Today I wrote my 45th Viewpoints review and, for the first time in a few weeks, wrote more than the minimum monthly quota for paid writers (four @ month) at the site. I know it is a small accomplishment in the greater scheme of things, but I'm pretty pleased, since that means that my monthly check will be a bit bigger than the one for February. I'm not sure how many reviews I'll be able to do between now and the 31st; theoretically I could do 17 more, but I also write for Epinions, and as long as that site keeps on offering the $10 (or $20) for 10 promos, I'm going to try to get 20 reviews a month done there, so it's doubtful that VP will get more than 10 more reviews from me unless I drop everything else I do online and that's not going to happen. 

I also found out today, much to my satisfaction, that if one Googles "Han Solo (Death Star Escape), the review I wrote yesterday shows up at the very top of the first page. I'm not a Google expert, but I'm pretty sure that this makes the folks at Viewpoints' head office in Chicago somewhat happy that they accepted me as a paid writer.  Viewpoints doesn't have a visible "hits per review" bit of graffiti like Eps does, so I do not know how many outside "hits" my articles are getting, but wow. That Google-search result thing sure boosted my self-esteem some.

Today I also reached my minimum goal of writing 10 reviews at Epinions for the previously-mentioned $10 (or 20) for 10 reviews promo.  I was going to pick something easy - like a Star Wars collectible, but yesterday I wrote three of those, so I decided to write what some might call a "real" review and chose Michael Crichton's The Lost World.  (Oh, and I also remembered I need to write a few reviews in the Books category, so that was another factor I considered.)  I think it is a good critique, even though I've already had to update it several times to correct goofs I made while I was composing it. (I definitely need to have Office 2007; I miss Word...and its spellchecker!)