What's Wrong With My Body?

After getting a dozen or so hits from various search engines on this phrase over a 24-hour period, I toyed with a few responses.

There are, after all, some assumptions we can make--particularly since they were all coming from the United States. I considered simply guessing: You eat too much processed food and you don't get enough exercise.

I actually thought, though, that these searchers were looking for something specific. Maybe there was a book out by that name, or they were looking for a particular website. It seemed too strange that suddenly multiple people were searching EXACTLY that phrase. They clumped up in my search results, too, one right after another.

I'd speculated about this a bit and not quite decided how to respond when I happened to carry some laundry into the living room last night at just the right moment. "Just the right moment", in this case, was the moment during which my daughter was watching television and Drake of Drake & Josh woke up with green hands. Josh ran to look up the condition on the Internet and voila! Drake said incredulously, "WhatsWrongWithMyBody.com?"

"Yeah," Josh said. "I have it bookmarked."

Guys. They made it up. The URL, as you might expect, redirects to nick.com. And when that doesn't work out...well...I guess we go to Google.



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Should You Work for Free?

The answer to this question (like so many others) is a resounding and heartfelt, "It depends." I'm very firm on this.

This question arises frequently in the professional writing world. Established writers, as a rule, want to discourage new writers from writing for free because it might hurt the market rates those established writers command. That's wrong. A new writer's focus needs to be on her career, not the good of the industry; let that burden fall to those of us who are already making a living.

I'm a firm believer that for some writers in some circumstances, there are very good reasons to write for "free". I expect that the same general principles apply in other fields.

That said, I think that most of the people currently writing for free aren't getting much (if any) mileage out of it, because they don't have clear strategies or a clear understanding of how that writing will move them to the next step. Getting "clips" or "exposure" or "links" in a general sense is very unlikely to pay off; if you're writing for "free", make sure you know exactly what you're getting in return and exactly how it will help take you to the next level.

Can Middle Schoolers Get Pregnant?

I know this blog is pretty new for me to be recycling posts, but I think I'm compelled by basic common sense to re-use the answer here that I set forth in my response to "Can You Rape a Prostitute?"

Yes, but you shouldn't.

Of course, any girl who has reached puberty and has a normally functioning reproductive system can get pregnant. The really big news is, if you time it just right you can actually manage to get pregnant BEFORE YOU'VE EVER MENSTRUATED. Yep, it's true. It's pretty rare, but menstruation is something that happens to clear out the unused eggs at the end of a cycle, so it isn't going to start until a couple of weeks AFTER you start being fertile.

Let me back up, though. If this is a question you have to ask, you are NOWHERE NEAR ready to be considering sex.



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