A Query Into Donation Buttons

 

Created in Canva by Pauline

Okay, I had to laugh. I was reading articles on Medium.com today. Lovely website. You get to meet lots of people there, especially those interested in writing. The only downside is that to be a member you need to pay $5 a month, or $50 for a year’s subscription when you pay it all at once. I don’t mind doing it. I’ve been there almost five years, and over time, I’ve earned some money on the platform. However, in the last couple of years, they’ve had a huge management shakeup and have created a better business plan for themselves, and consequently for their members. How that worked for me is I now earn bupkus from them. Yes, I said bupkus. If you want to look on the bright side, which I generally try to do, I am learning as a writer. I’ve got a place to publish, and some people read what I write. What used to be $20 a month has dwindled down to more like $1 a month in earnings.

I read an article where the lady had a PayPal donation button at the end of her article. The plea was to help her feed her cats. I can understand. We’ve got three cats, and they do like to eat. In the past, I’ve posted a Buy Me a Coffee link, which nobody ever clicked. I’ve been using PayPal for a gazillion years, and I thought, “Hey, maybe.”

So, I went to PayPal to figure out how to make a button. You could choose whether you wanted to have a campaign; say, if you needed an updated computer to write on, you could set a donation limit of $1,000 or whatever a new computer costs these days. Then I happened to catch a YouTube short of a lady with lots of teeth in her pictures. Granted, they are nice-looking teeth, but wow, does she have a lot of them. Anyway, in her YouTube short, she talked about how people who want to donate to you don’t especially like to wade through a lot of complicated stuff. She inferred that this happens with PayPal. Also, there are fees involved. Always. Hey, that’s what banks do.

So she recommended that people use something called DonorBox. I figured, why not check it out? The one thing with me using PayPal was that I established the account back in the day when I was going by LadySkyeFyre. In those days, nobody used their real names on the Internet. I adopted the name LadySkyeFyre after everybody who read what I wrote under my original fake nickname thought I was a man. It was a combination of my initials: PEV. Also, LadySkyeFyre was a sort of a take on the stones I was using at the time to learn how to be a psychic channel. Moldavite, horribly expensive now, looks like somebody smashed up an old green Coca-Cola bottle. It is an asteroid that fell to Earth a gazillion years ago. As the asteroid fell through the Earth’s atmosphere, it burned up; consequently, it looks like green glass. That asteroid scattered itself over what are now Czechoslovakian potato fields. It is called an outer space stone, a channeling stone, or a stone of transformation, and if you are quiet enough, you can feel it vibrating in your hand. It is supposed to help you make contact with celestial beings. I used it to try to make a connection with my Spirit Guide. Did it work? Well, I’m channeling now. Maybe it did.

So, my nickname came from that stone. It fell through the sky and burned up as it did. LadySkyeFyre.

By the way, I gave one of my pieces of moldavite who reported back to me the next day she’d had four orgasms in her sleep. Who can argue with that? That never happened to me, but I use that story to establish credibility for the stone.

The problem is that whenever I use my PayPal account, it shows my old name, LadySkyeFyre, and nobody knows my real name, Pauline Evanosky. Consequently, there might be some confusion.

So, on I went over to DonorBox to check them out. That’s where I laughed because they were referring to donations made to non-profits. The only way I qualify as a non-profit is because I don’t make any money. Now, I’m not going to go through the legal process of becoming a legitimate non-profit. My husband did that when he and his boss went through all the legal hoops of doing that with The Alameda Post, an online newspaper in Alameda. Besides, I hope someday to earn some money with my writing.

However, you don’t make money unless you ask for it. For me, that will likely be an incentive to get something published this year.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate the support. I’ve listed a bunch of places where I am on the internet. And I did it: Donate Here On PayPal

 

🌺 Pauline Evanosky

🌺My Links:

Talking To Spirit — my website
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky on Medium
Talking To Spirit on Substack

Pauline Evanosky — my author’s website

My Table of Contents for Medium — Updated Monthly
My Table of Contents for Substack — Also Updated Monthly

Facebook

References I recommend on your path to more psychic awareness from TalkingtoSpirit.com

 

Thinking About Writing – The Process

I can remember someone saying once that a published book is the part of the iceberg that appears above the surface of the water. The much larger part of that iceberg is hidden beneath the water. What is hidden is the work that went into the published product. The years of thinking, of molding, of forming a story. Or, of finding the story.

I remember Stephen King once answered the question, “Where do you find the ideas for your stories?” He said he would walk in the desert. The things that were poking up out of the ground were his stories. He’d dig one up. I liked that.

Even now, as I sit writing this blog post, I really didn’t know other than I would write about the very act of writing. Other than that, I was willing to sit back and allow it to happen.

You know, that’s actually the hard part. It’s easy, and it’s hard all at the same time. At least, for me it is. It also took me years to be able to sit down and not really have a clue what my writing was going to be about, and then produce something that fulfilled me.

Now, when you’re writing on a longer project, you would have your chapters already laid out. At least, I do. I love to use a mind-mapping strategy for larger projects. You start with a premise in a circle on a piece of paper. I suppose you could do this on your computer, but I find using a writing implement, like a crayon or a marker, with the feel of paper too delicious for words. Then, like a flower, all sorts of leaves sprout. Or vines. Along each of those offshoots come your chapters. Not all of them are going to end up in the story. You’re playing right now. I love to see a few words for a chapter twine around the page, riding the back of that vine. You’re planting for your story.

Once you feel you are done, or you’ve run out of room and decide you’re done with this stage of the process, you sit back on your heels and take another look at what you just drew.

This is where you pick the offshoots that please you, and then you move to your computer or notebook. Write a very short synopsis of your story. That’s what went into the central circle. Then, begin laying out your chapters. Those are the leaves and vines on your plant. Use whichever ones you feel are necessary. Some of them you won’t use, though they might show up later on in the story.

Now, you go back to the one-liners you wrote on your computer. You expand them from the short, bare-bones statements into something a little longer. Typically, I move from one or two lines to something that is maybe five or six lines long. That is a chapter. Roughly speaking, I’ve got maybe 10 or 15 chapters. From there, I write the book.

I have already determined how I want the book to feel in my hand. For this, you go to a bookstore and see what catches your eye, or, if you’ve got books at home, do it with those books. I don’t care if the story was written 150 years ago or last week. If you liked it, then, that is all that counts. The heft of it in your hand. How does it feel to sit with a cup of tea or a beer beside you to read it? How does it feel if you go out onto your balcony? You’re looking for a mass. You’re not going to copy the book. It is merely a book that you like. I don’t care which books are popular or what trends are happening in books right now. I’m talking about what pleases you.

Look and see how many pages are in the book. Take a sample page from the book, one that has writing on each line. Count the lines on a couple of those pages. Now, count the words on a few of those lines. Do the mathematical thing and average it out. You now have a rough idea of just how many words there will be on each page. You didn’t have to count every stinking word. Just an average of a few lines. For what I write, I generally figure on 10 to 12 words per line and about 33 lines per page. It’s just an estimate. If you’ve got 350 pages, well, then you’re looking at a book that’s going to be about 115,500 words long. Which is probably okay for a novel. I’ve been told novels are about 180,000 words long. In the old NaNoWriMo writing challenges (write your heart out every November with the National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo), the goal was 50,000 words, which, the first time I did one, was an incredible feeling.

Now, this is all an estimate. You do you. But for me? It was enough to get going and to keep going. I’ve had chapters grow overlong and have gotten broken up into pieces. What might have begun as 10 chapters grew to 18. It’s just a road map.

I count everything I write, all my articles, and when I’ve got a book going, I’ll count my output there too. My goal is 50,000 words written every month. Some months I don’t get there, but I usually get close. This month, March of 2026, is going to be a good month for writing. I’m already sitting at 30,000 words, and the month is only half over. Last month was terrible at 26,000 words, but then I was preparing our tax information for our tax lady, which is a horrible job.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate the support. I’ve listed a bunch of places where I am on the internet.

🌺 Pauline Evanosky

🌺My Links:

Pauline Evanosky on Medium
Talking To Spirit on Substack
Talking To Spirit — my website
Pauline Evanosky — my author’s website
Facebook
My Table of Contents for Medium — Updated Monthly
My Table of Contents for Substack — Also Updated Monthly
References I recommend on your path to more psychic awareness from TalkingtoSpirit.com