Write Everyday Project #22, Stuff You, Yahoo

Setting aside my dissatisfaction for how little you make writing for the Yahoo Contributor Network, Yahoo has managed to find an all new way to piss me off.  Since 1996 or so, I've maintained a Yahoo email address and with it, a collection of bookmarks attached to that account.  Since the system was pretty primitive in '96, I had to come up with my own organizational setup.  You see, all it did back then was list your bookmarks in alphabetical order.  So I devised categories for my bookmarks like Cartoon, VidGame, and the ever so popular Misc, and added them to the title of each bookmark.  If they updated regularly, I put what day or days they updated in parenthesis after the title.  Ergo, one of my oldest links is "Cartoon Sluggy Freelance (MTuWThF)".  So if it was first thing Monday morning and I wanted to read that day's webcomics, I just scrolled down to "Cartoon" and picked the (M) ones.  Quick and easy.  Its a system that's worked for me for fifteen years now.

And then, at the beginning of September, I lost the ability to add new Bookmarks.  "Yahoo Bookmarks cannot be added to, modified, or deleted until we complete an upgrade.  Your Bookmarks will be available on October 20th."  Fine, fine.  I can still use the old Bookmarks, and I'll just save new ones in my browser until the service comes back online.  Inconvenient, to be sure, but not game breaking.

Today is the 20th, and I logged on to My Yahoo and discovered that my organizational system is completely screwed up.

Look at that hash!  What's more, I can't figure out what the Hell the system is supposed to be now!  Obviously, it isn't alphabetical.  But its not by the date that I put them in, since the first on the list, "Chugworth Academy" is one I added in 2003, but "Abominable" (short for "The Abominable Charles Christopher") is from last year.  Its not by when I visited them last, since Chugworth quit updating in 2009, hence the (Dead), while Abominable only updates on Wednesdays and I saw it last yesterday.  It just seems to be a random mess.

So, I think to myself, there must be some kind of sorting error.  I'll just fix it in the controls and...

Well.  That's certainly inconvenient.  I prefer not to have toolbars cluttering up my browser, but I've been with Yahoo for 15 years, so I guess if there's any one toolbar I should have, that's the one.  Not a problem...

   

No.

No, I will not install IE 9 just to sort my frikkin' bookmarks.  "Do more from anywhere."  What a cruel joke.  

So that's it.  After fifteen years, I'm finally giving up on My Yahoo.  It's iGoogle for me now.  It'll be a pain in the ass getting all the bookmarks over there, but I was due to clean out some chaff (like the long since creator abandoned Chugworth, for example, or all those Buffy and Angel sites I put in there in the early 2000s) and this is the perfect time to do it.  I just wish it hadn't come to this, but some betrayals cannot be forgiven.

Stuff you, Yahoo.

Working for Yahoo, Part XIV

Two more weeks without a post.  Yikes.  Blogging may not be my thing.

Despite my still serious complaints about Yahoo and the economics thereof, I saw a relatively easy assignment and snapped it up.  Write 350 words about your favorite novel, they asked, so here it is: My thoughts on American Gods. 

In truth that was more about getting back into the habit of writing than any great expectations about its success.  A glance at my stats shows that my review of the new Randhurst AMC is still my most popular article, despite the cross-linking I did with the Western Battlefield Summery article.

On the other hand, my stab at "current" content in the form of my First Impressions: Age of Empires Online Beta only scored two measly hits, and no one at all has read my review of Murder for Two.

I mean, I know musical theater ain't exactly front page news unless it's Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, but Murder for Two really was a funny little show.  No one?  Really?

Very depressing.

In other news, there are job openings at The Escapist and Rock, Paper, Shotgun that I'm trying to fill.  I don't have high hopes, since the jobs were posted on the front pages of popular websites and will likely be flooded with entries, but I'm doing my bit regardless.

Wish me (lots and lots of)  luck.

Working for Yahoo, Part XIII

Yep, still a bad blogger.  Sorry about that.

I did manage to put together a guide page to my Western Civil War series.  It seems that the Yahoo pay scale is by length, because the guide is the longest thing I've written for them, and they paid me $3 up front, rather than the usual $2.  So that's something.

But not enough.

At this point, I've made around $26 writing for Yahoo, which has all been from upfront bonuses.  I've achieved 850 or so clicks, so I may eventually make it to my first 1,000, at which point Yahoo will generously give me...another $1.50.

So yeah, the Yahoo thing isn't working out.  But hey, I did complete the Western Civil War series, so that's something at least.

The big question is, of course, what next?

It might be time to start getting serious about writing a novel.  Let's see if we can make that happen.

(Yeah, I know, doomed.  But what do I have to lose at this point?  And when will I have a better chance?)

Working for Yahoo, Part XII

Wow, two weeks since I've blogged about my writing and a month since I've said anything over at After Hours. I'm a bad blogger.

To be fair, I've been busy, but over all, it's not been a great couple of weeks in the writing realm.  I spent a week working on a project only to have the hard drive on my desktop die the final death and take a week's work with it.  I've spent the last week and a half trying to recover from that, but it's slow and painful going.

Today's lesson?  Backups!

In other news, the next two articles in my Civil War series are up, Chikamauga and Shiloh.  You may recall that I had two articles rejected for re-editing.  These were the ones. Back when I talked about it a couple of weeks ago, I said that I'd be a good little writer and do what I was told.

Yeah, well, screw that.

The complaint that got them kicked back to me was that they "needed sourcing."  Even though those had been the fifth and sixth articles I'd submitted in the series and the first four had sailed through without a source to be seen....and that five more had been published after that hadn't needed it either, I resolved to "give the client what he wants."  So I spent a bunch of time to add links to everything that could possibly be a source to the Chikamauga article and re-submitted it.

A week later it was rejected.  You want to know why?  "Too many long links."

I swallowed my curses, deleted all the sourcing I had done and then resubmitted it exactly as it had been the first time, along with the Shiloh article, which I'd never gotten around to fixing in the first place.  And guess what happened?

(Well, since links to the published articles are in this very post, I suppose you don't really need to guess, do you?)

In short, the Yahoo editing process is terrible.  The comments they make when they review your stuff are so ambiguous as to be worse than worthless, and when you try to follow them anyway, a different editor bashes you for the changes.  There are apparently so many editors out there who don't communicate with one another that there's no fixed standard for submissions at all.  Ergo, the only sane strategy is to write what you like and then keep submitting it until you get accepted.  It's a cynical procedure, I grant you, but no less cynical than Yahoo itself setting up a no-win scenario for writers trying to do as they're asked to do, is it?

Working for Yahoo, Part XI

So, I got my first couple of rejections from Yahoo.  To be precise, they turned down two of my Civil War articles saying that I need to cite my sources.  Which is odd, because they didn't ask for that on the first four articles in the series...and they didn't ask for that in four more they published in the same series that had been submitted after the two that got refused!

Puzzling, to say the least.

I can only hypothesize that Yahoo has a ton of different editors, and that the two articles that I submitted on the 20th that got rejected went to one who's more of a stickler for the rules than the one who got the four I submitted on the 23rd.

Nevertheless, one of the rules for being a good writer is "Give the client what they want."  So, tempting as it might be to revise one and re-submit the other unamended to see what happens, I shall swallow both pride and curiosity both and do as I am bid.  That's the job.

In other news, as I mentioned, I have a bunch of new articles up.  Starting off with four new Civil War articles here:

Tupelo
Stones River
Kennesaw Mountain
Brice's Crossroads

What's interesting about these is that they're the first battlefields in the series, well except for Fort Donelson which was the last stop on my trip last March, that I haven't actually visited.  I'm basically just summarizing what I know about the battles, backed up by Shelby Foote and Wikipedia, and pulling relevant travel details from National Parks sites.

Why yes, I do feel like a contributing member of society, why do you ask?

The thing of it is, most people interested in going to these battlefields are almost certainly ending up somewhere else other than Yahoo for that information.  But if Yahoo is willing to pay me to mold that content into a few hundred words on their site, who am I to argue?  I'm not copy and pasting, and you'd have to go to two separate sites to get both the history of the battle and the travel information, so the pages I'm writing are more efficient, if nothing else.

Finally, I also have a review up of Murder for Two, a cute hour and a half long musical about a murder with fifteen characters and only two cast members.

Yes, I actually went and saw it, just over a week ago, in fact.

You can give it a glance here.

Working for Yahoo, Part X

So a couple of days ago, I had two more articles posted by Yahoo.  They were more of my Civil War series, talking about the Battle of Pea Ridge, and the Siege of Vicksburg.  The thing of it is, they actually got posted on Saturday the 21st, while I didn't Tweet or Facebook about them until Monday the 23rd.  In the interim, I let them both go unannounced over the weekend to see what happens.  Also, I figured I'd get a bigger bump by mentioning them on a Monday, instead of a Saturday.

And a funny thing happened.  The Pea Ridge article did nothing at all.  Indeed, it only got 6 hits in total on Monday when it got a little publicity from me, and nothing since.  The Vicksburg piece, on the other hand, has been averaging 9 hits a day, with or without my pumping it up.  Vicksburg, of course, was a crucial battle in the Civil War, and is much more likely to be known by people than the relatively small battle that was Pea Ridge, so those numbers make a certain amount of sense.

So, once I saw how those numbers were going, I did the obvious.  I wrote up a similar article on Gettysburg, as a start to be "Travelleing the EASTERN Battlefields" series.  If a moderately well known battle can draw in much better hits/day than anything else I've done, how about the most famous battle of the war?

I also finished off the Western Battlefields set, so I've got nine Civil War articles in the queue awaiting approval.  A couple of those, like Chikamauga and Shiloh are of big and reasonably well known battles.  Others, like Stones River and Brice's Crossroads, not so much.  But I am very interested to know how well they'll all do, and whether the success of Vicksburg is an aberration, or if the bigger battles lead to more hits.

And, just to keep things fresh, I've also got a review of a little play I saw on Friday and some commentary about last night's Bulls game.  This last one could go either way.  Its a time sensetive piece, in that it won't make any sense if it goes up after the Bulls play Game 5 on Thursday.  But if they do accept it quickly, it may be able to get me a ton of hits quickly. 

We'll see.

Working for Yahoo, Part IX

So, after three weeks in the system, here are some numbers.

Here's Louie                                                                              22 days, 37 views
Visting Civil War Battlefields: Wilson's Creek                               21 days, 70 views
Kings, Queens, and Generals: A Summer 2011 Reading List        21 days, 34 views
AMC Randhurst 12: A Theater in the Digital Age                          16 days, 98 views
Lord of Ultima: A Copy of a Copy                                                10 days, 37 views

As we can see, certain trends are at work here.  For one thing, the two assignment pieces I did, "Here's Louie" and "Kings, Queens, and Generals," are the least efficient ones I've done.  I'd expected that assignments would get some play somewhere on the Yahoo network, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  Apparently assignments are only good if you can't think of something else to write.  What's worse, both of these, especially Here's Louie, have almost all their views in the first couple of days, that is through views generated by my mentioning them here, on Facebook, and on Twitter.  There's virtually no hits after that first bump, so these are pretty much entirely self-promoted.

Ergo, assignments are a bad deal.

I'll admit, I expected the Lord of Ultima piece to do better.  I know I search for reviews before playing random internet games, but traffic on this one is pretty much flat too.  Technically, the reading list is getting more play.  So Yahoo is right...video game reviews, even of a game for which I couldn't find any other reviews, don't do well.

Where they're wrong, though, is in the popularity of the movie theater review.  As you can see, its outpacing everything else in both a per day hits and in overall.  Yahoo wouldn't give me the upfront payment on this one, but it's still doing pretty well.

Despite the theater review's comparative success, I've spent all week pumping out six more Battlefield articles like my Wilson's Creek one.  Why?  Well, the thing of it is that the $2.00 I get for each one is equivalent to 1,333 views straight up.  So regardless of the fact that the Randhurst piece is nominally more efficient, if I can keep scoring the upfronts, that's probably better overall.

Of course, it's still not much money, but it's a start.

Working for Yahoo, Part VIII

So doing a short story for Yahoo was a terrible idea.  With the deadline looming, I slapped together what I had and put it up.  I'm not the slightest bit happy with it, and don't plan to link to it even though the damn thing got published immediately.  Fortunately, since it was an assignment, it ended up being in the "Display Only" category, which means I can take it down or edit it whenever I like.  I'll likely try and fix it through editing, but since I blew a whole week working on what turned out to be drek, that'll have to wait until I get more paying articles up.

As the deadline neared, I tried to cancel out of the assignment only to be warned that doing so near the deadline (which I most certainly was) would endanger my ability to receive other assignments.  So I swallowed my pride and dumped it up.  It does suggest, however, that Yahoo definitely has a Quantity over Quality point of view towards what it publishes.  It doesn't matter if it sucks...just get it up there.  I did cancel out of a similar Science Fiction short story assignment that had 15 days left on it.  I'm not getting shoved up against a wall like that again.  

However, since I have no intention of linking to the story here or anywhere else, it will make a good test case to see how many clicks something that has no author advertisement at all can garner.  Right now, it has 0 clicks.  I wonder if it'll get any at all?

In more positive news, the article I wrote about the slow speed RTS Lord of Ultima finally got published.  Have a look at it here.  I do wonder what took them so long, since I wrote it almost two weeks ago.  

I also got my second article about Civil War battlefields submitted.  It should be published late this week or early next week if Yahoo works as fast as it did on my first article in the series.

Working for Yahoo, Part VII

I've got a new article up, a little review I wrote about the new AMC Randhurst 12 movie theater that just opened up last week. It was the first one that I've submitted that was rejected for the upfront payment on the thought that it wasn't likely to appear on a Search.  I submitted it anyway to get a few more page views, though.

Most of my writing time's been taken up with trying to finish this short story that's due in only four days now, which is why things have been a little quiet around here.  Nevertheless, I hope to get it done and out of the way soon and back to my normal production.

Working for Yahoo, Part VI

Well, I've got some money back now.  Granted, its only $2, but it is money.  So I guess I'm officially a professional writer, if only by the narrowest of margins.

That $2 comes from the Up Front fee for my Civil War Battlefield article about Wilson's Creek.  That was part of a trip I took back in March to a number of battlefields.  Since the first one paid out, I guess I'll do the rest soon.

I also accepted, wrote, and got published on the same day an Assignment from Yahoo about my Summer Reading List.  Its not bad, if perhaps a bit obvious in a couple of cases.   I did think it was interesting how quickly they got it and published it, especially since I've got a couple more articles in the queue that are still awaiting approval.

Something that is annoying to me is that they suggest putting up a Contributor Photo.  Which is fine, but every time I try, it bounces and I'm stuck with the default blank slate.  Its getting on my nerves, and I don't know what I need to do to make it work.

Working for Yahoo, Part V

So, after one day online, my first article on Yahoo has a grand total of 21 page views.  That apparently translates into something like 3 cents.  That's pretty puny, and far worse than I'd imagined.  Now granted, I finished the assignment way early, so its possible that once we're actually nearer to graduation days in late May and early June it'll get more play and maybe some pub from Yahoo itself.  In which case, the 21 views represents only my own ability to market through Facebook and Twitter.  And if that's the case, I can see how my own limited efforts have borne relatively few fruit.

I also have to consider the possibility that YAC is a long term game.  That we'll pick up views over the long term instead of in one big burst.  In that hope, I've typed up another quick assignment, so we'll see how long that one takes to get out, and what happens when it does.

But still.  Three cents?  Ugh.

"Here Comes Louie!" - Writer's Notes

Something else I'd like to do here on Tales is to putout some Writer's Notes about the various articles and stories I get published.  Since "Here Comes Louie!" is my first published (if not submitted) article to the Yahoo Associated Content network, it naturally gets the the first Writer's Note.

Naturally this post will make more sense if you go and read the article first.  (And another page view won't do me any harm.)

Perhaps surprisingly, given the personal nature of what I wrote, this one came pretty easily.  Even though its been twenty years, I can still picture the way the gym looked, the smiles on my family's faces as I approached, and the heat of the air.  I remember being grateful for the lemonade, even as I found it almost sickeningly sweet, and I felt a degree of contentment at having accomplished something significant in my life.  Once I got stated, it was pretty easy to get into a groove and just punch it out.  The Then (Now) structure was one I've seen before, though I don't remember where.  Just another one of those ingredients we pick up as we go, I suppose.

Another thing I can't remember, is my fellow graduates.  Most of my closest friends from high school were either in the band, carry overs from my years at St. Raymond's, or in the Loyola gamer community, and most of those were in other classes.  Ryan had transferred to a different school after our freshman year, Steve and Powell had graduated the year before, while Luke and Drew were sweating it out in the balcony with the rest of the band.  Really, the only members of the Class of '91 I do remember are Tom Carney, another band friend, and Alec Gorecki, who I'd played endless games of chess with while we skipped out of our useless FORTRAN class together.

The other thing that those memories make me wonder is the obvious:  Where did the years go?  I can't believe it's been twenty years already.  How can two decades go by so quickly?  It's just a little baffling.

Working for Yahoo, Part IV

Oh, so that's why you do jobs from the assignment desk.  It's because it goes through the system so much faster!  In fact, here's my first assignment right here!

Readers of this blog may recall that I wrote my first article for Yahoo on Monday the 25th of April.  I wrote my second one, picking "memories of your graduation." off the list almost at random, on Tuesday the 26th.  So here we are on Thursday the 28th, and I haven't heard a thing about my first submission, but the second one is up already.  Mind you, I'm locked into the lower pay scale without any up front bonus, but hey, its up and out there in a couple of days.  That's not bad at all.

Of course, the real deciding factor will be page views.  Will the fact that the assigned article is appropriate to the season and may therefore get more press from Yahoo itself give me enough page views to make a reasonable amount of cash from it?  I still don't have a very good handle on how many page views the average Yahoo page gets. If I get 1,000 or so then I've made $1.50, which is a pretty shitty rate for a couple hours of work.  Get it up to 10,000 and we're at $15, which is at least minimum wage.  One hundred thousand means I'm looking at $150 which ain't bad at all.  And a million or more, well, that's damn fine money.

Complicating the matter is the fact that each article is going to hang out online virtually in perpetuity, racking up more and more page views over time.  So what I get in the first week may not be indicative of what I can get over the course of weeks, months, or even years.

On the other hand, my current ability to self-promote is somewhat limited.  I figure I've got maybe a hundred or so Twitter Followers, Facebook Friends, and what have you.  The Google Adsense tracker shows that my two blogs here generate 42-43 page views a day.  Not bad for just starting out, but hardly even a drop in the bucket as far as Yahoo is concerned where views are measured in the thousands.

So there's a lot I don't know about this just yet.  Hopefully sometime next week I'll start getting solid numbers from Yahoo and be better able to evaluate YAC as a money making venture.

But in the short term, hey, I've been published!  That feels pretty good, no matter what.

Working for Yahoo, Part III

Today, I submitted my third article for Yahoo, a business review.  In this first week of work I'm looking to try a little of everything and see what pans out and what doesn't.  I'm getting more used to the Yahoo text editor, though its still not my favorite.  I'll probably use an outside word processor for longer works, but it seems like less of a hassle to do one and done articles in the editor.

I've also decided what to do about the mystery short story assignment.  I have a couple of characters in mind to use, so I'll write a short self-contained story about them for Yahoo, while doing a longer piece that serves as a series introduction for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.  With luck, EQMM will buy my story.  With God's own luck, it'll be a hit and I'll get a regular writing gig out of it.  Mind you, while I have a setting and characters, I still need to think up an actual mystery or two.  That requires planning, and isn't well suited to my compose-as-I-go style that I've been using on my non-fiction Yahoo stuff.  I may even have to write an outline, which is something I haven't had to do since I got out of school.

What a concept, eh?

Working for Yahoo, Part II

Today I approached my article for Yahoo Associated Content a little differently.  There's an assignment board that becomes available after you log in.  In it they have basic suggestions for articles that they want done.  I'm not certain if only one person gets each assignment, if a small number of people can do it, or if anyone can get in on the action until the expiration date.

Regardless of which it is, I grabbed one, wrote it, and submitted it.  One thing that I thought was odd, though, was the fact that unlike the articles that you submit on your own, the assignments always seem to be set to the minimum payment option with the least exclusive release options.  Considering that these are articles that Yahoo itself is requesting, you would have figured it would be the opposite: exclusive to Yahoo but encouraged to be written by having the highest payment options.

Since it goes the other way, though, I can only infer that the "assignments" are more like suggestions of things to do if you're out of ideas to do on your own.  So useful, but not really more profitable than your own work.

Mind you, I wrote it up anyway, just to see how it plays out.

But while I was looking over the assignments, I noticed one which surprised me.  "Write a mystery short story."  It surprised me because they explicitly said in their writing suggestions that fiction doesn't do very well on the network.  What's more, the technical definition of a short story is a story over 1,000 words and less than 10,000.  (Anything under 1,000 is considered a "short short" or "flash fiction.")  Indeed, the writer's guidelines for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine suggest that 2,500 to 8,000 words is the ideal size for their use.  Meanwhile, Yahoo's normal guidelines suggest that you keep your submissions in the 300 to 500 word range.

Complicating matters, I see that EQMM pays anywhere from 5 cents to 8 cents a word, but a submission is by no means guaranteed.  Assuming that as as new writer I'll only get the 5 cents, and further that my hypothetical story is the minimum 2,500 word length, then I'd earn $125 on a sale to them.  At the standard rater of $1.50 for every 1000 page views at Yahoo, I'd need more than 83,000 views to make that much on Yahoo.  That seems like a lot, but I haven't had anything published by Yahoo yet, much less seen what the numbers are like so I don't know if it is or not.

Seems like a lot, though.

So while on the face of it, EQMM seems like the better deal, there's a catch. Its not a guaranteed acceptance.  I'd have to submit it and then wait as much as three months or more to find out if the story was going to make any money at all.  Meanwhile, I could write it up and submit it to Yahoo and have it making money sometime in the immediate future.  And it would have to be soon, because the assignment for Yahoo expires in May, making the obvious solution of submitting it to EQMM first then dumping it on Yahoo if it isn't accepted a non-starter.

And of course, I'd have to actually write the story.

So what do you think?  Write a mystery for Yahoo and take guaranteed money that's probably less than I could make at EQMM, and possibly a lot less?  Or take the shot, go for more money, but without knowing if I'll get anything at all, with the three month wait?  Or maybe just say no thanks, and keep doing YAC articles instead?

Any thoughts?

Working for Yahoo, Part I

So, after spending some time getting the other half of this blog up and ready to go, I got to work trying to find work.

To be precise, I wrote my first article for Yahoo Associated Content, and I made a pitch to The Escapist.

The latter really wasn't all that much, comprising as it did only a short email discussing what I wanted to write and what issue it was for.  I'm hopeful that it will work out, but its my first pitch, so we'll see.  Regardless, just perusing their Writer's Guidelines and making sure my email to them fit those guidelines was a pretty useful experience.  Here's hoping they like my idea.

The more complicated process was submitting an article to the YAC.  First, I had to decide on exclusive vs non-exclusive.  The former supposedly makes it more likely I'll get an up-front bonus, while the latter let's me publish it elsewhere.  Since this is a test run to see how their system works, I went with exclusive.

The second step involved choosing whether "Yahoo Partners" could also publish my article.  Well, it would have been  a choice if I hadn't picked exclusive in the first choice.  As I had, that was already picked for me.

Next, I had to decide if I wanted to try for the Up-Front bonus.  As far as I could tell, the only reason not to at least try was that it would take longer to go through the approval process.  One to two weeks for Up-Front as opposed to one week for simple Performance Based.  Since this is still a test run, it seemed best to give the Up-Front a shot.  There's slightly more money available that way, since if they accept it for Up-Front, you get paid first and still get the Performance money afterwards.

Finally, after inputting some descriptive text, we get to the text editor.  And frankly, its a bit of a pain in the ass.  For one thing, it doesn't allow the auto-correct from my browser's spell check to function.  I can see that there's a problem, but I have to fumble around trying to spell the word out myself or go look it up.  Its not a big thing, but it slows me down, and I don't see a good reason to disable that functionality.  Also, they demand proper sourcing for things, but the superscript and subscript functions in the editor are broken, if the Pre-Publication Preview is to be believed.  Finally, the image adding is both cumbersome and inaccurate, especially since they don't tell you what pixel size they accept.  They'll just let you put in whatever size picture you like, then crop it so it looks ridiculous.  I tried to add a picture I'd taken that relates to the article four times and every time it looked stupid, so eventually I just went without it. 

Mind you, I suppose the latter two problems could be with the Preview rather than the text editor, but since I can only assume that the Preview is how things are actually going to look, I had to make corrections based on what I saw.

Overall, though, the text editor didn't fill me with joy, but it was functional enough that I managed to get what I needed to done. 

So now I've got an article submitted and another proposed.  Tomorrow, I'll do more YAC work, and see what else catches my attention.