Memorial Fund for Gabriel

It is with a heavy heart that I write this today because I miss a little boy named Gabriel. Watching his brother Raven and his father Woodstock, a/k/a Loren David O'Connor, suffer through the pain of their loss while trying to make arrangements for his burial, memorial and wake is really hard. Gabriel Jaden Coates was with us for a short 3 years, 2 months and 2 days, yet he has made a profound impression on the hearts of people that will last forever. He left this earth to enter the spirit world on Sunday, May 24, 2009 at about 11 am. Gabriel fell into the water of the Antelope Creek, which was fast moving and deep. His body was recovered by very compassionate rescue workers about two hours later.

Woodstock, Raven, his friends and family are sort of moving in a state of unreal shock. Things need to get done. So we are helping in whatever way we can. Funds are urgently needed to buy the casket and to buy a plot where he will be laid to rest. Please spread the word and help in whatever way you can.

Please visit the dedication site for Gabriel at http://www.angelsforgabriel.org. News and information about his memorial, burial and wake will be posted on this blog. Lots of pictures will be loaded soon that I took of the gathering site where little Gabriel drowned. We took photos of the creek and the campsite where he laughed, played and enjoyed. There is a very spiritual picture on the site now that shows what we believe is Gabriel's spirit that appeared while Woodstock and I were standing by the stream talking about Gabriel, about what happened, about his life, about what to do now. It is then that we both felt his presence and a butterfly landed on Woodstock after that moment. I took a photo in the direction of where they found Gabriel's body in the water and that is where the column of light appeared. It was an intense, sad, happy, etherical time.

We will be assisting Woodstock with transferring of funds to the Funeral home when it is placed on the paypal in the amount we need. The general manager Chris Girdner at the Girdner Funeral Chapel is giving us until Tuesday at closing time to come up with the total for the casket. This is urgent. Other arrangements are being made and other funds are needed very much. Please email angelsforgabriel@gmail.com if you have questions or if you want to help in some way.

The Forest Service, the fire department, the Siskiyou county Sheriff's department, the Fish and Game dept. personnel, and the townspeople volunteers from Tennant were very gentle, kind, compassionate during the entire ordeal. We are all grateful to them for the way they handled this situation.

I have many things to write and memorial signs and brochures to make, and a website to update, so please help us facilitate this link being spread far and wide to get the funds together. Gabriel deserves a decent casket, memorial, burial and wake. Help us give him that much, please. Woodstock should not have to concern himself with money at a time like this. Right now we are all camping in our rigs while this is all taking place, so family please plug into this compassionate service.

Much love and blessings.
Summer Breeze on behalf of Woodstock, Raven, Gabriel & Raven and
Jazzy all his friends and family.

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Social Spark Offers Blog U Back Opportunities

Are you a professional blogger who writes advertisements for clients on your blog through companies that pay you to blog?

I can speak from personal experience about “sponsored conversations”, which is what some professional sites call advertised blogging for clients. I belong to over one dozen companies who offer bloggers pay for writing sponsored conversations on their own blogs. Not all of these companies keep me working on a regular basis. Some of them do not have work for my blogs because I have not achieved some level of qualifications required by them. (that can be a whole other topic to post about).

A few companies give me work on a regular basis on several of my blogs. One of those companies is Social Spark. I just recently achieved enough page rank with this company to write several posts a month. I have four blogs listed with them titled The Midnight Writer, Blog Day Planner, The Midnight Writer’s Journal, and The Midnight Writer’s Freelance Quest.

Since I don’t receive as many paid posts as I would like from Social Spark, I have begun to check out one of the other options they offer in their program. Aside from paid sponsored posts, they offer affiliate programs, cost per click offers and causes. An additional feature is their program called “Sparks”. With this, advertisers choose to list offers to allow bloggers to accept the opportunity to blog about them and they in turn agree to “Blog U Back”. This concept will help you in several ways.

• It will give you blogging practice writing reviews.
• You will help other bloggers and advertisers while adding pages to your blog with interesting and versatile content.
• It will help diversify your blog.
• You will increase your page rank by driving more of an audience to your blog since the blog u back offer will bring readers from the other person’s site to yours. Usually, in a Blog U Back offer each site puts a reciprocal link to the other person being reviewed.
• You will gain back links.
• You will accrue good karma by writing for something other than money to help others out.

Have fun blogging and if you email me, I’ll Blog U Back.

The Midnight Writer

Today this Blog Makes its Entrecard Debut

Image by Aldon via Flickr

Yes, I am entering yet another blog on Entrecard and hoping that it will be approved. I am working on a system to tie all of my blogs into one huge network, but it will be a few months before more details are released. In about three months, I will start utilizing this network to the benefit of fellow bloggers and freelance writers.

Blog Me Back 2 will be used exclusively for writing reviews and promoting this action among other bloggers to help connect us together in order to promote more content. It will also help with driving up page views and to encourage more visitors to this host blog and to other blogs who write a reciprocal review for me.

The image to the left shows a typical Entrecard traffic bar when someone is an active dropper on other Entrecards. This is an area that I need to work on. So I'll need your help by encouraging me to come review your site and drop on my widget. It will look like the image below.

You might be asking why I chose this image. I'll tell you. I love silhouettes and I always have been fascinated by them. Tonight as I was choosing which image to use for Entrecard on Blog Me Back 2, this one reached out and grabbed my attention. It reminds me of a down home version of my Midnight Writer silhouette image that I use in my profile. Instead of heels, the woman is barefoot and that is how I like to be, barefoot walking in the grass in a beautiful meadow. The wind is blowing her simple country style dress and a ribbon is visible in the back at her waist. She's playing with some flowers it looks like and that is what you would find me doing on a mountain campout. the shadow is Mysterious and that is my middle name.

Any more questions, just ask me. And be sure to visit Entrecard. You'll see Blog Me Back 2 over there, I'm sure of it. I'll probably be clicking away tomorrow dropping on your widget.

The Midnight Writer

Let’s Get It Going on with the Blog Me Back Concept

Are you ready to take the plunge? I am and my fingers are hot and ready to tap those keys as I write about you, or your blog, or your website or your company or a service or product that you provide. I want to experience the art of writing reviews about others like you for several reasons. We can count them here.

First, it will help me polish my writing skills and I will develop a better eye for physical and grammatical layouts in both blogs and websites. Blogging about others,or writing reviews, will help you polish your skills, too. That is very important for a freelance writer.

Second, it is not always about the money! It’s really not! Sometimes it’s about recognition. Get your name out there by writing as many reviews as possible to help you get noticed as an author. The beauty about writing reviews about others on your blog is it builds pages that are cached in google and other search engines.

Third, if you write reviews on your blogs, you gain page count to help increase your blog rank while you build some quality content on your blog. The first year is sort of proving grounds for any blog to figure out if the subject matter is readable and if it will carry both an audience and your interest as the writer. If both happen, it’s a good blog and I say promote it.

Finally, reciprocal blogging builds back links to your site and the for the person you are writing about. Include some hyperlinks to help bring attention to other pages deep within your site and theirs to really increase the view value and page value of a blog.

There is one major point that I almost forgot to mention- you retain the authorship of your work right on your own site. In freelance writing, that is what I call having the best of both worlds.

So have fun and Blog Me Back Too! What are you waiting for?

The Midnight Writer

Technorati Tags: reciprocal blogging,reviews,critique,freelance writing,Blog Me Back Too,The Midnight Writer,The Midnight Writers Blogs,promote

Sharing Random Thoughts about Reciprocal Blogging

This is my day planner online. If you want to view it, just click the photo since it’s hyperlinked. I use this to help plan the work on my domain blogs and to monitor the progress of posts, programs, ideas, reviews or just about anything that I do online.

This Blog Day Planner needs a review to help me improve its function, the posts, the content, the layout and all aspects of its design and purpose.

If you review the above blog, then I’ll review the blog that you chose to post this review. Why, I’ll add 100 Entrecard credits for good measure and give you 3 inbound links back to your site. If you take the challenge, email themidnightwriter1@gmail.com so I can blog u back and send your EC credits.

Be honest in your review but upbeat and offer solutions to problems if you can or make suggestions to problem areas, please. Thanks.

 

Random Thoughts about Reciprocal Blogging

So here are my random thoughts that I would like you to consider when you blog me back 2. Please add to this list in the comment section following this post.

• First and foremost, be honest. Give a fair critique on blog style, layout, fonts, images, colors and most of all content.
• Talk about the nature of the posts on the blog being reviewed. Give some examples in the conversation.
• Use a natural flow when writing. A blog review is not a content article so formality is not necessary.
• Use good grammar and sentence structure but followed more loosely as blogging rules apply.
• Be precise and to the point.
• Talk about the blog or content author and give some bio information and a profile link.
• Please read a few blog posts on the site you will reviewing.
• Offer your creative insight on areas that you see need improvement.

This is a good list to get you started. I’m anxious to read your ideas.

The Midnight Writer

I’m Seeking Intriguing Subject Matter

If you are a regular reader of my blogs, then you know that on my diverse blogs I cover a large variety of topics. I am a creative freelance writer, so it makes my heart go flutter and my brain gets all electrified whenever I happen upon some unique subject matter on which to sprinkle my creative magic dust.

Will you be the next intriguing subject matter for one of my ghost written blog articles or will your story appear in one of my magazine articles, or in a private collection of stories that I’m saving for my first work of short story fiction?

If you think you are the stuff that great stories are made from then contact me at themidnightwriter1@gmail.com and give me the juicy details. We can discuss the publishing format after we decide if your subject matter is the stuff of intrigue.

I’m anxious to get started so please hurry and send me your synopsis so we can create a masterpiece!

The Midnight Writer

The Birds are Serenading us in Brownwood, Texas

Today we traveled to Brownwood, Texas after dodging and enduring some heavy downpours that brought high winds and massive lightning bolts. When the storm began, we were in Fort Hood, Texas which is located about 20 miles west of Temple. We knew of a nice Inn with jacuzzi tubs for $36.00 a night that also had all the perks of two king sized beds, micro, fridge,  coffee maker, cable and high speed internet. So we left Fort Hood and drove 20 miles through the storm to shelter and relaxation.

Yesterday was Cephas’ birthday, March 25 and he hit the big 50. He was deserving some R & R from the highway and the cramped van to be able to relax. We enjoyed some good movies and a late showing of the X-files. I stayed up most of the night working on our website at Mountain Spirit Productions and our blog at Mountain Spirit Productions. I had to remove and reinstall the domain blog wordpress software to get the blog activated after a three month glitch that we could not resolve. It still has the primitive wordpress software but we’ll remedy that in the near future. Anyway, the point is that we had a good time sharing time together and relaxing in the warm dry motel room.

Our van roof leaks around the high rise vent so staying dry was important to us. The rain pours in right onto the bed that is not exactly as nice as a real waterbed, if you know what I mean. Since we didn’t sleep, we did the most logical thing, napped till checkout time neared, grabbed a shower and coffee, then drove a mile to the nearest Starbucks where we slept 3 1/2 hours. I bought a delicious coffee with a shot and we headed west on Highway 190, our destination being Abilene then New Mexico. There is some other pressing business in Texas that will have to wait till the return trip, as we’re on a fast turning calendar page.

The storms that I mentioned earlier really caused some damage around parts of Texas which we were very fortunate to escape. High winds up to 90 miles per hour took out windows in buildings and cars so that highway and city crews in certain cities had to clean broken glass from the streets. I’m so thankful to God that we missed the 90 mile an hour winds and the golf ball sized hail. That certainly would’ve damaged the top to our van, which is like a type of plastic. Maybe we were in tune with the spirit. I’d like to believe that we were. In any case, we were graciously spared.

Tonight, we pulled into a Walmart in Brownwood to be greeted by hundreds of birds getting ready to nest in the trees that border the parking lot perimeter. Darkness was settling in so the birds were flocking in the trees making them appear as if they are bearing loads of large fruits. Their musical chatter has been entertaining us since we arrived. Just in the past five minutes they have calmed and quieted. I take it they’re settling in for a night’s rest, and so shall we be in a little while.

Cephas was so enamored by the birds that he took out our camera and made attempts to capture hundreds of birds flocking from tree to tree. It was amusing for awhile just watching the cat tease the birds as it walked from tree to tree just watching and waiting for just one bird to get careless and land. It was too dark for the photos but we tried. Maybe photo shop will yield a magical image capture that we cannot see with the naked eye.

It’s 12:40 am and true to my name, I remain

The Midnight Writer