This was one of the ecourses offered at Suite101 University. The site is taking down this section, sometime soon. I wanted to keep the content available. It's well worth keeping.

Professional Writing By Sara Quest Introduction Do you long to call yourself a professional? By taking this two-week course, you will be. This course will provide you with enough resources and contacts to keep your career as a professional writer going long after you've stopped reading. The rewarding career is about to begin: you will be creating your own free websites, which will be nothing short of an online party for professional minded writers. The site will reveal the services you aim to offer future clients. This is an efficient and necessary avenue for displaying and updating services, and for allowing potential clients to view them. But let's not forget "the basics:” we will explore facts pertaining to copyright and "use rights," keeping abreast of trends via leading sources like Editor & Publisher and Writer's Digest, and learning "the write etiquette" when it comes to dealing with clients. You will learn ways to hone skills through intimate study of professional writing samples, from Writer's Digest insiders to professional author websites, and you will learn how to "imitate the best,” finding new ways to develop your own successful style! Additionally, through examination of public demand, you will be able to incorporate into your personal agendas a knowledge of which writing sells. You will soon discover your writing is worth more than pennies on the professional pay scale, and top local and national editorial contacts will gather under your belt within two weeks’ time. Through our study of top professionals and trends, you will gain resources that will allow you to produce resalable work able to pass tests of time. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from learning these quality ways to market work so you can sell to markets over and over again, for many years to come, allowing you to gain quality contacts and higher pay. Once you've learned how to become a polished writer / businessperson, you will have begun your prosperous path as a professional. The popular notion that "it is hard to break into the writing business" is mere fallacy. Editors are ALWAYS willing to read writers' offerings, and they will accept them if they are clean, concise products appealing to the overall public. All you have to do is take a two-week course that shows you how. So rejoice, fellow writers! You are about to learn everything you need to know in order to write for a living! What Students Are Saying... Informative, refreshing, inspiring. I'm ready to tackle the writing world again A quick, convenient way of getting more familiar with a topic. Prompt instructor feedback the most useful feature along with the suggested links, which have already proven helpful. Anyone looking to start a new professional writing career, or enhance the one they already have, can benefit from this course. Hilary Williams Thank you Sara…it’s been such a pleasure to take this course, and I just know we’ll all be better writers with fewer rejection letters after taking it! Jodi Wetherup

…more

This was originally part of the Suite101 University ecourses. They are all being taken down from the site, sometime soon. I have preserved some because they are worth keeping. It seems a shame to lose something which has value and had so much effort put into it's creation.

E-Publishing

By Dawn Whitmire

Introduction

"Catch the Wave -- Become an E- Publisher"

Anyone with a computer will tell you e-commerce and e-publishing are definite waves of the future. More and more e-publishers are popping up over the Internet and it’s not surprising others want a piece of this pie. If you’ve thought about becoming an e-publisher, this course is for you. However, let’s be frank. This is not an easy job where you’ll make quick money overnight. E-publishing takes investment of your time and knowledge. You have to be willing to learn that which you do not know and to find someone who can teach you. If you’re reviewing this course introduction, the thought has crossed your mind or maybe you know someone who is interested in venturing into the wide world of e-publishing. Can we show you how? Absolutely. Can we make you a success? Absolutely ... not. That will be up to you. Your success will depend upon your devotion to your task and your drive to succeed. We can give you the steps to take; we cannot infuse you with determination. …more

I'm not unlinking from 9Rules. My feed still goes through on the Writing section of their network, so for that, I am keeping the link up. But, I have in every way that matters, given up on 9Rules. I feel really let down, disappointed and somewhat stupid for ever believing in it.

If I had my blog in 9Rules in the beginning, when the site still had passion behind it, I would have felt very much differently. Instead, I was accepted in the one and only batch of blogs after 9Rules was bought out. Since then we had a few empty promises and then... nothing much at all. Someone logged in for awhile to update the blog, token updates. My links appeared there until someone must have protested that my links were appearing too often. I update daily so there are a lot of posts to choose from when someone updated the 9Rules blog. But, someone must have been jealous and protested about the amount of times Word Grrls was linked to. I never bothered to ask about it, I understand pettiness and jealousy. It was just one little thing that began to bother me.

I've been a member of 9Rules since 2009. When the site went down recently, without explanation, I thought that would likely be the end of it. Like a sudden sinking of a ship. Just gone beneath the waves, leaving nothing but a kerplunk. But, they brought it up.  Of course, it's been unchanged since then. It would have been a nice sign of life if there were a post about the down time, or an email sent out to the members. This unchanged, non-communication, took away the last trace of hope I had for the site. I'm just waiting for it's final disappearance now.

But, as I wrote above, I'm keeping the link up as long as my feed still gets published on the network. It used to be important, part of the agreement to having membership. Now I can find many sites still part of the network, but no longer giving the link back to 9Rules. No one cares. I don't mean the individual bloggers, I mean the people behind 9Rules. They just don't care or have an interest in the network. It serves them by merely existing as  a domain to stick up Google Adsense. A shame, but it happens all too often when someone sells a site to someone else.

RIP 9Rules.

My ex and I are becoming friends again. It won't ever be the same as the days before we were married or while we were married. But, I didn't like feeling estranged from him. We are far apart in physical distance but we have never been very far apart in friendship. It's hard to let that slip away even after a divorce.

I don't think every couple can go through divorce and keep a friendship. You have to let go of a lot of anger, sadness and other emotions. You even have to forgive things that you can still hear him saying in your mind. You need to let go (or hold less tightly) to things that hurt you so deeply you can almost feel the cracks in your heart, mind and soul. But, for awhile there is just numbness. That's how you pull yourself away at first. You just don't feel anything.

Then you live through the aftermath. The time it takes to rebuild yourself and your life. It takes a lot of energy to rise from your own ashes. I went through a time of wondering if I could ever feel connected to the world again. I journaled through the worst of it. Writing helped sort out my thoughts and pull some of them out of the muck my mind was in.

Then his email bounced, about six months after our divorce. I felt a shock that I might not know where he was, or that I could not contact him any time. That was the moment I reached back and connected with him again. It wasn't friendship right then. It was more like a feeling of loss, not wanting to lose our connection, whatever state it happened to be in at that time.

Now, about ten years later, we are friends. It's not a comfortable friendship where I just say whatever I am thinking and know he will understand. There are things I don't want to say. There are things that have become too personal. I's not as simple and uncomplicated as it had been. Ironic that the person I have been more intimate with than anyone (other than my Mother in a different kind of relationship) is someone I now feel reserved with and unsure. It's not that I don't trust him. I just feel I have to hold back. Burned once... twice shy. I don't believe he would hurt me but the burn mark is there, it hasn't quite gone away.

I am glad the friendship is there. It's worth keeping. My family wonders if we could/ should get back together. I don't like when they ask that. It's like they deny everything I felt and went through. As if it all were nothing. But, I don't say much about any of it to them.

By the time I actually publish/ post this a lot of what is on this screen right now will be edited out. I don't want to hurt my ex-husband or have him feel bad about what I'm feeling or have felt in the past. I am responsible for my own feelings, for what I take seriously and what I brush off. He isn't. In the end, I think that is how you recover from the divorce and re-work the friendship. You just decide what is important and what your priorities are. You don't choose to be bitter, you just choose to be happy.

This is a free ecourse which was part of Suite101 University. This part of their site is being removed soon. I wanted to keep the ecourses available. There is a lot of information in the courses. It is a shame to lose a great resource.

Basic Grammar Skills

By Janet Blaylock

Introduction

This course is a basic grammar course that will help anyone who is interested in improving their punctuation, capitalization, and sentence structure. The exercises and tests will help increase your skills in these areas and help you to discover your weak areas as well as your strong areas. As a result of increasing your basic grammar skills, you will write more effectively. The list of reference books are for your information. They are not required for the course. I have found them valuable in understanding grammar. These books will also help you to learn how to write term papers and other papers that you are required to write if you attend a college to receive a degree in a specific field. …more