Generate Google AdSense revenue with Docstoc

Image via CrunchBase

My dear, sweet old (old, old... :wink: ) Mom sent me an email this morning with a link to the Hick Chick Meal Planner and a brief but certain commentary: "You need this!" I immediately downloaded the Meal Planner, but what struck me was Docstoc itself.

My initial impression of Docstoc is that it's not only a great source of free and affordable documents "for small businesses and professionals", but had good potential as a nice source of revenue. Apparently there are more ways to earn, but what interested me is the potential to earn from both creating and selling documents, and the AdSense revenue generated by offering them both for sale and for free. According to DocStoc, "Sign up for DocCash and we'll split (50/50) the revenue we generate by displaying advertisements alongside your documents."

Be sure to check out the Why Upload Documents section of the website for more information. There you will find many helpful links, including how to Generate Extra Cash From the Documents You Upload to Docstoc (via Google AdSense), and the FAQs on Selling Documents on Docstoc.

I am not being compensated in any way for this post. I just want you to explore it as a possible source of active and passive income for you and your family. I'm saintly like that.

P.S. If you want to create .pdf files from your Word docs like the Hick Chicks did, a great free tool is CutePDF. Good luck!

Can you dig it?

Image via Wikipedia

I was driving to get my toes splashed with color when the light flicked to “Whoa, now – you hear?” Off to my right a teen in pj bottoms was dancing a sign to life, announcing a Girl’s Club sale. I couldn’t help but smile and watch her as I pressed to a stop. When it was time to “Giddyap” I caught sight of another girl to my left hotfooting in slippers, waving a similar sign, completely devoid of self-consciousness or fear. White to the right of me, black to the left. Freckles. Giggles. Toes. It was as though God himself had opened up the Heavens and spat out a perfect moment just to remind me that he could.

I was warm and fuzzying myself into a Zen-like froth when but two blocks later I spied no fewer than six young men, only one white, giggling although I’m sure they would deny it and prancing and goofing with signs and a box one of them had turned into a makeshift car. Turns out the East Plano Football team had a fund-raiser going on at Sonic and they were there to siren us in.

It was all I could do not to pull to the side to double over with joy. It’s been that long, you see, since I’ve seen teenagers of any color unabashedly acting like children. Some preconceived notions I’d packed from California to Texas slipped out of me and seeped into the sewer where they belong.

Delight reared its ugly head. When I arrived at my destination I asked to have my toes painted a surly shade of OPI “Can you dig it?”

Turns out I can dig it. Ain't it cool?

The Wizardess of the Willows

Image by floodllama via Flickr

A friend of mine who will go unnamed, *cough* Holly Jahangiri, otherwise known as the Wizardess of the Willows, Thwartress of Wallows, opened a massive, steaming can of slap-upside-the-head on my Facebook page last weekend. She was responding to my response to another person who will go unnamed, *cough* Unfinished Person, who had asked how the writing was going. In so many words, I admitted that I was struggling a bit because it goes against every parenting impulse I have to tune out of hyper-vigilance into the altered state of twilight, (neither wakeful nor asleep), where I do my best writing.

Her Wizardessness suggested that while my children are small I might want to think about creating stories for them instead of concentrating on adult novels. I countered with, "But... but... I don't know how" (in so many words) and she volleyed a, "Kill the inner critic and just do it! You can write. You read to your children. Write what your children would like to read." (In so many words). Then she kicked me square in the behind. 8O

And so I'm thinking about this thought as one thinks about thoughts in a thinking sort of way, and all I can come up with is, "But...  if only I could draw, I'd make the fear go away..." .

And putting my butt against the wall. 8O

So now I'm thinking of stories. How does one tell a story on the fly? Does one sit on the fly and tell a story? I'm less prone to act, more apt to worry.

Writing prompts! I need to find a website with writing prompts for children's stories. Oops, there isn't one. Oops, yes there is. But I can only find prompts for Christmas and Easter. It's neither Christmas, nor Easter, so those prompts are certainly of no use to me.

Ouch! 8O

I suppose I could give one a try. Or create my own prompt. But I don't know how to do that.

8O

Okay! I know how. I'll do it right now. :D

The Magical Mystery Banana

I just discovered this banana carcass on the carpeted floor of our family room upon inspecting the work of my husband Dennis, whom I'd successfully cajoled into vacuuming up a sludge pile of spilled Joe's O's aka Cheerios®.

We used to refer to our family room as "the white room" due to the proliferation of white shelving units therein. But seeing as how the room hasn't actually been white in a very long time, in the manner of my soul, my teeth, and the parts of my eyes circling the green rings, we now simply call it the family room.

Firstly, wasn't it clever of me to tell my husband that the big vacuum "doesn't work for me"?

***********

Me: It just doesn't work for me. I don't know why.

Dennis: What do you mean? It works perfectly. I just used it yesterday.

Me: There's something wrong with it. I can't get it to work. I don't know what the problem is. Every time I try to vacuum I end up going over the same spot again and again and again and why don't we just get rid of this thing and get one of those units with the wand and the....

Dennis: Taking off down the hallway, hands over ears, one hand stretched pleadingly towards the closet that houses our perfectly functional vacuum cleaner.

**********

Secondly, and I love men, I really do, and I respect them as a species of person, and hate those awful "little husband brain" ads that put them in the same category as intellectually-challenged gerbils, but leave it to a man to vacuum a room to a state of fuzzy perfection, yet allow a violated banana to remain on the floor.

**********

Dennis: You said to get the Cheerios, you didn't say anything about a banana. It's fine. Just leave it there.

***********

Thirdly, does anybody have any clue why there are dots and a small cross pressed into the banana? I'm at a loss.

Fourthly, I think I read somewhere that ants are repelled by bananas and all manner of sugary things. Going forward into summer/satanic ant season, I think it would be prudent to place a quarter of a banana in each corner of each room in our house. Under our bed. On Dennis' pillow.

I think I'll do it today.

The Daily Irritation

Image via Wikipedia

Mimes doing a quirky little dance.

Don't send me your hate letters. I didn't make them do that.

************

The purpose of "The Daily Irritation" is to distract you from more pressing and unavoidable daily irritants.

The Death of my Brain

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I've finally done it. I've gone and killed my brain.

For real this time.

Because I've been feeling and looking like over-sized dog balls in sweats since the exact moment my husband's sperm first connected with one of my ova about four years ago, and the weather's finally starting to come around, I'm doing my best to stay off of the computer and outside performing healthy activities with my kiddos.

I've been feeling human again, with a hint of a spring in my step. My kids are happier. The sun has touched my arms and face more this last two weeks than it has the last year.

Or three.

But, as is the way of things, for everything we gain, something has to go. And what I've lost, it seems, is any chance I had at becoming a writer.

I sat down a short while ago and performed a one word mind map as a writing exercise. I couldn't think of a good word, so I Googled around and found a website that spits out random words upon command. The first word was uninspiring. The second, ludicrous. (Not literally.) The third was so dull it just made me angry.

I took the fourth because I didn't want to be angry no mo. That word was "hole".

Okay, "hole", here we go. Branches:

dismal
dark
see through it
the band
ruin
donuts
in a sock
poke

Alright. What to do with my little mind map. Hmm. Perhaps I'll try my hand at a poem.

Hole

When I think of dismal
I think of your hole
I can see through it,
Courtney Love is a fool
I want to eat donuts
in your hole
And poke a sock
through your hole
and
:-\
WTF?!?

Okay, I've tried this mind mapping business before and was able to eke out better stuff. Not good stuff, mind you. Just better stuff. Keeping in mind, of course, that I am not a poet, never have been a poet, and have no mind to ever be one. I just attempt it every third jumping-frog moon because I am compelled by a dark force, the same dark force that compels me to wear lime green velour pants and like it.

I mind mapped "afraid" on 10/22/09 and came up with this:

fear
water
clowns
cold earth
pill bugs
branches

Which led to...

Afraid

The smell of fear
is in the water
Somebody's spiked
the punch bowl
and that clown doesn't care
that I'm Somebody's daughter
Cougar's breath's on
the neck of the foal

So I burrow farther
into the cold, wet earth
With her pill bugs and roots
and no light, and no air
For safety
and control

© Heather Kephart

It's not great, but more satisfying than what I was able to produce today, after three or so weeks of avoidance of my blog.

My family and my health is my top priority at this point & I've really been working to get things on track. But I also want to be a writer. So I'm going to try to get my butt in here at least once a week and put my nose to the grindstone.

I apologize to those in my social networking circle. I'm not going to spend a fraction of the time going forward that I used to spend online reading and commenting on my favorite blogs, nor am I going to do a ton of blog promotion. Please do not feel obligated to comment here. I will probably not be able to return the favor, and that just ain't raht.

I do wish everyone the best. Please know that my attempts to peel myself away from the web are not meant to be attempts at peeling myself away from you. It's simply the best thing right now for home and heart. I need to lose a gazillion pounds and get healthy and learn how to be a fun playground Mom. Folks, we can rebuild her!

I have no clue what the future holds, outside of green tea. But I know it's good. For all of us. Huggles and puggles to all y'all web people.

The Muse has a Sick Sense of Humor

Image via Wikipedia

I was so inspired by yesterday's guest post by Justin Germino that I plunked my ample behind in a comfy chair and had another go at poetry writing.

Like most, I have a teen journal filled with earnest but wanting attempts and it breaks my heart to read them. A bad poem is like a sloppy kiss. I want my poetry to be like uvula-rattling historical fiction sex—the kind where the hero has you backwards on a horse and you both climax as you leap from a cliff to the top of his castle, or I don't want it to exist at all.

Granted, this demand for perfection of expression is most likely going to keep my feet glued to the springboard unless I beat it into submission with insolent, mediocre little practice poems.

So I gave it a go, and it wasn't long before I started to remember that if you're me it sucks to write poetry. It's fun—an absolute blast in fact, but it sucks. I can usually cough up a good line or two, but, as with ball sports, the difference between a zero and a hero rests in the follow-through—and I ain't got none o' that.

I attempted a poem about rain and somehow ended up with the start of a Country Western song:

The last time Georgia danced slow
was at a honky tonk in Barstow
The rain was hard
and the wind whipped cruel
but his body was safe and warm

Maybe someday I'll finish it. Or maybe not. 8O

Then out of nowhere this popped into my head:

His gentle white ivories nourished
the keys and the
song sprang up
to greet
him

Then nothing. It was like a door slammed shut in my brain. I chased after the next door and the next until the scenario played out in my brain in the manner of the opening sequence of Get Smart. As always, the sophomore stanza is devastated by some ludicrous, infantile rhyme that my consciousness rightfully (and thankfully!) dives ten neural feet to head-butt into oblivion.

I blame you, Dr. Seuss. It’s become apparent that I’ve fatally internalized you and Theo LeSeig, and am doomed to emulate and derate your legacy. Case in point:

The man went to the country bar
Far, far to the country bar
And his boots
Went root toot
And his spurs and belt buckle
went whir and tootschmukel
In the most particularly schmuckulous way
you might say...

I am ruined!

Never again!

Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

---

All ridiculousness © Heather Kephart