The Mother Load

(Author's note: Mahalo Moment is a new feature on the Mother Load which will chronicle my adventures as a Senior Guide for Mahalo.com.  Expect about six posts a month on the humorous side of online writing.)

I have a couple of good friends who've just been hired to write for Mahalo, and there may be a few of you out in readerland who took the information I sent your way and have signed on to write as well.  Both of my buddies have expressed concern that their writing time for a typical Mahalo page is, at this point, abysmally slow.  I've reassured them that learning the ins and outs of page writing takes time, but they WILL get faster.  I write about a page an hour because I've had a chance to practice and perfect my technique.

So what did I do immediately after sharing that encouraging bit of info?  I took hours and hours to write a page that I should have been able to complete in 45 minutes.  The upside? I'm not even annoyed about it.

How can this be?  Why is it that I, Sarah, self proclaimed rock star of the online writing world (and president of my own Mahalo fan club, members totaling one), can be happy with a performance such as that?  Because of Claude.  *LOVE*

The topics for half of the pages I write each week are allowed to come from my very own brain. Somehow, the folks at Mahalo aren't frightened of what might from such a dark and twisted place, and so far, I've not given them a reason to be. As much as I'd like to write a page on how to buy presents for Sarah Clark, I've restrained myself...for now.

That said, I can't deny that the opportunity to get paid to write about my favorite things is actually pretty cool. There's a little surge of adrenaline every time I realize the site doesn't have a page on something I consider a part of my identity. Such was the case when I wrote my first page this week on French jazz composer/arranger Claude Bolling *LOVE*. (Yep, that's a link to the page. Check it out. The Mahalo peeps tell me I'm not required to link to them, but seriously...I spent hours and hours on this page. If you don't read it, I will cry.)

There are pages I can write with a detached and professional manner and then there are pages like that one.  So special is this man to me that the only way I could do justice to his amazing legacy was to write, rewrite, edit, and polish until the page was absolutely perfect.  There may also have been quite a bit of YouTube watching and screen stroking and frequent breaks to sigh deeply and become a quivering puddle of abject love. 

If you're concerned that my husband will be jealous to hear about this 80 year old composer's effect on me, just know that he's been a quivering puddle of Claude love since he learned I was going to write the page and will probably not reconstitute until I write something boring about taxes.  Fortunately, that's next up on the writing agenda. 

That page will take me a half hour, tops.