In every household over dinner tonight, all over the world, I hope that the conversation will turn to a very serious subject:

Why are so many women in attendance at the Academy Awards last night starving themselves?

Are their families blind to this? Where are the people who love these women?

Because the camera is supposed to add ten-fifteen pounds. If that’s the case, then these women must look like Holocaust survivors in-person.

When my daughter was just seven years old and in second grade, she began noticing that her friends are thinner than she is. And so the conversation began in our house.

It goes something like this.

Mom, how come I’m not as thin as my friends? I’m fat. I don’t want to be fat. I want to be skinny like my friends!

Answer: Some women are lean and some women are curvy, but it’s never healthy to be too thin or to diet just for the sake of becoming skinny.

Answer: It’s never a good idea to try and change your appearance to please others. It doesn’t matter what your friends look like, it’s much more important to love and accept yourself for who you are.

Answer: You and your friends have different body types, and they are going to change even more over the next few years, and none of them are going to look exactly alike, nor do they look alike now.

It’s never a good idea to impress upon a young girl that she is not thin enough to be acceptable or to make her afraid of becoming fat.

The only sensible reason to try and change your body is for health reasons and then the only acceptable approach is to eat better and exercise more in a moderate, gradual way without shaming or pressure.

My daughter is curvy. I am curvy. Maybe you are curvy, too.

I am putting out a call tonight. We all need to have to have conversations with our daughters and tell them that they way those women looked at the Academy Awards is NOT a healthy choice. And we need to pressure the media and the industry authorities and actresses themselves to take responsibility for the horrifying examples that they are setting for the daughters of the world.

It’s up to us to help our daughters understand that the healthy choice is to be more tolerant and accepting of what our bodies want to look like and less tolerant of unacceptable — and unsustainable — images of women.

These women look like they are going to die from starving themselves. I sincerely hope that this does not turn out to be the case.

But those Academy-award nominated actresses are putting our daughters at risk. And it is inexcusable as an example, whether they are sick or not.

And anyone in the industry who is putting pressure on them to starve themselves for success is guilty of injuring the world’s daughters, period.

I hope every mother in America will talk to her daughter tonight. And tell her, you NEVER have to look like that to be loved.

And then hug her and love her exactly the way she is. And ask her to do the same with herself.

And if you have an eating disorder or weight obsession, I hope you will seek help for your sake and for all of our daughters’ sakes.

Please copy and paste this meme into your blog so long as you link here. Or blog a response and link back to this post. And then talk to your daughters and report about the results online. Enough is enough!

We can change our daughters’ futures by raising our own awareness about self-abuse among women and talking openly and honestly about how to love and accept ourselves instead of further dis-empowering and abusing our bodies.

2011 has been something of a mess in publishing as publishers scramble for survival amidst full systems change.

The bottom line is some publishers will work it out and some won’t.

I predict that 2012 will be the year that publishers remember the importance of partnering with authors, rather than merely treating authors like “content” they can “leverage.”

That’s my great hope for publishers, anyway.

Against the backdrop of all of this mess, focused writers have to still be able to ground and gain traction in their writing careers. I know, because I train them.

And when I look around at my peers, other authors, long-time freelancers, and teachers,  I see that it’s the most focused who are still able to flex their writing skills for income.

In other words, those who can flex their skills still earn.

And those who freeze up in fear and refuse to learn…well, I’m not really sure what’s going on with them.

The bottom line is, you either see the changes in the publishing landscape as a challenge to take on or you let your fears lead you into dark places.

The writers who are still writing in 2012 will have faced the dark times and figured out how to thrive anyway.

During 2010 and part of 2011, I wrote a book about how to grow a creative career no matter what is happening in the economy or the publishing world.

I’m not saying that neither matter, I’m just saying you either roll over and die or you roll up your sleeves and dig deeper within yourself.

That’s what the lesson of tough times is supposed to be. If there’s not going to be any growth, then what’s the point of all this?

You either get caught up with the negative Neds and Nellies or you put your creative energy into growth, innovation, and partnering wisely.

You either take your writing career into your own hands and produce yourself (which I have been saying since 2005) or you concede that you have been pretending that this was true, while you were secretly hoping that the publishing industry was going to parent you like a child.

The publishing industry has no interest in parenting writers. (And neither does anybody else, for that matter.) Writers need to man- and woman-up and grasp the opportunities that are right in front of us.

Are you in charge of your writing career or not?

You have a whole day stretching out in front of your like a field of infinite potential.

And you could take five or ten steps today that would insure you will still be around writing tomorrow.

Take those steps, writers. And ignore all the nonsense out there. There’s still plenty of it with more cropping up each day.

Steer clear of the yimmer-yammer—do your work, instead.

Because the writers who are doing their own work, are crushing it.

What can you do?

• Update your professional portfolio.
• Update your online website/blog/portfolio.
• Organize your past work. Look for ways to re-purpose it.
• Figure out your platform dynamic by taking my “Build Your Author Platform” self-study course (coming in January) or my Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform course.
• Make a plan to take your writing career to the next level by leveraging the best of what you’ve done and the best of what you currently offer.

In 2012, I’m leading writers into a bright future. I hope you are coming with me.

~ Photo by JulieRed

Borders has sold me a lot of books over the years. But not as many as they used to lately.

Apparently I am not the only wayward customer.

I was especially enamored by their huge store on Michigan Avenue, right next to the Water Tower in downtown Chicago.

This was when I was a city girl. You know, back in the day.

I don’t remember what year the superstore opened. It wasn’t always there. Not when I arrived in 1988.

But once it did open, I hung out there an awful lot. Wandering the shelves. Cruising for books that called out to me.

This reminds me that it was in Borders on Michigan Avenue where I got the job lead from one of the cashiers that finally sprung me from the city I had lived in for nine years.

I went from Michigan Avenue, where I worked in the John Hancock Building, to the Sangre De Christo mountains of New Mexico on a train, taking only what I could carry.

But that’s another story for another day.

During the times I spent in Borders cruising books I was mostly dying to leave that city. My God, I was desperate to get out of there. Do you know that feeling? When it’s way past time to move on and you are still right where you don’t want to be? That was me then.

Borders was a respite—an escape from a place where I didn’t really want to be living and hadn’t wanted to be living for years.

But back to the books. There were books. There were lots of books—tons of them—spread out over multiple floors. I don’t remember if it was two floors or three. At that time in my life, I spent an awful lot of time in the basement of Borders where all of the self-help, creativity, and spirituality books were.

I would walk out of those revolving doors (I think it was revolving doors) with a stack of books, spending like $50-$75 bucks at a time.

I had a ton of astrology books back then. Like a whole shelf full. Today, only a few of my favorites are still with me. I have saved the best of my best and given away, donated, or traded in the rest.

Today, I spend what I used to spend at Borders at Amazon almost each month, probably not quite.

The closest bookstore is Borders at about twenty minutes away without traffic. I have never been as enamored with it as I was with that one on Michigan Avenue.

I think that Michigan Avenue store was special. It had an energy about it. A kind of magic.

Or maybe the magic was in me. I’m not sure. An awful lot of longing went on in me in that store and what I was longing for then…was really the life I have today.

Thanks, Borders. You did me a whole lot of good at a time when I really needed you.

Regardless what anyone says about you. You were good to me. And I appreciate it.

Do you have any Borders memories? What do you want to say to Borders? Good or bad, share your thoughts and ping this post if you want to share.

~ Photo by monsieur paradis

We interrupt this series of inspirational (and I hope empowering) messages on creativity for some thoughts on what is going on in politics right now: specifically the fact that the war against women is hitting a new high.

The media has long and regularly made a mockery of women and now we are all going to pay for it by women losing every important right we have ever fought for.

I am angry and disappointed in the way the media portrays women. I believe that their lack of respect now threatens to undermine all the strides that women have made in my lifetime.

Because of the way women are depicted (or not paid attention to at all) in the media, as trivial, throw-away objects of either sexual desire or mass ridicule, I now have to drop everything to fight for rights that should be universally granted to all women as long as we are the rightful owners of our bodies.

Going forward, I am ONLY going to give my attention to media resources that portray women as empowered, equal members of this democracy, and portray us with dignity and respect.

I invite all of my friends, whether Democrats or Republicans, to join me in withdrawing attention and funding from media that undermines women’s rights and dignity and join me in rallying around and sending money ONLY to media outlets that treats women as equal players in this democracy.

And here is my message to the media: Get powerful women on your radar, media, and start writing intelligent news about us as though we were equal players in this democracy.

Because guess who writes the checks in most families? We do.

And we are not going to support major media outlets who trash women, no matter what our political affiliations.

Our daughter’s rights to govern her own body are now on the chopping block and this will, very much, affect our daughter’s day-to-day equality in the future.

What this means to me as a mother is that the depth and breadth of our daughter’s future rights as women are being written in the halls of government right now.

Do I want my daughter to have the same freedoms, I have had?

Then I have to act.

Do you? If so, then you need to act, too.

Please join me in writing an equal future for our daughters and boycotting media that trivializes women in any form of coverage.

And let’s start paying more attention to media that eschews sensationalism and throwing the dirt of the day against a woman in the spotlight for thoughtful, intelligent, equal coverage of women in world issues.

If you think that journalism is dead, then you are not reading The Oregonian.

The Oregonian was the first newspaper I ever read and loved.

When we moved to Oregon a little over five years ago I picked it up and read it and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was full of outstanding writing, compelling voices, and hair-raising stories. I was hooked.

Five years later the newspaper is considerably thinner. Some days, like on Mondays, I swear the paper is barely there at all.

The section that covers the area where I live has practically evaporated. The building for the Southwest suburbs has been shuttered. I feel sad every time I drive by. The editor I wrote for worked there and he was really kind and encouraging.

I just got an iPhone. So did my husband. There doesn’t seem to be any app in the app store or any plan for moving from a print model into digital formats. If there is one at The O, I don’t know about it and it seems like I should, fan that I am. Is it a secret?

Any yet, amidst the doom and gloom predictions, and with a brand new publisher, The Oregonian just gets better as it grows leaner.

The coverage of issues effecting women and families lately has been nothing short of comprehensive and horrifying.

And that’s why I want to say thanks. I want to say thanks to The Oregonian because you are motivating me. Making me feel like I should do something, say something, be more involved in helping to solve the rampant dis-empowerment of women who, according to your recent reports are being crushed by:

Domestic violence

Sexual abuse of incarcerated women and mothers

Wife slaughter

Sex trafficking of teenage girls

Overwhelming homelessness

And neglect and sexual abuse of children by parents

I love that the stories start with a short piece or an editorial and then get wider, deeper and more probing of the key issues as you cover them further.

I hate what you are reporting on. I love that you are reporting on it.

Thank you so much.

And please, don’t stop.