I hope none of you are working on new Valentine’s Day lenses or web pages right now. You’ve almost certainly left it too late to get much profitable traffic this year, if you are.

Easter, though, is nine weeks away. This gives you time to get a lens or two online. You’ll have time to choose a good subject, hopefully one that puts a slightly different spin on the usual Easter eggs and little bunny rabbits. You don’t want to compete head-on with the top Easter pages, do you? Maybe you know about some Easter customs unique to your area, or your family has its own traditions or recipes for the festival.

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When I seriously started writing lenses on Squidoo, the first thing I did was look at other people’s work. I visited a large variety of other lenses assessing what worked and what didn’t.

I picked up many tips just by looking. It’s what I’ve always done to learn to improve my writing and web page building. Look at what the experts do and learn from them.

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Jack Vettriano - the Book: My New Squidoo Lens

My new lens, Jack Vettriano – The Book, is the first I’ve made for over two months. I just couldn’t get on with any. I started several, decided they bored me so I deleted them.

I’m so glad I remembered how much I liked this book about the artist Jack Vettriano because it gave me the opportunity to write about something that really interested me even after I began to lens.

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Santa Squid from Squid Art Too by Tagsforkids

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

I’m finishing this year feeling I’ve accomplished some things that I really wanted to do. There have been some disappointments and sad times too – just like many years, in fact.

At the beginning of the year, I was making very few new lenses on Squidoo. I’d become a Giant in October 2008 by making 50+ lenses. After that I just lost inspiration for writing. I’d start a new lens, think about it, then delete it because I couldn’t think of more to write or I was bored by the subject. Worse still, I sometimes finished a lens, read it the next day, decided it was rubbish and so deleted it. Although I made a few lenses, they were a struggle.

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I know… it’s incredible that Squidoo has made me an Angel when I’ve been a bit of a pain occasionally over the last 18 months. I’ve argued when I thought things were wrong and done so quite vehemently sometimes.

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For this week’s Squidoo Rocket Moms lens we have to write about a place we’ve visited.

This is so hard. My thoughts are whirling. Should I write about St Maartens, a Caribbean island I visited briefly but loved?

Maybe I should write something about Paris, France, a city I’ve often visited and one of my favourite places. I could write about the small French fishing town of Honfleur in Normandy, another place I’ve visited several times because it’s a favourite.

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The Fun Side of Work

Almost anybody who writes has been there. You need to write something new, maybe because your blog need updating, you write for a site like Squidoo and you’re taking part in a challenge or perhaps you are lucky enough to have been invited to submit ideas. Some days, though, your mind just goes blank, you can’t think of a thing to write about.

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One person’s research might be another person’s plagiarism but really it should be more than a matter of opinion. The differences between the two should be obvious. It should also be obvious that someone hasn’t just done a straight rewrite of another’s material.

When I research for an article, online or off, I consult many  different sources. Usually I’ll look online first because that is quicker and easier but then I will consult reference books, either my own or in the library.

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Today I saw a post in a forum which said that it was only older people who cared about writing grammatically.  It went on to say that nowadays it’s quite OK to use its instead of it’s and that lots of newspapers nowadays do this.

All I can say is that I’ve never seen a newspaper deliberately use its instead of it’s. When they do, it’s a typo. If you doubt what I say, check on various newspapers’ style guides available online.

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I’ve been putting suggestions in the Stazjia’s Stars forum for ideas to make into new lenses. My latest suggestions have been inspired by the weekly Senior Squids Challenge. Last week, the subject was ‘The Moon’ so I wrote about Moonflowers – Night Blooming Plants, this week it’s about ‘Time’ so I’ve done one on Local Time and Railway Time.

The point is to take an idea that is very wide ranging and think of your own slant on it. There is no way that anybody could write a comprehensive lens or web page about the moon or time. Both subjects are too big.

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