writing – Shelley Burbank, Writer

🍸Friday Happy Hour: Social Media Whoa(s)

Shelley Burbank
June 5, 2020
Friday Happy Hour / Good Life Crazy Times
5 Comments

This week 's Friday Happy Hour is brought to you by the color YELLOW. It's Lemon Drop season, peeps! Happy Friday Happy Hour, Peeps! So, it’s Happy Hour Friday. Hubby brought home not only vodka and three types of olives but also lemon drop mixer! Yes, I know you don’t use the olives with the mixer. Basically, ⅔ mixer to ⅓ vodka, shake it up with ice, serve with a lemon peel. I think the mixer might also be good with sparkling water for a non-boozy sipper. DISGUISED UPDATEFor those of you who are waiting with bated breath…

🍸Friday Happy Hour: May 22, 2020

Shelley Burbank
May 22, 2020
Friday Happy Hour / Good Life Crazy Times
5 Comments

In a little while I am going to participate in a virtual happy hour on Zoom with some of my Maine neighbors. It’s so weird and ironic. Most of them will be within literal shouting distance of each other because their houses/camps are next door. I mean, they could open up their doors/windows and yell at each other, they are that close.

✍️Writing Wednesday: Adapt!

Shelley Burbank
May 20, 2020
Good Life Crazy Times / Writing Wednesday
6 Comments

Focus on your goals. Adapt to circumstances beyond your control. Take pleasure in your work. All is not lost! After ranting a bit yesterday about how my idea for a cozy mystery series ran into the cold, harsh reality that someone beat me to it, I spent the rest of the day researching the market. By the time I was done, I’d come to the conclusion that I am probably not a cozy mystery writer anyway, and maybe I should take my idea and turn it into a chick lit series! As far as I can tell, this…

👓 Doggone It: All The Best Ideas Are Taken

Shelley Burbank
May 19, 2020
Good Life Crazy Times / Writing Wednesday
8 Comments

Is it true that all the best ideas are already taken? In a world where everyone is writing and self-publishing and traditionally publishing genre series, is there anything left unexplored?See, I have a hankering to write a cozy mystery series, one with a character I absolutely adore and want to spend many hours with as she solves puzzling crimes. Every cozy mystery series needs a hook: the main character’s a witch or owns a cat or runs a bookshop or is a member of a knitting club. I wanted to set my series in a milieu…

☕️ Writing Wednesday: 3 Cool Ways to Work Around Procrastination

Shelley Burbank
February 19, 2020
Good Life Crazy Times / Writing Wednesday
2 Comments

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…

📚 Writing Wednesday: Simplicity, Luxury, Refinement

Shelley Burbank
February 12, 2020
Good Life Crazy Times / Writing Wednesday
2 Comments

This morning, I grabbed my usual cup of coffee (blueberry flavored with flax milk) and my current read (Wilkie Collins’s 1860s thriller, THE WOMAN IN WHITE), and headed out to my still-sparsely decorated balcony. This is how I start my days, with coffee and books and music. Today I cued up opera arias on YouTube and settled in to the English countryside with Collins’s character, “Walter Hartwright, of Clement’s Inn, Teacher of Drawing.” Listening to the classical music while reading paragraphs like the following sent me into a pleasurable swoon: “I must have been hard to…

👓 Writing Wednesday: Big Bookstack

Shelley Burbank
February 5, 2020
Good Life Crazy Times / Writing Wednesday
3 Comments

Bookstack for the AutodidactAn autodidact is a self-taught person. That’s what the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online edition tells me when I look it up just to make sure I'm not missing any valuable nuances of meaning. The word comes from the Greek autodidaktos, didaktos in turn from the word didaskein which means, to teach.Looking up histories and etymologies of words has me asking myself if I shouldn’t, maybe, teach myself Greek. Words are so interesting! I could give up writing and instead lose myself in the intricacies of language itself. Hmmmm. Tempting. However, I’m having enough trouble scheduling in…

✍️Writing Wednesday: Stash Away All

Shelley Burbank
January 29, 2020
Good Life Crazy Times / Writing Wednesday
8 Comments

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…

Techno Woes

Shelley Burbank
January 8, 2020
Good Life Crazy Times / Uncategorized / Writing Wednesday
0 Comments

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…

The Coziest Time of the Year

In which I try to make amusing excuses about neglecting my blogging responsibilities.