September Writing Updates for YOU

I've been pretty busy writing over the past month, and I've got some great stuff to share.

First up is The Smoking Jacket. Five Tips for Determining If Your Girlfriend Is A Spy is a great piece about finding out whether your girlfriend is really just good at learning languages, or whether she's actually got something to hide. Then there's Five Ways to Afford Beer On a Budget, which provides some excellent tips, including bartering any useful skills you might have for some refreshing brew.

Over at Trail's Edge Blog, there's a lot about flirting with your fellow outdoor enthusiasts. For example, you always want to be prepared for romance when you're roughing it (you never know when you'll run into your future mate!) That's why you should check out Guys: 5 Tips For Staying Sexy in the Wild and Girls: 5 Tips For Staying Sexy in the Wild. No less important is knowing the right gear to have on hand with you at all times. If you've read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you won't be surprised where I'm going with this: 5 Uses For the Towel.

And don't forget, Halloween is just around the corner. Which means I've been busy updating my awesome site about Viking cosutmes, discussing tasty Worms in Mud dessert recipes, and asking people what their favorite Halloween monsters are.

All in all, a very productive month!

Article Rundown: Combat, Camping, and Nerds

I've been pretty good about updating my list of published articles over on my humor blog, You Amuse Me, but I thought I'd do an update here as well for anyone who is interested.

First of all, I'm pleased to be writing for a new humor market called The Smoking Jacket. It's a subsidiary of The Playboy Network (gasp!) but it's been described as "surprisingly safe for work." I've recently published A Guide to Leveraging Your Nerd Cred into Dates there, in which I talk about how you don't have to be a generic "stud" to woo members of your preferred sex. I've also created a handy list of Five Occasions When Going to Hooters is a Bad Choice. Hint: you might want to consider ix-naying the popular chain during first dates and family vacations.

My writing for Trail's Edge Blog is still going strong. Check out this list of Things To Watch Out For When Beach Camping if you're going to be enjoying the beach overnight for the first time. And although the last thing I'd want to do would be to scare people off of camping, I still think you should read about 5 Makeshift Weapons For Defending Your Camp in case of emergency.

To round out the list, here's an article from my old standby site, Weird Worm. If you think that all action movies are the same, then you obviously haven't watched the movies that contain these 8 Ridiculous Close Combat Fight Scenes.

Hope you enjoy!

Thoughts on Setting Writing Goals and July 2011 Update

I was thinking earlier about the writing goals that I set for myself in June. I was frustrated that I hadn't done as well as I'd hoped, and I was trying to figure out why I was having trouble. Although I did manage to write all my Trail's Edge blog posts, and I blogged even more than I said I would over at You Amuse Me, I fell short with Weird Worm articles (seven instead of eighteen), didn't start my mystery blog, and didn't read The Happiness Project. Out of all of them, the Weird Worm goal bugged me the most.

Later in the day, I went for a swim (trust me, this is an important part of the story). My goal was to swim for at least fifteen minutes.I didn't have much more time than that to spend, because I had to get back to work. So why was it that I felt so frustrated after a fourteen minute swim? It was surely close enough to my goal to make the difference not matter. It bothered me that after all the work of getting ready to swim, going to the pool, and actually doing the deed, I still didn't feel like I'd done a good enough job.