Because I refuse to be called Rusty McFuzlebutt

I've renamed my blog! It's not as snappy as My Lent Vent, but the winner of my contest to rename my blog was meeeeeee!!!

My other entrant was from my fake fact maker upper, Anne, as featured in my Little Known Facts post. She wanted to name me Rusty McFuzzlebutt. Anne's new name is Travis VanFartstinkle, by the way. Immature? Absolutely! Fun? Yes. Some days, you just need to pick up your phone and see that Travis VanFartstinkle is in your contact list.

So.... My new blog name is Instead of Dishes and Laundry and here is the new web address if you care to share:

insteadofdishesandlaundry.blogspot.com

Note- There are no spaces or underscores (That's these things _ )

Thanks to those of you who read my blog on a regular basis!

Tomorrow, I am going to get a little crafty and Pinteresty and show you my office space redo- It's super cute!

Enhancements

I'm no expert on this, given I've written a blog for all of less than a month, but I've done some research. Mainly because I like seeing growing numbers in my viewed blog posts. Some days. the numbers are sad :(
In fact, since the inception of my giveaway, this is what I've seen when checking for entries:

Stupid happy face sun, you bring me no joy. (This is my wink, wink, nudge, nudge for you all to enter.)

So anyways, my research includes Googling or Binging "increase blog followers" or "enhance readership of a blog."

This is what I've come up with that was not included in my search findings or articles I read:
Blog about something that becomes wildly popular on Pinterest. Since this is where pins are born from, either a recipe or decorating concept off of a blog or a picture from a magazine. At least the kind of stuff I look at on Pinterest stems from. This will be my goal for next week. Find a great recipe or perform an entryway redo. Or maybe I'll design a media wall.... My bathroom could use finishing as well. Then I'll Pin It, hope all my friends Pin It and so on and so forth. This will all lead back to blog hits. Beauty tips are out of the question, unless you'd view it as a saterical tutorial because my attempts at anything other than a messy bun are crap in the land of beauty.

Another variable I did not read about, probably because the articles were old, is to promote your blog using social media. I have added a Share to Facebook or Twitter button on the right sidebar JUST TODAY! I guess that makes me new and improved! This is a place I am severely lacking in because *sigh* I have no Facebook at the present time and cannot promote myself. Pinterest as mentioned before is also a good avenue to bring in readers. I also don't have Twitter. I signed up for a Twitter account once upon a time, but I couldn't figure out how to tweet. And I hate seeing hash tags thrown all over the place as if they were training bras at a Bieber concert. They just ruin sentences.

Now on to what I did read:
One article suggests writing "killer articles" once a week or so, which I think is a good idea. What is a killer article you ask? It's something that could provide a list of local resources, a how-to, a less thought of view of a popular topic or a list of items of memories that provoke warm feelings or interest with a reader. This is said to bring in readers who search for specific topics on a search engine. If you do this once a week or so, then you are able to spend the rest of the week writing less time consuming articles of your choosing. So far, my blog posts seem to take up time to write but really don't have much direction other than me telling you what's on my mind. This means I shall work on providing intermittent "killer" content.

You must blog on a regular basis. This is important so people don't forget about you. Muh-li-sssaaahhh!  (My sister, Melissa, sucks at maintaining her blog on any kind of schedule, but she gets points for only blogging when she's constructed killer articles.) At the same time, unless a reader makes time to read a blog like one would the daily paper, a daily blog post could be taken for granted and simply go unread.

There are also resources offered by your blog site to enhance or promote blog traffic. While I looked some of these up last night, I've yet to read or do any of them. But, if you've got your own blog and you'd like to read up on what I've yet to look through, click here.  I did add a few buttons on the right side bar that will let you share my posts, which I learned from skimming some of this.

I'm still learning how to enhance the content inside my blog that may lead to bigger numbers and better experience for my readers. Adding pictures and mentions of other people or links to other websites help the cause. How does sending people to someone else's site help me, you ask? Well, if you're like me, I track my traffic sources and can see what sites lead y'all to my blog. So, if you've mentioned another site or person, they may in turn pay attention to yours. Or you an send them an email with the link telling them they've made celebrity status in your little blogger corner of the world wide web.

One thing I tend to spend a lot of time on is editing. I typically write a paragraph then go back and edit it. When you're getting your words down on paper (or the notepad of your iPhone, as I do), you don't always recognize the fact that your punctuation is atrocious or you've used the same word/phrase over and over again. I'm thinking of seeking therapy for my tendency to create run on sentences.... Truthfully, the longer I write the less I pay attention to the editing, so if you notice my posts lose their luster towards the end, it's because I've read the post so many times and changed it around that I get bored reading what I've written. Which is where I'm at now. I'm bored, so I'm done :)

Don't forget, the giveaway/contest ends tomorrow at 11am! Click RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW for the details. It's easy! One little email and you could win!

Writing II

This is where I left off yesterday:

Tomorrow (That's now today.)  I will discuss Nicolas Sparks-esque romances, bundle all the other genres of fiction in which I don't read so probably couldn't write, Tina and Mindy type books and non-fiction.

There are always Nicolas Sparks type books... Could I write a love story that has a reader so emotionally invested they actually cry while reading the character's tragic or uplifting plight? Probably not. I think I'm a little too sarcastic by nature. I think I've read two of Spark's books. The Notebook (Loved it and cried through the last 60 pages.) and A Walk to Remember (Didn't love it so much.) I guess I choose reading as a refuge, not something that pulls me into a world of love and loss. You could say that I could draw off of my own tragic love story that is still being played out in my life, but I don't think I'm emotionally mature enough to put that all out onto a platter for everyone to read right now. My emotional wall is a well laid set of thick bricks without mortar as is stands and writing too much just might make it tumble into a pile of emotional wreckage.

This would be true for writing a work of nonfiction either as an autobiographical story or one of inspiration at this time in my life. I could tell you "how it really feels" as I feel like I sometimes hold back while writing updates on Paul's Carepage. Somethings are just too intimate or to divulge. If I were to write a book of this genre, it would totally and completely read like a copy and paste of Tina and Mindy's books only with my own anecdotes. Is there a funny way to write about teen pregnancy, mommy and daddyhood and cancer? I'd like to think so. Truth is, Paul and I have created more laughing moments and inappropriateness out of our lives together than the somber realism we may be expected to exhibit. If you hear laughter bounding through the cancer ward, it's probably me. Laughing at my husband. It's unfortunate I can remember things like the girl who went to our school for two months in fifth grade but not the conversation I had about a piece of mail I received last week. This may hinder my ability to write a work of nonfiction.
As far as other types of books such as horror, suspense, legal thrillers.... I don't read them, nor do I possess the thought process to write you a long and tangled web of lies, deceit and whodunit. It's just not how my mind works and simply, not how I roll. If there are other genres out there, I'm completely oblivious to them. I guess Amazon doesn't even bother to suggest any other kinds of books. They magically know me better than that.

At some point I am going to do a Part III to this idealization that I'm going to author something someday. Like, there are parts to the writing process in which I will have to revisit English class and think about plot points and character arcs and antagonists (See? Right there, I had to actually Google 'What is the bad person in a story called?' to come up with the word antagonist.) Already, my eyes are glazing over and my mind is shutting down.... Additionally, there's getting published and so, so much more I have no idea how to proceed with the whole shebang. I saw a sitcom the other day where a woman sold her blog rights to Hollywood for millions of dollars. The fictional blog was named "Smart girls don't suck." I would totally read that. I would totally go for just being discovered one day and handing the whole thing over for gobs of money.

Now that I'm back to reality, I suppose I should come to the realization that things cannot be that easy and the dishes need to be done. Fantasy is so much easier. And dryer. I'm kind of sloppy when I do dishes.

Check back in tomorrow for details on my GIVEAWAY! Yes, I'll be giving away PRIZES!

Writing

'You know what I did this weekend? I've kinda, sorta wrote the introduction to my book.

"You're writing a book?" you say?

Ha! No. But somehow, after being a cheap ass and just having the Try a Sample sections of Tina  Fey's Bossypants and Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)sent to my Kindle App, I've constructed a well written and comical introductory snipet of my own book in my head. Okay, I may have written it down, but someday I may be famous and publishers will be begging me to write a book and I'll have already saved myself some time and earned myself even more money by having early submissions to the editor.

....I may have had a bit of a Shopahaulic moment there.... If you haven't read the Sophie Kinsella series, the main character, Rebecca Bloomwood, is infamous for sensationalizing small moments in her life into huge idealizations that lead to her self proclamations such as "the girl in the green scarf." This happens while she's convincing herself she needs to buy the out of budget designer scarf which will lead to everyone noticing her. I guess I just made myself "The funny girl from Minnesota who wrote a book."

I'm not even sure what kind of a book I would write. If it were the genre I read most, it would be contemporary romance. Could I write a fictional but witty story about two second-chancers that includes tawdry love scenes and still look people in the eye? I'm not sure. I do know I already have a list of crappy words I wouldn't use to describe wee-wees and hoo-has in my books.

There is always the subjectively narated romantic comedies written by Sophie Kinsella or Marian Keyes. I've noticed that these kind of books, prior to my buying all my books digitally, tend to be larger in physical size with more polished covers than the typical paperback Harlequins. Aside from the size of book, these often nix the actual explicit parts in their character's relationships. The fact that they skirt around "the juicy parts" frustrates me.  If I'm subjected to the main character's comical yet electrifying attraction and proliferation of their relationship, the least the author could do is at least tell the details of their first....joining.

This is a reason I may not be able to write romance with the juicy parts. I've already compiled a mental list of people in which I'd be embarrassed of the knowledge they are reading this. And I haven't even said clit, cunt or penis. (Now I'm sitting here editing and debating whether I should at least PG-13 this thing and take that last sentence out.)  So romances with canoodling or no canoodling, I have reservations about writing a romance. I think that makes me somewhat of a prude.

Tomorrow I will discuss Nicolas Sparks-esque romances, bundle all the other genres of fiction in which I don't read so probably couldn't write, Tina and Mindy type books and non-fiction.

I will also be doing a GIVEAWAY this week!!!!!! It's going to be a good one, too, so share and promote my blog with your friends! Here's the link to my blog if you want to share-

http://mylentvent.blogspot.com

Cheating on Lent

Thank God for forgiveness. Literally. 
I, Sarah Sexton, have cheated on Lent.
I'm going to have to plead extremely special circumstances of why I did so and I promise, I was a good (well, good-ish) girl while I cheated.
The story goes as follows- I received a text message yesterday from my sister with a screen shot of a Facebook post. It's a status from my sister-in-law, Carmen, stating that her son was missing from a snowmobile ride while they are all on vacation in the mountains of Wyoming. While in said mountains, they have no Internet service or phone reception, aside from the lodge's computer and landline phone. (Insert panic here) While we're all back here in Minnesota, we have no idea which son is even missing or what the circumstances are. Our best line of communication comes down to Facebook.  So I asked my husband, "Do you think I should get on Facebook and see what I can find out?" And my Facebook-hater husband says, "Well, yeah!" So I logged on and since my sister told me to expect a message from Carmen, I looked through my messages.  Unable to find one from Carmen, I wrote a wallpost asking her to call Paul so we could get an update.  Paul had failed in his attempt to reach her by calling the lodge. (Really? There's an emergency here, Desk Lady Answering the Phone, and you're telling us we need a room number to connect?!?!?) Finally, after what feels like an eternity, but is only 15 minutes since initial text message, Carmen calls Paul to update that is was her oldest missing and he had went off to find another missing snowmobiler and neither had come back. This whole time in between prayers and deals with God, I stayed on the wallpost page answering questions from other friends seeing the post form myself to Carmen. And a few people popped up on my instant messenger to whom I answered while waiting for news... And I couldn't very well NOT answer people's questions and thank them for their concern, right? And I may have checked my friend requests... But, I was very nervous and needed something to occupy my fingers...And I didn't respond to the friend requests. And I didn't actually click on any of the posts under my notification bubble.... I stuck to my wall post. And I do hope you have figured out that everything has turned out okay in Wyoming since I'm now rambling about Facebook and not telling what could have been a very sad situation for us all. Jacob, along with the other snowmobiler, were found. The four hours they were gone and the couple hours we knew about ended well with the two having gotten stuck on a ridge on the other side of the mountain but weren't hurt or affected by the elements. (Thank you, God, for hearing our prayers.)
So back to me. It always comes back to me since I am able to be completely subjective in my musings. I did log off as soon as I reported what happened and told everyone I'd be back on Easter. I kinda, sorta patted myself on the back for only cheating a little and resisting temptation of delving into my Facebook further than I did. It gets me to thinking if I have cheated in other ways. Like this blog for instance. Am I finding a new way to communicate with the world that negates my reasoning to give up Facebook for Lent? Not really. Okay, maybe. I'm not looking to social media as a constant pastime, but also don't find myself praying as much as I did in those first few days. Could I give Facebook forever? I'd like to think not. This blog takes up time from my day that I could be praying. But it doesn't take up as much time because there aren't impending comments to read and respond to as Facebook has. And I'm not spending as much time checking my numbers of readers as I did when I first got this blog. Then there's the fact that I had to create a Google+ account to make this blog. It is my understanding that Google+ is some kind of pseudo Facebook? In fear of further cheating on Lent, I have not explored it too much and I don't think I need to manage two social media sites when I can't think of a single person who would have Google+ and not Facebook anyway....
I was bored today and counted down the remaining days until I can reenter the virtual world that I miss so much. I have NOT been on Facebook less days than I have left to go. Sigh... I mean, PRAY! Thank you God for sending your only son to live and die for us as we continue to try to be good Christians but accidently cheat on our promises we have made. Thank you for offering your forgiveness in all facets in our lives from our small indiscretions to sins we may knowingly commit. God is Good! Amen.

Blog vs Blog

I'm enjoying this writing/blogging thing. Question is, is anyone enjoying the reading part of it? Well, guessing from my vastly dwindling page visits, I'm not sure.... But I'm going to continue on regardless.
I've done some writing/pseudo-blogging in the past.  Nothing published or scholarly, by no means. It's actually been my husband's Carepage as I've chronicled most of his, along with our family's, journey since his diagnosis of cancer in 2010. That has a good following. In fact, as the page's administrator, I'm privy to the people who follow my postings, their email addresses (which has come in handy when I want to extend a personal thank you,) when the last time they visited the page and how many total times they have logged in. I love that feature! It not only gives me something to do  during long clinic and hospital visits, but it feeds some kind of deeply hidden vouyeristic feeling I get when I'm the only one that can see these details.
Now, this blog gives me information on those viewing it. But it isn't nearly as fascinating. As a matter of fact, it's random and boring and probably only exiting to... I'm just not sure who... Seriously? I'm don't know the names of those who read this. BUT, I am told how many people read each post in a day and collectively. I am told what country readers are from. I am told how many times I check my own blog(that's embarrassingly high), I am told how readers connect to my blog wether it be direct web address or more than likely through a Facebook link, lastly, I am told what operating system and device people use when they read the blog. For reals? Why would I or anyone else care if their blog is read on an iPod, droid phone or PC???? Quite frankly, it's creepier to have that information collected about a reader than me seeing how often certain people check in with the Carepage.
Why, Google? (Google is the blog host.) Why do you collect this obscure (at least to me)  information? Creeper computer geeks. That's my best guess.
Oh, and just in case you caught me on the readers from Facebook links, I am not the one posting the links as I can proudly (albeit, sadly) say, "My name is Sarah. I am a Facebook-holic and it has been 14 days since I've last been on Facebook."
At the end of the day, I've got a lot to say and I like the writing part of blogging. I don't like the absence of comments and flow of conversation that I am accustomed to while on Facebook. Perhaps once Easter is here, I can get the best of all worlds-Facebook, blogging and the continued closeness to my faith that I've been able to achieve while NOT on Facebook. I hope I'll remember to Facebook a little less and pray a lot more once I'm back to the world of status updates and newsfeeds!