blogosphere

Quick (and exciting!) news from FinCon13.

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I'M-SPEAKING_LG(2)The bad news: Abby didn’t win the Plutus Award for “Best-Kept Secret Blog” last night.

The good news: She did win the People’s Choice Award. Her reaction was quite choice; read about it at her blog.

And I won for Best Frugality-Based Blog, which frankly astounds me: I didn’t even know I’d been nominated until shortly before the conference. We got a lot of good-natured ribbing about it being Mother-Daughter Night at the Plutus Awards.

So many thanks to all of you who voted. She still can’t quite believe it. Abby has already noted a number of new followers.

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Writers: Stop undervaluing your work.

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thLast spring I turned down a writing job that would have paid $450. The piece would have been long but not particularly hard to do, as I’d covered the topic before. In fact, I did a pretty good outline in several back-and-forth e-mails with the editor.

(Note to self: Don’t do that again. Ask what the job pays before you do anything else – and especially before you spend half an hour of your day e-mailing back and forth.)

Some of you are probably thinking, “Is she nuts? She turned down an easy $450?”

But that’s not really what I turned down.

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Message in a virtual bottle.

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Message in a virtual bottle.I’m tossing this post out there on faith, because I’m not sure how many people will actually be able to read it. That’s because the site continues to flutter and flicker.

My web goddess is ferreting out the gremlins responsible for the past few days’ worth of aggravation. It’s not an easy task, so please hang in there if you get “site down” or, worse, “fatal error” messages over the next couple of days.

Honest: I’m not quitting the business, even though part of the business quit me (and an unknown number of other writers).

Today I put my final MSN Money post into draft form. After almost seven years of contract work it feels odd to be a free agent once more. Not unpleasantly odd, mind you: I’m looking forward for a clear space in which to breathe.

I’ll still have to work, but I’ve lined up just enough to pay my basic expenses. I don’t want to dip into savings, but neither do I want to go back to being just as busy as I was before.

In other news…

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Termination dust.

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Termination dust.Today dawned a typical September day: gray and foreboding. The sky was the color of a galvanized trashcan and the air tinged with a chill that whispered of summer’s end.

When the clouds lifted a bit I saw termination dust sprinkled on the Chugach Mountains. That’s the local parlance for the season’s first snow. The tail-end of the tourist trade clucks and points, taking numerous pictures of the shining whiteness while buttoning coats up to their chins.

Residents pretend they don’t care, but it can drive a little shiver into your day. Sure, the snow is still way up there. But we know it’ll make its way down to the flats fairly soon.

Even DF, who’s pretty cheerful about everything and a skier to boot, gets a little glum at the prospect. In fact, he sings about it (to the tune of Chopin’s Funeral March): 

Woke up this morning, looked out the door and cussed:

There on the mountains — behold! the whitish crust.

Termination dust. Summer is a bust.

Hate facing winter again, and yet I must.

That made me laugh. I needed to laugh: Termination dust showed up on the very day that I got terminated.

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Need a reason to save? Here’s a $10,000 reason.

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Donna-FreedmanSeptember is National Coupon Month, and Valpak and Savings.com are sponsoring a campaign called “10,000 Reasons to Save.”

The idea is to highlight the “tangible, long-term impact” that coupons can have on our lives.

Coupons have made a major difference in my life, especially when I was a broke single mother and a broke middle-aged college student. Maybe they’ve made a big impact in your life, too – and if so, you can share your story for a chance to win up to $10,000.

That would be a pretty big impact, too. 

The Reasons to Save website invites readers to contribute short essays (250 to 500 words) about their specific reason to save – buy a house? have a baby? put an existing baby through college one day? – and how smart coupon use could support that long-term goal.

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Let your geek flag fly.

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thMy friend Linda B. is a major genre fangirl. There was a time when she could be spotted at MediaWest conferences, dressed as a middle-aged Corellian spice trader* and participating in blaster battles all over the conference hotels.

She and other fellow geeks would see plays and skits, admire others’ costumes, buy fan fiction (including some rather startling “slash” fiction) and, yeah, shoot at one another.

She and several other middle-aged women would share hotel rooms and at some point conduct readings of abysmally written fan fiction. A particular “Star Wars” story always brought the house down with the line, “Han spurted into the room.”

Good times, despite the expense of traveling from Alaska to Lansing and the “con crud” that she always seemed to catch.

These days she’s staying closer to home – working, writing plays, making jewelry and doing free-form bead weaving – but she’s still a geek. Or maybe she’s a nerd. Probably both.

Either way she’s a fangirl, which is how she came to send me the link to this Wil Wheaton video, “Why it’s awesome to be a nerd.” This is the kind of thing that slips over her transom on a regular basis, along with things like song parodies based on characters from “The X-Files” or news about the latest Doctor to play “Dr. Who.”

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Jean Chatzky wants to school you on finances.

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XSmallWant to take charge of your debt, your spending, your retirement or some other aspect of your finances? Maybe it’s time to go back to school.

Jean Chatzky’s “Money School” opens Sept. 10 – and since friends don’t let friends pay retail, I can offer you a discount code.

The financial editor for NBC’s “Today” show and the author of eight books, Chatzky will teach half a dozen virtual personal finance classes in real time (more on that in a minute).

You can choose one or two or take all six for an additional discount. Bonus: You won’t have to worry about mean kids who slam you into lockers or steal your lunch money.

What’s on the syllabus? So glad you asked.

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In which I electioneer for the 2013 Plutus Awards.

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thNot for myself! I did ask for Plutus Awards votes back in 2011, when I was nominated for “Best Blog Contributor or Freelance Writer” and “Best Written Blog.” (Thanks to all who voted, because I did win the first one.)

This time around, I’m asking for your votes for someone else: my daughter, Abigail Perry, who writes I Pick Up Pennies.

It’s pretty easy to do: All you have to is click on this link and her site’s URL will automatically be filled in under “Best Kept Secret.” Enter your own information (name, e-mail and whether or not you’re a PF blogger), then just scroll a bit further down and hit “nominate” – and you’re done.

Do I sound impossibly stage mom-ish? Well, she’s too modest to nominate herself so I felt compelled to do it for her. Here’s why.

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Giveaway: “How I Make Money Blogging.”

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https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?cl=132158&c=ib&aff=219310We’re heading toward September and you know what that means: Christmas shopping!

Or at least the stores seem to think so, given how early they sneak the red-and-green into the inventory. Can’t we have Halloween first?

Some of us shop year-round and then have to fill in with only a few items come the Black Friday madness.  Some realize around mid-December that they haven’t even started.

It all takes money — and one way to earn money is through blogging. Stop laughing. Some people actually do bring in a little extra cash, or a lot. Crystal Stemberger is one of those people. I’m giving away a copy of her e-book, “How I Make Money Blogging: The Beginner’s Guide to Building a Money-Making Blog,” in case you want to be one of those people, too. (There’s a discount code for those who want to buy the book outright; see below.)

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