July | 2011 | My Conflicted Self

Free Shit: An Update

About a month back, I decided to stop ignoring all the online competitions I saw around the web and started entering them like a crazy man.

On 20 June, I published a blog post on how to enter free online competitions and where to go to, such as winstuff.co.za, who post all the online competitions that they find for us…

I also told you about sites like Groupon and the rest and how they help you to get some major discounts, especially for eating out. Since then I also discovered a nice aggregator for all these sites – www.alldeals.co.za – which aggregates, or lists, all the deals from the many deal sites out there in one place, including online deals. You can also sign up to their daily email deal notifications.

More importantly though, yesterday I won my first competition and I have winstuff.co.za to thank for this as well. Not directly mind you, but through another competition they had linked to on the same site.

I won something that if you knew me, couldn’t be a better prize. It is a Philips BodyGroom which is pretty cool. But anyway, that’s not the point. I have been doing this for less than one month and it’s paid off already.

Tip: Take the time to setup your browser’s auto-complete feature. It is worth the initial setup time purely because of the amount of time it saves you in the long run.

Groupon Changes Privacy Policy, Starts Tracking User Location (readwriteweb.com)
Free Shit! (myconflictedself.wordpress.com)
GROUPON CUSTOMER SURVEY: Businesses Who Have Used Groupon Please Weigh In Here (businessinsider.com)
Rise of the Clones: Groupon Faces Growing Competition (blogs.wsj.com)

July 14, 2011 | Categories: CharlieV the Geek, Happy, Information | Tags: Competition, Contests and Sweepstakes, Groupon | 1 Comment

Revenge of the Zombie Girlfriend: A Brief Interlude

It has been quite a while, almost 5 months to be exact, since I started writing my “Revenge of the Zombie Girlfriend” story. A recently self-published author friend of mine started a blog challenge back in February called the Katalina Blog Challenge. It was partly to get herself motivated to write if I recall, but I also felt the need for motivation myself, so when the first challenge came out I was quite excited to get started.

We were told to write ourselves into a short scene, but as the main character and in third person. We were told to describe ourselves as we were then. I decided to put myself into a zombie infested wasteland as a survivor. For anyone that knows me, this shouldn’t be a surprise. I love anything Zombie… I had also just started dating my girlfriend back then and in the story I had found out that she had been turned and shot her in the head. It was quite funny seeing the reaction that got from her and my friends. I came to an agreement with my girlfriend that the zombie version of her in the story is not her and started referring to that version of her as “alternate not-you” in conversations with her.

In the second challenge we had to insert some sort of solution to the scene we had created. From that day I started getting increased traffic to my blog and decided to carry on with the story under the title “Revenge of the Zombie Girlfriend” and haven’t wanted to change it since.

Every time I have posted a new part of the story, I have received massive boosts in the amount of traffic to my blog. When I published the last part, I had the highest amount of traffic for one day at over 600 hits. I know this is still very little in the grand scheme of things, but for me it’s more than ten times the amount of traffic I had to my blog in it’s first month in just one day!

I have come to the decision that I need to start giving the story some of the desperate attention it deserves. I need to take this ugly chunk of wood and carve something awesome out of it. I’ll be the first to admit that, right now, I would never buy this book if it were one. It’s a bit messy, really untidy, very random, it’s all over the place and is more bad than good right now. I won’t even get into plot holes.

Thanks for all the support my story has received so far nonetheless, and hopefully soon I’ll be able to compile it all into a nice neat e-book for your enjoyment. For now you can still read it here though.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my awesome girlfriend for putting up with me about this. I have to admit that I rather enjoy your reactions to the parts which the Zombie Girlfriend (alternate-not-you) is in.

Wish me luck!