name, is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the internet.  Unlike Bookworm Room, where I write about whatever interests me, and fill my posts with a lot of personal commentary, the pieces I write for Mr. Conservative’s site riff off of news stories.  In some, I’m just flat-out reporting.  In others, I add a little bit of me to the mix.

What I’m ending up with is a sort of Venn diagram, with an area of overlap between the me posts and the Mr. Conservative posts:

To the extent that there’s overlap — that is, I write a post for Mr. Conservative that is the same as a post I would write on my blog — I’m re-posting my work here and noting at the bottom that it originally appeared at Mr. Conservative’s site. I’m telling you this now so that you know that it is my work.  I could leave these posts only on Mr. Conservative, but I want to re-post those pieces here, at Bookworm Room, so that they can be part of the delightful, ongoing conversation that we have here.  I will also continue to post entirely original content, unique to Bookworm Room (such as this post).

For me, doing things this way means that I only have to write once about something that matters to me. Since I’m providing lots of original content that’s exclusive to Mr. Conservative, as well as the original content that is near and dear to my heart at Bookworm Room, it’s nice to cut a few procedural corners occasionally as to those things that overlap without actually diminishing quality.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this. I’m excited to be earning money, but the job does require a fair amount of work. Doing some post-sharing seems like the most efficient way to get the endless flow of words in my brain out to the right places.

I wrote earlier today that something good had happened.  I won’t go into too much detail, because I don’t want to ill wish myself at this stage in the game, but I can tell you a little.

I’m trained as a lawyer, and I’ve worked as a lawyer — writing and researching — for more than a quarter of a century now.  During my first four years as a lawyer, I just hated it.  I had no idea what I was doing, and did not find mentors to help me out.  To make it worse, imbued as I was with a whiny mid-1980s feminism, I was not a cheerful employee.  Despite the fact that they were paying me ridiculous amounts of money for my negligible skill level, I felt that they owed me something, rather than the other way around.

After those first four years, I found a mentor (who, incidentally, helped pave my way intellectually for becoming conservative) and began to enjoy the intellectual chase.  Finding  just the right case law to help a client, and then writing a compelling, elegant brief was very satisfying.  Eventually, though, I got jaded.  Bay Area judges are moved as much by liberal navel gazing as they are by the law itself.  Eventually, I didn’t want to keep banging my head against that wall.

Meanwhile, I had children, and my energies first dissipated and, when they returned, they had shifted.  As my children grew up, I discovered that I was fascinated by politics and that I love writing about politics and social issues.  Honestly, it’s an incredible pleasure to write when the worst that can happen is that someone points out that you made a mistake.  In all my years as a lawyer, I’ve never gotten over the fear that I may make a mistake that results in my client being terribly damaged and in me being sued for malpractice.  The fact that I never have made such a mistake has not taken the edge away. In fact, in some ways it makes things worse, because I fear complacency.

Once I started my blog, and certainly after I’d honed this craft for a while, I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up:  become a paid writer.  Not a paid legal writer, but just a paid writer.  Probably to your great irritation, I’ve been trying to monetize this blog for years, but if I make enough to pay for one airplane ticket to the East Coast per year, I’m doing exceptionally well with my writing.

Things changed for me Friday.  I got an email out of the blue asking me if I wanted to provide content for someone’s blog.  I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t remember this guy’s  name, even though we’d been in touch a couple of times several years back. Embarrassed, but not surprised.  I have a chiaroscuro memory, dappled light and dark. I remember the copyright year of almost all the books I’ve read, I can list all the kings and queens of England from Edward III to the present day, I know the lyrics to an insane number of songs from the 30s and 40s, I’ll remember if you have children and what they do, but I won’t remember your name.  I’ve humiliated myself on more than one occasion with this gaping hole in my memory, and my response to this man’s email was no different.  “Excuse me, but who are you?”  Fortunately, he wasn’t offended by my memory failing or, if he was, he didn’t let it get in the way.

He has an up-and-coming website and, as he said, he needs help with content.  He’s a truly gifted salesman with a wide and deep understanding of how money flows in the blogosphere.  He’s been able to create crazy traffic levels, but writing is not his thing, and he’s exhausting himself trying to keep up with traffic flow.

This weekend was by way of an experiment. I wrote stuff for him to see if I could match my style to his needs, and he posted my work to see if it kept his readers happy.  So far, all is good.

My husband was a bit worried that I was providing all this content for free (asking, with reason, “How do you know that he won’t stiff you?”), but I explained (a) that I didn’t think this man would stiff me and (b) that my work was a loss leader and those can be risky.  Since I like writing, it was a financial risk, but not a painful one.  Here’s the irony:  After my husband and I finished this discussion, I opened my email to find out that the man had sent money, nice money, to my PayPal account.  I like it when my gut is right and my risks (which are usually small, because I’m not a gambler) are rewarded.

This weekend ended up being a bit chaotic, because I was fulfilling both the new blog’s needs and my family’s needs (which were very time-consuming this weekend).  Weekdays will be smoother because, in a way and for the first time in years, I’ll have a real job.  (That is, assuming this grand experiment works for both me and the other guy.)

Don’t worry, though, that I’ll give up this blog.  I may do some cross-posting (the posts I do for him cross-posted here, not vice versa), but mostly I want to keep Bookworm Room going because I’m so happy here.  The work I do for him is news reporting type stuff.  The work I do here is a conversation between me and you about wonky political issues, hot news topics, foreign policy, national security, social issues, education, etc.  Leaving here would be like walking away from my life’s party while I’m still having fun.

Still, I’m really, really happy.  I’ve always had this feeling, irrational though it seemed for many years, that all my blogging was leading somewhere.  I wasn’t getting paid, I was writing when I should have been doing that gosh-danged laundry, I ignored my kids a bit (benign neglect, of course), but this work seemed important to me.  I’d like to think that it was preparing me for a project that is good now and has the potential to get very much better.

Wish me luck, please.  With this guy’s enormous sales, marketing, and internet talents, my writing chops, and your wishes, something good might be happening here.

Spammers have launched a major attack against Bookworm Room. I’m happy to say that the Azkimet spam control function in WordPress is working, in that it’s not publishing all those fake trackbacks and links.  That’s good.  The bad thing is that Azkimet, overwhelmed by the deluge of both decent and indecent comments, has decided to put every comment and trackback into the “pending” (or as I call it, “purgatory”) category.  This means that your comments will not publish immediately.  Instead, I have to approve each of them.

I’m in contact with my Webmaster, so I know this problem will be resolved, I just can’t say when that will happen.  Until then, please bear with the fact that your comments will vanish pending my approval.

I have to admit that I’m enjoying have a newsletter.  Blogging is like a bulletin board, while writing a newsletter feels like sending mail to a friend.  It tickles different parts of my brain.

I’m also trying to make the newsletter somewhat different from the blog.  My goal is for the newsletter to have original content, in addition to links to blog material, so that it is always a fresh, rather than a redundant, experience for you.

If you aren’t already receiving the new Bookworm Room newsletter, you can subscribe by putting your email address in the subscription form in the right-hand column.  —>

You know how there are some people who never get nominated for things?  I am not one of those people.  When I was in junior high school, I was nominated “Most likely to be a librarian” (wrong!) and “Most likely to wear braces forever” (which seemed likely to be true for a while).  In high school, I was nominated “Most likely to spend her life with her nose stuck in a book” (how did they know)?

Children, especially teenagers, can be cruel, and I have to admit that, aside from being mildly grateful that my classmates even knew my name, I found those nominations a just a wee bit hurtful.  This latest nomination in my life, though, just thrills me:

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we were unable to hold the competition last year for the most coveted honor in the right-o-sphere, the title, Grande Conservative Blogress Diva.  As you know we here at GayPatriot define a diva as “a strong, confident woman who commands the respect of men.”

“A conservative blogress diva”, we noted in 2009, “need not be conservative  per se; all she must do command the respect (or have otherwise earned the admiration) of gay conservatives.”  In 2006, I observed that some nominees are are libertarian. And others, while more centrist, distinguish themselves by their iconoclasm and the manner in which they take on the silliness of certain leftists — and conservative pretenders, i.e., those who, in the words of one of our nominees, “drive . . . liberals nuts.”

Please indicate those blogresses, whom you feel, meet the criteria for Grande Conservative Blogress Diva.

Me!! A Grande Conservative Blogress Diva!  Except that I’m not yet.  If you read the post, you’ll see I’m among suggested nominees.  If you would be good enough to comment at the best moving from me from “suggested” to “actual,” I would be most grateful.  If the honoree of being a nominee for something flattering, rather than, well, yes, insulting, becomes mine, I will be sure to let you know when the vote rolls around!  Incidentally, I’m so impressed by my potential nominee competition that I don’t cherish any hopes of winning.  I’m just excited to be potentially nominated.

Meanwhile, I’m off humming to myself ‘Yeah, baby, I’m a suggested potential nominee for Grande Conservative Blogress Diva!  Woo-hoo!”