Guest Author, Brian Mongold of Eazy Cheezy

Hello Kat fans! I'm Brian, a Kat fan who was lucky enough to get an invite to talk with you a bit. I'm currently residing in Sunny Florida with the wife, while the rest of our families are living around the mountains in good ole West Virginia. I know Kat loves the Mountains, but I like wearing my flip flops year round under the Florida sun. I'm admittedly not a fancy, shmancy writer like Kat and many of you are. My thing is finding stuff and splattering great resources in my blog, Eazy Cheezy. I like to think I'm pretty good at finding things, which makes life a bit easier, but the wife would probably tell you I'm better at losing things. I don't even want to talk about those car keys. :)




Kat's been so kind to invite me over as a guest blogger, while she's circling the mountains. I'm extremely honored, but a bit overwhelmed since Kat's brilliance is consistently displayed here at TENDER GRACES. Trying to live up to the expectations of Kat and the Kat Fans is quite a bit to live up to. Bear with me and let's just wing it a bit and go for it.

So here I am sitting on the couch with the trusty laptop placed carefully on the left armrest of my loveseat. Typical writing environment for me. Lights are off, laptop is popping and the TV is serving as my backup dancer. The wife just made some tasty Tossimo coffee and I'm ready to go! My two pooches, Sienna and Miku are playing the usual "need more attention" game as they're fixated on my every move. As I glance over at Miku, I notice her attention has shifted. Her head in now lying comfortably on her backside. She has this talent she does that involves twisting her head to her lower backside and resting it there as she awaits a surprise. That's how we know when she's a bit gassy. Her head will be assuming the position as her nose is sniffing away. As Sienna sighs and Miku is now side-tracked, a thought comes to mind. How about sticking with what I do best and show you some resources that may hopefully bring a bit of value.

From hanging out at TG, I've gathered that many of you are writers of some sort and there's a ton of resources on the net that could increase your efficiency, make you a better writer and just flat out help you get organized. Two articles in particular stand out to me. Mashable.com provides a WRITER's TOOLBOX: 35 Best Tools for Writing Online and CollegeDegrees.com brings us even more categorized tools with their article, 100 Useful WebTools for Writers. Between these two, you should find quite a few helpful tools and ideas. Another link I'd like to share is Nerd Business' 5978 High Quality Icons for the Web. Nothing like some free, pretty vector images to include within our writings. I use this site for many of my blog posts.

The time you take out of your lives to carefully organize your thoughts on paper and the web is very personal and important to you. Unfortunately there are many on the net who believe that content you publish online is free game. Plagiarism on the net is far too common. I've personally had my proudest work, 50 Free Sites to Watch Movies and TV Shows Online, copied and pasted to its entirety. The author then began to add additional content to the work. The time I took to find these sites and post them took weeks to finish. In the end, I spent a good 30 hours on the series, while the content thief swooped in and grabbed it all in just a few minutes.

There are many great tools to help protect your work online, because unfortunately it may be stolen without giving you any credit whatsoever. The anonymity of the net makes it easy to do this and get away with it. Copyscape, a professional plagiarism search, lets you type in your URL and hit the search button as it searches for your content that's been copied. It's free to conduct a search, but to get the full results, you'll need to go premium which will cost you 5 cents per search. Though a bit dated, The Boston Herald provided a nice listing of The 20 Best Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools. A good site to keep up with related news and learn more about plagiarism is Plagiarism Today.

Hopefully the listings and sites I provided will help you today or someday in the future. I could probably go on forever and milk my 15 minutes of TG Fame, but I think it's time for me to head on back to Eazy Cheezy and get back to my flip flops. I want to first give a BIG thanks to Kat for setting up the spare TG web-room to let me write this. The brilliance of her writings here at TG is just amazing. I just pre-ordered my copy of TENDER GRACES and am so excited to get it when it comes out!