I used to have an Amazon Affiliates account. I opened it when I started my original blog a decade or so ago. (I think that blog is finally offline.) I never made “real” money off of it. I got some affiliate earnings (small commissions that never change the purchasers price paid) and I had them deposited as credits to the associated amazon account a long time ago. It wasn’t enough to notice.

A little over a year ago the account was cancelled. It wasn’t because I was hardly using it, though that would’ve been understandable. It was an attempt to collect sales tax from retailers such as Amazon by the state legislature. Here’s a Star Tribune story on the event from then. Here’s an opinion piece from earlier this year that somewhat mirrors my own thoughts on the mess when it happened.

Around the time I started Our Agile Journey I sought out a way to have occasional affiliate links on that site.I learned of Amazon affiliate aggregation. Basically, a company creates an affiliate account and then has multiple people creating links for that affiliate account. Each individual persons contributions contribute to a volume goal that ups the affiliate percentage for pay outs. The company organizing it skims a touch off the top. The result is a higher pay-out for smaller blogs that couldn’t get that kind of throughput on their own and a bit of pay for the organizer. While this was initially something I thought I could do, it turns out that members of these affiliate groups need to be qualified individually to participate in the Amazon program.

With Amazon completely out of the picture I looked for more general aggregators and found VigLink. With them I was able to link to Barnes and Noble. Not as good, but still a good think.

Recently, at the beginning of this month actually, Amazon re-opened it’s affiliate program to Minnesota. Likely they are opening a distribution or data center somewhere in the state. Not that important to me honestly. What it does mean is I can start using Amazon Affiliate links again.I am curious as to how affiliate links work with the Amazon Smile program. I always assumed that the Smile program shunted what would otherwise be affiliate earnings to the charity chosen by the purchaser.

Instead of reactivating my Amazon Affiliate account I have decided to have VigLink activate my account for Amazon. I have also decided to start using it here. After all, I make a weekly post with up to 14 book titles and 7 show/movie titles. Each of those could be a link that pays a small percentage back to our family if someone thinks their kids might like the story and click-through to buy it as well. VigLink responds to support inquires pretty fast. I expect that this site will be Amazon approved by the time the next post goes up. Maybe this will help me do a better job of identifying exactly what book the kids are reading?

Every Tuesday I post to OurAgileJourney.com.

Every Sunday night I post the next TWB.

To accomplish the weekly posting at my other site I should be writing at a rate of 1.5 posts per week. I should be spending some time on it every night or two such that I always have at least one post ready to go and one partially complete, but preferably more so in each state than that. Right now I have three partial posts and none ready to go. Tomorrow. But I will either make one of the partials ready or create a whole new one by tomorrow.

The weekly posting here is a little different. All that I require of myself is to create a list of items. The beauty of this particular weekly post series is that it really requires no research to write for. (Unless you count verifying stories read by Heather as research.) What it does require (for me) is to write every night. I can’t remember by the end of the week what was watched/read earlier in the week. (Excepting 500 Hats. I think I might hot-key that title to save writing time…)

One thing I was hoping would happen by adding this second weekly post commitment is that I would write more. It would help establish a habit. That part is working. What’s more, as I write each nightly entry I am wanting to write more than a simple list. This is exactly what I was hoping to see happen.

The new goal is to nurture this and allow the nightly writing to grow. I would like to see it grow from extra details around the day & lists to writing more posts for both blogs. That is the next step. I have some ideas of the steps after that, but I’m not quite ready to share them yet.

I struggle with this. I think most people do at one time or another. It can take many forms. I’ve spent far too long choosing between two color settings on a display in the past for instance. Maybe someone has had a project car waiting for that new side panel for two years. Perhaps you’ve had a song written, but not “ready to share” since you were in high school.

The relevance to right now is that most often I don’t write down ideas for posting; to this blog or Our Agile Journey. The problem, as I tell it to myself, is that my thoughts aren’t fully formed yet. See, I rarely write an actual draft of anything. I often re-write parts of a post as I’m writing it. I may re-order things, cut them out completely and post them to a new post, or add new stuff to earlier thoughts. I don’t write a draft start to finish without editing followed by a couple rounds of editing to a final. Of course, that means I never actually write when my thoughts are fully formed, I just feel that way as I am able to complete the post.

The real problem then is I don’t want to write something down until I can finish it. I want to start a post and let it flow to the end. I don’t want to jot down a single sentence and come back to it later. Whether due lack of time or lack of direction I tend to avoid it until the whole thing can happen at once. It translates into my preferred style of playing video games as well. I’m a bit of a completionist.

Historically if there is a percent done counter on a game I struggle to move on until it makes it to 100. I’ve gotten better. Realities of available time (and talent depending on the game) have gotten me to accept getting the main story and possibly some side-stories. I no longer try to get all the multiple endings of any given game. I also struggle to play sessions of only a half hour or an hour. For example, if I allotted myself 3 hours a week to play games I would rather do it all at one go then half an hour a night most of the week. That may or may not be related.

Now I need to bring the ability to not always go 100% from gaming to writing. I need to learn to be ok writing a little bit down, taking a voice note, or cutting and pasting a headline and web address. That needs to be enough for me to expand the effort. If not, I fear I’ll never get ahead on the other blog, contribute to this one, or complete speeches for Toastmasters.

The assignment is to write take something previously written and change it so it speaks directly to another person. The main problem here is that I don’t have the backlog of writing that I should. Even if I include sources outside of OurAgileJourney I don’t have enough. I used an idea I’ve had in my head a long time for the last assignment and don’t really have more for it yet. So I need something new for this one. I’m kind of free-writing right now, trying to get started. I guess that might not have been apparent. Even less apparent might be the whole “The assignment…” bit. I mean, I have my degree, what the heck am I talking about?

I’m not 100% sure where my future lies professionally. Since I was in Junior High I’ve had visions of rising to a C-Level position in a large company from an IT related track. Essentially becoming a CIO or CTO in the future. I still think that would be fun and that I would do well. Thing is, I’ve had other ideas lately too. The foremost is becoming an independent trainer and author.

Specifically I would do things such as teach a group of future Agile Coaches for an organization before helping them implement Agile. I would have industry approved classes that I could also teach. (Think PDUs or similar.) I would have a book or two along the lines of the classes and perhaps coursework developed that others used to teach. Maybe, just maybe I’d even have a series of fiction novels in there somewhere. I would move among companies helping them improve and gaining knowledge. This would allow me to update classes and create new books over time as I learned more. I would be able to put at least as much into the Agile community as I’ve been able to learn from it.

None of that really helps here and now though. I need a topic that touches someone. Something personal. It has to be about passion, and not about me. I like to also use the assignments as a way to feed into my blog. This can be difficult as Agile Project Management, while a huge topic, is not something that touches a lot of people. I also want to make sure that I don’t cover something in weeks that are too close together. Perhaps there is something I can get together though. Maybe there is a way I can write to someone who might be reading my blog. Well, someone who may someday read through the archives of my blog anyhow. (There really isn’t a readership per se yet…)

Yeah, I think I have something now. It’ll build off of a previous post.

Thanks for sticking around this far. It has been a so-far rare look into some part of how some of my post topics can be borne. A little piece of my current writing process as it were.

Oh, you wanted to know more about the post I finally decided to make? The piece I’m writing that is “to someone?” Well, I guess check back next Tuesday at OurAgileJourney.com!