Category Archives: Uncategorized

Posted on

Journo Portfolio for Writers

by

Here’s a Journo Portfolio review for freelance writers who’d like to quickly and easily create an online portfolio:

Authors wanting to create an online portfolio showcasing their writing may find this helpful. In my case, I needed one place to round up posts (from three different blogs), articles archived online at publishers’ websites, and magazine article clips (in PDF) from 32 years of writing! Journo Portfolio seems to do the trick.

You may also find this helpful if as a freelance writer you have written for a variety of publications, and on many topics. It can help literary agents or editors see the full scope of your writing career.

How to upload blog posts or articles archived at publisher websites to your own portfolio:

Since I just started my page at Journo Portfolio yesterday, so far I’ve only had a chance to upload my blog posts and a few magazine articles archived online. It was very fast and easy. I uploaded links to 35 posts in about 3 hours. It would have taken half that time (or less) if I hadn’t opted to tweak the post descriptions.

If you want to create your own, it’s free to start with 10 article links, then $5 for a month for unlimited. For a few other features you can go to the $10 month plan. (And no, I’m not a spokesperson for them, just a random author who found this site helpful so want to pass on a few things I learned so far about using it.)

As for starting your own: first create a login, choose a banner, upload your photo, and name your portfolio (you can start with the free version). Then you’ll see a giant plus sign, at the bottom left of your page. (See example below.)

Click that, and at the home button (picture of a house) you can see your dashboard.

When you click Articles + it’s simple: just copy and paste the link from the website and it will import the link with a photo and some text from the article. It will automatically import to your Home page unless you have already set up other pages.

NOTE: if you want to start out simple, you can just skip creating other pages for now, and all articles will automatically upload to your Home page. The upload will already include the article photo and the first few paragraphs in the description. Bam! Done!

But I do think it prettier to make link descriptions shorter, sort a lot of articles by tabs/pages, and add tags for Google to find your portfolio more easily. So here’s how to do that if you want to go deeper:

How to add pages to your portfolio to sort articles by topics or magazines:

If you want to create tabs (other pages) on your site for different article topics or names of publications you’ve written for, create a new Page. The tab is automatically auto-created. This bumped me at first because I expected it to be more difficult!

You can see in my first image the tabs are Home, 1920s Historical Memoir, Writing Tips, Parenting, and Books. I may change that as time goes along. I found it easiest to first upload links to my Home page, as that has links to all articles in chronological order.

After importing my history-related posts, then creating a new tab for those, I did have to designate they show on both the Home and 1920s History Memoir pages. (See below, “Blocks to display on”).

Note in the image below, where it says “Search blocks” it’s simply searching for the pages/tabs you created. (“Blocks” means pages in this case.) If you don’t indicate a page, it won’t show on any, so at least choose one block for your link to show in. (But as I said, if Home is your only page, you don’t have to mess with this.)

Note above the Text Excerpt field. Journo Portfolio with automatically grab the first few paragraphs, but I chose to shorten those, usually to the subheading in my original article. (The example above is from my post A Sure-footed Dhurzee & a Sly Cook.)

By the way, you can also set Journo Portfolio up to continuously import a feed or all articles from your own blog site. I can’t decide if this is a good option. When I elected that option after I uploaded some links, a few were duplicated.

Also, since a portfolio seems to be public from the time it’s created, I didn’t want a bunch of links posting without my handcrafting the descriptions first and checking the photos. Some photos at my old sites are not so great and I’d like to update those and possibly even the articles themselves before adding them to my new portfolio. (Some old articles contain now-irrelevant links.)

Also, a feed to automatically import new articles is not necessary; it’s a cinch to add the links yourself, and update the descriptions to be sure they looks good.

Also, in the settings area you can add tags. That will be a little additional work, but wise so that Google grabs the new portfolio when people do relevant searches.

By the way: to find website links to your old material, insert your author name in quotes in Google Search. (It’s quite revealing what Google does find. Do you know it shows your last three tweets, if you are on Twitter? Tweet conscientiously!) Google Search is how I found a few of my old archived articles.

Check, too, for alternate spellings of your name. Some sites may have listed your byline without your middle name, or with your middle initial, or using your maiden name (if that was formerly your author name).

Uploading scanned magazine article clips in PDF to your author portfolio:

Next up for me will be a bigger project: scanning my old articles (tearsheets from print magazines) into PDF. If you already have yours scanned, kudos to you! You can get rolling with that right away!

Some of the print magazines are still going strong, for example Writer’s Digest, but don’t have all articles digitally archived (that I could find yet). Other magazines I wrote for have gone entirely out of print or may have articles archived under a new company name with a digital website.

For example, I was formerly was a contributing editor (continuous writer) for Christian Parenting Today (CPT) print magazine (1989-2005), which had about 300,000 readers at its peak. CPT was a sister publication to Virtue and Today’s Christian Woman magazines. All were stellar print publications taken over by Christianity Today (founded by Billy Graham). A few of my parenting articles with them are archived now at the Christianity Today site.

Most of my CPT articles I’ll have to take a day to scan and upload. But I do want to include them in my portfolio, as it shows the range of topics I’ve written about, and most of the parenting articles offer perennial advice.

I didn’t thoroughly explore any other portfolio creation sites, so have none to compare them to. I saw Journo Portfolio recommended by The Write Life blog, so I simply dived in I’m pleased so far.

Do feel free to comment if you have any questions or thoughts about this!

Write on!

Laurie

Posted on

A Naughty Baby Elephant

by

When elephant Kitty gave birth to the first baby elephant born in Nedangayam lumber camp in S. Malabar India, Kitty’s Baby became a beloved pet to all — until she outgrew her welcome.

Image by Dusan Smetanta

Gladys Gose Pearce, October 1926

Dear Diary,

I was told a story about when logging elephant Kitty gave birth to the first elephant baby born in Nedangayam, to great excitement.

It automatically became “Kitty’s Baby” and was the pet of the camp. The Indian Forest Guards encouraged it to reach its little trunk into their pockets for bites of sugarcane. The old shopkeeper fed it sweetmeats when it favored him with a visit. Kitty was docile and benevolently watched the spoiling of her offspring.

When dry season came and fodder in the vicinity insufficiently sustained the herd, the elephants were moved to greener pastures. When they returned with the rains, Kitty’s Baby had grown enormously but had not forgotten her old friends. She’d again feel in a pocket for sugarcane. But if there was none, a resounding tug tore off the pocket and occasionally part of the coat, to the consternation of the wearer. The friendly tug-of-war games in which many had previously engaged with her now became dangerously unequal.

Worse yet, when she called on the shopkeeper, she had grown too wide for the doorway but went in anyway, taking the door frame and part of the wall with her! The shopkeeper was in a quandary. What should he do? He finally moved his shop to a new location, where he hoped Kitty’s Baby would not find him.

Since then, no one has played with baby elephants.

[Excerpt from Tigers, White Gloves and Cradles, coming soon. Copyright 2020, Laurie Winslow Sargent]

This post is from a collection of diary entrees and letters written in the 1920s by Gladys Gose Pearce, an American expat. Her husband J. Kenneth Pearce (Ken), a logging engineer from Seattle WA, worked in British Raj India for ten years. After a jungle honeymoon touring elephant lumber camps, the couple lived in Ooty, Madras, and the Andaman Islands.

Posted on

Finding Stories in Vintage Family Photos

by

Are you a writer? A reader? Or a history buff, curious about your ancestors? Regardless, stories intrigue you.  Here’s the first post in my series, Researching Your Own Attic Mysteries. Learn how to dig into your vintage family memorabilia to uncover stories and the personalities behind them.

I  thought of titling this post “I See Dead People”.

Not that it has anything to do with apparitions. Instead, it has to do with those Ahah! moments: when images of people in musty sepia-toned images in your attic suddenly become people who intrigue you. With a little digging, you end up seeing them in whole new light.

Take, for example, this image of my great-great-grandpa, John Martin Gose (1825-1919). My grandma’s grandpa.

IMG-8592

A year ago, this photo meant nothing to me. Even seeing his name marked on the back meant little. But now I know his story, I’m impressed with this guy!

What an adventurer he was. He traveled via covered wagon — from Missouri to California — to take part in the gold rush. He then moved back home, started a family, and brought them all on the Oregon Trail. The journey took nearly a year until they settled as as pioneers in early Walla Walla, Washington.

If that doesn’t beat all, although a farmer, he managed to raise a whole passel of young’uns who became lawyers, a judge and a doctor. All his children prized education so highly that one, my great-grandpa, made sure all his own kids –including four daughters—were university educated before 1920.

One of those girls, my Grandma Gladys, (1897-1994), was also an athlete. She scandalously swam across a lake at U-Dub in a men’s swimsuit to beat the fraternity guys, became a PE teacher in San Diego, then lived in British Raj India for seven years.

It seems that apple Gladys didn’t fall far from the family tree — adventurers begetting adventurers.

Do you now see John, in this photo, a little differently?

Naturally you’re wondering how I learned so much about him. No, I didn’t make his story up imaginatively out of whole cloth. Playing armchair detective, I combed through a combination of oral family history, online ancestry programs, photos, census records, diaries, and letters. A fuller picture of John emerged. It’s amazing, once you have online tools and documents at your fingertips, how quickly you can pull facts together about people in the past.

Old census docs contain a lot of cool details, including occupations, i.e. blacksmith or farmer. Perhaps someday your own great-grandkids will look at a census record about you, and say, “I didn’t know great-grandma was a writer!”

As an author currently writing Gladys’ biography (about her time in India), my exploration of John is more about understanding her backstory. But Gladys is a sum of DNA parts, of her parents and grandparents and their attitudes towards life. It’s nice to not only know her better but also the people who raised her.

I’ll explain more detail in future posts how to use various resources to uncover fascinating family details, which can be used in nonfiction stories, as elements of fictional characters,  or simply help you learn more about your own ancestry.

To not miss any future posts here,  subscribe to CrossConnectMedia.com (upper right of this webpage), and follow my Facebook page, (Laurie Winslow Sargent: for Parents, Writers & the Eternally Curious). I’d also love it if you’d join me on Twitter at @LaurieSargent with #MyAtticMysteries.

I’d love to know if this inspires you to drag some boxes out of your own the attic! Let me know also if you have any questions about this process of exploring old family items.

Feel free to comment with your own tips on researching family documents, to encourage us all in our fun history explorations.

Write on!

Laurie

Posted on

Answering: “What is Paperli?” for Authors

by

Pro authors ask me: “What IS Paperli (paper.li)? An online newspaper or magazine? If I see myself mentioned in a Twitter link, what should I do?”

Are people sharing your links on Twitter? Here's how Paper.li helps.

Are people sharing your links on Twitter? Here’s how Paper.li helps.

They’re confused even further when they click a Paperli (paper.li) link on Twitter that includes their author Twitter handle, then can’t find where in the paper they were mentioned and why.

So let’s clarify what Paperli (Paper.li) papers are, and aren’t, including:

* how a  paper like this is created, including how editors choose content,

* how to locate a link in a Paperli  to see how and why you were mentioned,

* if, how and when to thank Paperli editors for mentioning you,

* whether or not to Retweet paper.li links on Twitter that mentioned you.

HOW a PAPER.LI PAPER is CREATED

Understand: paper.li is an AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED link collector. It simply collects links posted on Twitter.  The “editor” of the paper (a Twitter user) sets parameters for his or her paper, then lets paper.li do its thing.
For example, my Family Faith and Writing Friday Post is set to automatically collect links I posted on Twitter the previous week on my Twitter page, @LaurieSargent. My goal is to offer a weekly summary of great links I shared. It shows in a newspaper style format, with headlines linking directly to the articles at their original sites.

Editors can control what links are collected in these 3 ways:

1.  Editors can set Paperli  up to  only gather links directly posted on their own Twitter pages, by them.
2. AND/OR: The paper.li site is is given a list of specific Twitter handles to auto-follow and post links from. That means any link that person posts. I, personally, only link my Paperli to a few Twitter handles: literary agents who pretty much always post items of interest to my writing audience.

So, no, author friends: I won’t automatically have Paperli  automatically add all your links to my paper via your Twitter handle. Here’s why: if you are like me, you tweet all sorts of links that may not fit the theme of my paper and my particular audience. My paper would begin to lose focus. HOWEVER, if we are mutual followers on Twitter, and I see great links to your articles, I WILL tweet those links, which WILL end up in my Paperli.

3. AND/OR: The paper editor tells paper.li to automatically find tweets on specific topics, identified by hashtags.  This too much of a wildcard for  me personally, for my own Paperli, unless I can quickly edit out any oddball stuff paper.li picks up for me. I don’t want readers to think I’m endorsing something I’m not. But if I get more active with editing my paper I may add a few hashtags.

Editors also control how often the paper is “published”. I choose weekly, so I can take a few minutes to edit/clean up the paper before it travels too far. Many with daily papers simply can’t keep up with that.

HELP! I SEE I WAS MENTIONED, BUT CAN’T SEE WHERE!

Be sure you are reading the right edition of the paper. If it is a daily paper and the paper.li tweet that mentioned you was from three days ago, go to that day’s edition. Click the Archives link (next to “Read current edition”), then the right date.

Also helpful, once in the correct day’s edition, is to click the ALL ARTICLES or STORIES links. There, the articles appear in list view; you might see your Mention more easily.

Note, authors, that your name may show up in a paper ONLY because you shared a link you found interesting. If the link you shared does not go directly to your website, but instead goes to an article on a different site, that’s where a click will take them to read the article. It will include a note that it was “shared by” you. This can still be nice because readers of the paper may then realize you have a tendency to share interesting stuff, so may click to your Twitter handle (linked to your name in the Shared by). They may then Follow you, and click on your website address in your Twitter bio to read about all your great books.

Just remember that Paperli’s focus is on the article shared, not the author of the tweet. If you see articles about other authors mentioned far more often than you, it’s because those authors are active on Twitter, posting great tweets that multiple people like and want to Retweet. Or they are such interesting people, many folks on twitter are tweeting about them. You can’t force this. Get active on Twitter, interact with others, post great stuff, and Paperli papers are bound to pick up your links naturally.

SHOULD AUTHORS THANK A PAPERLI EDITOR BY HITTING REPLY TO A PAPERLI TWEET?

 Well  . . . remember that tweets from paper.li are auto-generated. You are thanking the editor for something they may not even realized they did. Since my paper is a weekly (always on Fridays), I usually know who I’ve mentioned and why. But many papers are set to default to daily recreation, and even the editors don’t know what appeared what day. I suggest that you DON’T hit Reply on Twitter asking them why you were mentioned unless it’s a close friend. You will simply be making them do what you can do: go to the paper to find out. Honor their time.

HOWEVER: If someone regularly Retweets your links in their Paperli, it’s nice to send them a direct tweet or message, thanking them for getting your name out there so often.

Or if you find a link directly to your website in their Paperli, yes, thank them! ( If you’re smart, in your thank you, say “Thanks, XYZ for mentioning my article (include link) in your Paperli – I appreciate that. Friends, do Follow & visit XYZ (include their website).” The best way to thank someone is to direct others to them.

SHOULD AUTHORS RETWEET PAPER.LI TWEETS THAT MENTIONED THEM?

Maybe . . . if you trust the content of the paper, trust the editor, and think your followers might be interested in many of the articles in that paper. For example, one paper that often mentions me, which frequently contains other articles I like, is FAYL Parenting Ideas.  Retweeting is a nice favor to the editor.  Also, if a bunch of your author pals are also mentioned in the same automated paper.li tweet you are, a Retweet is a nice way to introduce your Twitter followers to them. But I suggest you check the paper first to be sure you truly want to lead your own Followers to that issue of that paper, which may have accidentally picked up a bizarre article via a hashtag.

And yes, do Retweet if the mention of you in the paper connects directly with an article link leading to your site AND you like the rest of the paper’s content. But frankly, it can be laborious to take time to see if my handle @LaurieSargent was in the paper because I shared a link to my own site or elsewhere. So if mentioned somewhere, I am simply grateful, say a prayer of thanks, and let God do His thing to let that Mention of me connect me or help others. I may get to know the editor of the paper, and if we are like-minded, I’ll do what I can to periodically shine the spotlight back on them.

Have you had a positive experience with a paper.li paper? Or have a lingering question about this? Leave a Comment below — I’d love to connect with you.

First name only is fine, and I promise not to send unasked for emails 🙂  But click Subscribe if you do want to keep up with my future posts, which will have lots of tips related to marketing and PR for writers.