I need this tattooed on my forehead…or something. Thanks, Kristen.

Great advice. I dig it!

Use AW Stats. They are far more accurate. My stats after I changed over from warriorwriters were telling me I was getting like 100 unique visitors a day (when I was used to 2000). I kept blogging but was going into depression. Then Hubby showed me these analytics and Google was wrong. I was getting closer to 3,000 unique visits a day. But Google, etc. want to sell you all these ‘optimization’ plugins and all that does is open the algorithm to what ‘counts’ as a visit. So say someone found my blog using Safari? Doesn’t ‘count’ until I pay for it to ‘count.’ That’s the best way I can explain it. AW seems way more in line with where my blog following was tracking before I changed to their analytics and self-hosted.

*learn to start saying no. Oops.

As for writing, I heard the advice that if you can’t finish something, just write something like “and they all died. The end.” and your subconscious will tell you the ending that it really wanted all along. It won’t be able to stand what you wrote down. (Was that from you?) For me, the hardest thing on the days when I don’t “feel” like writing is getting the first paragraph down. I have let that stop me before, but I recently applied the same advice to beginning for the day. I’m writing on a freaking word processor, not engraving words in stone, for Pete’s sake! So I just wrote something. And if I didn’t like it, later, when I hit my word count goal for the day or the week, I could go back and change it. When we start prompting our subconscious in the right directions and get it off its lazy butt, it’s amazing what the Muse will accomplish. Have an awesome day. I gotta go write now!

I’ve been frustrated with the blogging sphere because my numbers have gone down (as far as views) since January and I’m trying to figure out what I should do about it. Pay for a Facebook page? Get better at Twitter? But then, my writing suffers. I just started on this self-employment track and also work on the farm, so time management, which I had a handle on in previous vocations, is a new endeavor for me.

Time isn’t wandering around crying until mall security hands it a balloon. It isn’t buried in the woods like some stash from a bank robbery. There is no map, GPS, or time-sniffing dogs to help locate time because time isn’t lost.”

So true!!!