With a baby due any moment (seriously. My due date is today though the only excitement around here is that pesky hurricane) and
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
September hiatus
With a baby due any moment (seriously. My due date is today though the only excitement around here is that pesky hurricane) and
motivation to write the written word
Writing is hard. Whether it's blogging, dissertating, or love-lettering - it's as hard as any art of creating is difficult - it takes real effort and it means the sacrifice of lots of other things that you cherish like time and, in many ways, yourself and your pride. That's why we don't write as many writerly posts as we'd like (though they are my favorite when we do write them) and that's why finishing my dissertation is taking much too long to finish - all of it is hard work, much time, and an expression of vulnerability. So here's some motivation to get more writing done in my life - hopefully one of these will stick...
"I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done."
— Barbara Kingsolver via I Love Reading and Writing!
❝Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.❞
— Susan Sontag via the writer's den
via life is wine
"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair; the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page."
— Stephen King ~ "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft"
from More About Time: The Myth of Doing it All by Rice Freeman-Zachery
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath via BrainyQuote
For Japan With Love
Organized by the blogs Utterly Engaged and Ever Ours, these bloggers have also joined together with ShelterBox, one of the first major charitable organizations to help after the quake, in order create a fundraising site called For Japan With Love.
By donating to For Japan With Love you could help send some much needed supplies as well as an emergency shelter to people in need:
"Each large green ShelterBox is tailored to a disaster but typically contains a disaster relief tent for an extended family, blankets, water storage and purification equipment, cooking utensils, a stove, a basic tool kit, a children’s activity pack and other vital items."
Each whole box costs $1,000 (US), so For Japan With Love is hoping to raise enough to send 5 boxes so please donate if you can.
Thank you and have a lovely weekend - we'll see you Monday!
{For more information, go to Utterly Engaged and For Japan With Love.}
supporting the indy bookstore
via booktumbling
If you use blogger then you probably also got the email about the Blogger and Amazon.com integration. The bait is that if you use this feature (which claims to not only simplify how you hyperlink to Amazon, but allows you to directly search the website from Blogger editor) then you will earn "commissions" from the Amazon-linked items you've recommended and your readers have bought.
All this is well and good and I've got nothing against earning a couple of extra bucks or Amazon (trust me, I've bought plenty from them!). However, I hate the manipulation of this "integration," how the recommendation of a book and the use of a hyperlink to that book becomes a marketing ploy to trusting readers. Aside from that - it also seems like another way for a huge business/website to not only take more business away from other, smaller, bookstores, but also attention from authors' pages, book reviews, etc.
Anyway, before I step off my soap box - I'd like to make a commitment to hyperlinking any books Hiving Out recommends to IndieBound, an online place that helps locate local independent and small bookstores (hope that's okay with you, L. and Mae!). And, yes, with this website you can also earn commissions too (something we have not signed up to do), but at least it's in support of the independent bookstores and who doesn't want to support them, right? Okay, I'm off my soap box now - have a great weekend everyone!!
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