Hearthstone Community Church OFM newsletter articles by Me!

Today, I had someone else inquire if the articles that I have been writing for the Hearthstone newsletter were online. This has been a regular occurrence since I started writing articles for the newsletter starting in January. It has been a slight dilemma for me...mainly because I am a working writer.

My original plan for the series of articles that I am writing was to bundle them together at the end of this year into a single pdf, and use them as part of my advertising kit next year. This idea came out of the pro-blogging community. Basically, you take some of your best posts and articles, lace them with links leading back to your site, and let it free out into the internet. I thought it was a good idea for helping build a following for my own writing...someday, I would like to make a living wage as a writer.

Because of this, I was caught off guard by the first request for the articles to be posted online. It happened on one of the Yahoo groups. Basically, I dropped back behind the "I am not sure if shameless self-promotion is allowed on this group" defense. That was partially the truth...I am still not sure if it is completely legit or not.

Since then, the dilemma has been nipping at the edges of my consciousness. Today, when yet another friend asked if the newsletter was online, I had a few minutes to think about it and actual time to follow though once I decided what to do.

One idea was to simply put them up on Associated Content. That is what I am doing with the astrology articles (and anything else) that I am writing for Campus Connection, the student newspaper of the Community College of Denver. Unfortunately, with the new format that AC recently put into play, putting up a set of related articles requires some twiddling around as the newer ones are finished; it is either twindle ar hope that the readers can figure out the search function to find the rest of the set.

And this is definitely a set of related articles, the first three all have something to do with positive affirmations in a ritual and day-to-day life. The second article also has something to do with the practical uses of secrecy, which is going to tie into the next set. All this is leading up to what I am doing at the June Open Full Moon Ritual.

In the end, I decided to do a temporary archive of the articles that I am writing on the Bast Temple website. It will make it easier for people to find the articles in the same set; it will help the lodge's page ranking (or I hope it will); and make sure that I am updating the website at least once a month.

Of course, the term "temporary" is a relative term. I decided that I am going to leave up the January 2010 article up until February 2011, when it will be replaced with the article from the January 2011 newsletter. The same pattern will apply to the rest of the months. At the moment, I only have January and February 2010 articles up. I do not plan to put up March's article until I am approaching the deadline for April's newsletter. This is how I am doing it with Campus Connection; when the new issue goes live (hits the stands), I invoke my reprint rights.

(The only exceptation I might make is the article for June, which will be heavily related to the OFM ritual that I am leading.)

Webmasters will spot the advantage to archiving it by the month, rather than by the month and the year...yes, I am lazy and am going to recycle the page addresses as I go along. Plus, by rotating the content (and limiting the amount of duplication), I am hoping to recieve some of that Google Love.

Anyways, if you are curious to read the first article in the set, it is The Use of Positive Statements in Ritual. The link for the second article is hopefully findable in the sidebar...if I am wrong about how easy it is to find the second link, please feel free to complain in the comment section.