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✍ Writing Wednesday, June 24, 2020

✍ Writing Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Serenity on a Wednesday with lavender chamomile tea, new age music, and a book on my e-reader. Photo by Shelley Burbank Happy Writing Wednesday, friends!How was your day today? I started out analyzing this website to find out why subscribers weren’t getting blog post notifications. Which led me to my plug-ins. Which led me to my email marketing program. All before coffee. Yes. You read that right. All. Before. Coffee. Here’s the thing. When you are trying to be a professional, published author, writing becomes much more than sentence structure, character development, cool new plotting techniques, and everything…

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🍸Friday Happy Hour, April 17, 2020

I've started sketching humorous little comics in this weird, isolating period of pandemic. --SRB I have run out of vodka. Not only that, I’ve run out of olives.  Now, there are many things about this pandemic we are in that are more important than my inability to make myself a martini at the end of the day, but I’m mourning the loss just the same. Just as you are most likely mourning the loss of something seemingly small, but none-the-less important, to your idea of “the good life.”  (If you’ve lost a person to this pandemic,…

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☕️ Writing Wednesday: 3 Cool Ways to Work Around Procrastination

For the past couple of years, I’ve worked on creating a so-called “author platform” using several engagement tools. I built a website. I constructed a blog. I deleted my old personal Facebook account and started another one specifically for my author “persona.” I began writing female-empowerment flash fictions and posting them on my FB page and in a certain fan group to which I belong.  With great trepidation, I persevered on Twitter despite my feeling that it crackles with more negative energy than a circle of hell. I gained a few more followers and followed some…

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✍️Writing Wednesday: Stash Away All

  Clippings and maps and notes, oh my! So I'm in the beginning stages of a big new project proposal for Wattpad Paid Stories. As I've set a number of stories and at least one full novel in a particular fictional town (first conceived of and created in my college years in the late 1980s!), I've decided to use that town as the setting for the new project. Wondering just where all those old stories were and what I could glean from them for the new project, I plugged in the flash drive I've been carrying…

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Techno Woes

General wisdom for us creatives is to use our own website as our main platform rather than social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. This makes sense. It does. However, I have spent countless hours working on my own website, and I'm still not happy with it. I've tweaked it where I can, changing fonts and colors. I'm pretty happy with the landing page. But this blog. UGH! All of a sudden, the "previous" and "next" buttons are skipping posts, and I have no earthly idea why. I'm sure it's some code. Like that's going…

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☕️ 2020 Vision

The start of a new year is like opening up to the first page of a new book. I mean, it has that new book smell, right? The pages are unmarred by coffee stains or chocolate smears. Neither bathtub water nor rain has warped the paper into waves and bubbles. The corners aren't dog-eared yet. Nobody's underlined or written in the margins. It's all ahead for you to discover, a wonderful adventure waiting to unfold.Something about the first page of a new book excites me with possibilities. Sure, ten pages in I may be disappointed. Midway,…

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San Diego Open Mic June 2019

Dear Reader: Every second Friday of the month, San Diego Writers, Ink hosts a Dime Stories open mic event. I love these readings. What better way to spend a relaxing Friday evening than listening to some short personal narrative, memoir, or short fiction while at the same time honing my own public reading skills and also making some friends and connections in the San Diego literary scene? This was my third time at The Ink Spot, a gathering room big enough for about fifty people, a podium, and a sign-up table at the back. The atmosphere…

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A Good Life In Crazy Times

“Once upon a time . . .” Several years ago now, I wrote a blog about sustainable and local living. It started as a log of the year I attempted to stay out of “big box” stores, exploring, instead, local options: locally produced, locally grown, or at least locally owned retail stores. The topics expanded into DIY, especially knitting and other fiber arts, and gardening, cooking, and storing of food. I shared fashion finds from Goodwill and other second-hand stores. The initial year turned into two, three, five before winding down to a close in year…

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Pink Is My New Favorite Color

I used to love the color red. I loved it so much I painted my bedroom walls a deep, vibrant poppy. This despite the common knowledge that red is too exciting for a sleeping space. Not to mention the passion/anger factor. You don’t want to go to bed angry in a scarlet bedroom, right? Well, let’s see . . .Cindy Bailen, in an online article for USA Today Network’s site Reviewed reported on a study conducted by Travelodge. The hotel surveyed 2,000 households about how the colors of their bedroom walls affected their sleep . .…

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