The Law of Nines, and My Nine Year Anniversary on HubPages.

Recently I was surprised to receive an email from HubPages which said as follows:

"Hi Jodah,

You have hit a pretty impressive milestone—your Nine-Year Anniversary on the HubPages Network! Thanks for gracing us with your creativity and unique perspective these past nine years. HubPages wouldn't be the same without you. Happy Hubbiversary!

Fun fact: Nine-year anniversaries are frequently celebrated with gifts of pottery. If you decide to celebrate by making a cool clay pot for your garden, or by buying a decorative bowl for your kitchen, be sure to write a how-to or review article about it!"

Well, I knew nine years must have been approaching but I'm always amazed at how fast time moves. Anyway, thank you for the suggestion HubPages, but I am not a potter, unfortunately, and though I may consider purchasing a decorative bowl for the kitchen I don't think I will be writing an article about it. Instead, I chose to write this article celebrating the nine-years here, so I hope that will suffice.

I joined HubPages on 9th October 2009 and published my first hub on that day How to Become Self-Sufficient (or as Close as Possible). I had no followers at this stage and knew no one in the community so I thought of this simply as a place Online where I could store things I have written instead of having piles of full notebooks cluttering up my desk and office.

I think I had one comment on that hub the first year and a total of four after two years :) In fact, I didn't publish my second hub until more than a year later on 31st December 2010: Ways to Win (a Simple Numbers System to Help Beat the Bookmaker).

This was followed a few months later by my first poetry hub The Valentine Tree - a Poem for Valentines Day. This hub also only had one comment until five years ago when a wonderful lady named Nellieanna Hay stumbled across it. Well, the rest is history as Nellieanna began to read my work and encourage me to write more. She gave me tips about how to use HubPages and introduced other hubbers to my writing, as well as welcoming me into the community.

So after a very slow start, and due to Nellieanna's encouragement, I began to write new content as well as resurrect stuff I had written years before, allowed only my closest family to read, and filed away in my archives. In 2013 I published 54 hubs, an average of one per week.

Now I was becoming addicted. I was starting to get readers and comments and meeting wonderful people from all over the world. I was starting to realize my dream that I may be able to soon call myself a writer. Admittedly I do look back on some of my early work and cringe a little, but usually, with a little editing I can improve it and make it a passable read.

Then in 2014, I wrote an incredible, for me, 113 hubs. and was humbled to receive the accolade as Poet of the Year, voted by my peers, in the annual Hubby Awards.

At this time we had a few more features available to us then we do today. There was the ability to vote hubs up or down, funny, informative etc. There were also accolades like Hub of the Day and Editor's Choice, which have all now been discontinued. Anyway, winning a Hubby award meant more to me than the others because they were chosen by other hubbers and not the administration. Who couldn't be inspired by the wonderful community here?

Many people are attracted to HubPages as a place to write articles on popular topics that will be read by thousands and generate a nice income with the help of the ad programs, Amazon sales etc. I, however, was a member for four years before I even signed up to Adsense. I was just looking for a place on the Internet where I could store my writing, and act as my portfolio if you like.

I admit now, that since the introduction of the niche sites my views and monthly income has tripled from what it was previously, and that is a nice positive, so I am in no way begrudging people whose main aim here is to make money. I am just saying that was not, and is not my predominant reason for writing here.

Personally, the best thing about HubPages is the community. I find this a much better and supportive environment than any of the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I guess that is chiefly because most of us have something in common, we are writers and lovers of the written word.

I have now written 354 articles and could count on one hand the number of negative comments I have had. So to all my followers, and those who take the time to read what I write, and comment, a big thank you. I can't start mentioning people here who inspire and encourage me continually or I'll never stop and I would be bound to miss a few, and I don't want that.

Suffice to say I have gotten to know a lot of fellow writers here that I now am proud to call friends. You know who you are. Nowhere else on the Internet gives me such a sense of belonging as HubPages.

Pros

Well, I have already listed most of the positives as I see them.

• community
• online portfolio
• source of income
• niche sites
• ease of use

It is also a good place to have your work critiqued if that's what you are looking for. Just invite readers to give you feedback and critique your articles, either in comments or via email. Otherwise, post a link to your hub in the relevant forum and ask for help on improving it.

Cons

• HP has not always been supportive of poetry, fiction, and creative writing (having LetterPile as a niche site has somewhat changed that)
• Forums can sometimes be unwelcoming and become abusive
• Placement of advertisements can detract from the appearance of an article or be irrelevant
• Changes are sometimes difficult to adapt to (though most are probably to ensure the site's flexibility and resilience where many other content sites have failed)
• No longer allowing links to other articles in a series etc.
• The abolition of voting system on hubs

On the Fence

• HubPro
• Editbots (seemed to correct mainly grammar and typos in comments and, then, not always correctly)
• The name of some niche sites and the categories grouped together within them
• Joining the Maven group

• "To go the whole nine yards"
• "Working 9 to 5"
• "A cat has nine lives"
• "On cloud nine" means happy, euphoric or 'high'.
• "A stitch in time saves nine"
• "Found true 9 out of 10 times"
• "Possession is nine-tenths of the law"
• The word "K-9" pronounces the same as canine and is used in many police departments (world-wide)to denote the police dog unit.
• Dressed "to the nines" is dressed up as stylishly as possible.

• Rounders and baseball are all played with teams of nine players.
• A game of squash is won by scoring nine points.
• Golf courses often have nine holes.
• The expression to the nines means to the highest degree.
• Redivider with nine letters is the longest palindromic word in the English language. A palindromic word reads the same backwards or forwards.
• Only about one-ninth of an iceberg is visible above the water. Nearly all its bulk remains hidden beneath the surface.
• There are nine major planets in the solar system
• Beethoven wrote nine symphonies
• In French the word neuf means both nine and new.

With the length of this hub/article you, the reader were probably not expecting it to be part of my Off the Shelf series ... but I assure you it is. I was originally also going to write a poem to include but due to the length of the article, I decided against that.

This article was inspired by the title of the novel The Law of Nines by Terry Goodkind.

Here is an excerpt:

"Your mother was twenty-seven years old when it came to her. Now you're twenty-seven, and it's come to you."

The skin on Alex's arms tingled with goosebumps. By her twenty-seventh birthday insanity had come to his mother...

The Law of Nines is quite an epic novel in length at 502 pages but is a riveting read.

Terry Goodkind is an American writer. He is known for the epic fantasy series The Sword of Truth as well as the suspense novel The Law of Nines (2009), which has ties to his fantasy series. The Sword of Truth series sold 25 million copies worldwide and was translated into more than 20 languages and turned into a TV series called The Legend of the Seeker. (source: Wikipedia)