It’s been a while since I asked anyone to nominate me for a blogging competition.

I don’t want to be greedy. I’m already asking everyone I know to purchase a copy of my new book, The Writer’s Workout. (And yes, I’m asking you too. Please order soon!)

But what the heck, I have been blogging steadily and multiply since January 2007.

If you would like to nominate me for as one of the Top Ten Blogs for Writers, please do!

I’m going to be blogging more often than ever this year, since I’ll be promoting my new book all year, and responding to all of the questions and concerns that writers bring up while I’m around and about.

So let’s see if we can still get me in the game. What do you say?

If we are going to do this thing, we’d better hurry, the nominations end by December 10th (so I think that means by the end of the day on the 9th, I’m not sure, let’s go with that).

Here’s the rules (taken from this post):

How to Nominate Your Favorite Writing Blog:

→ Nominate your favorite blog in the comment section.
→ You have only one vote (only your first will be counted).
→ Please include the web address of the blog.
→ Explain why you think the blog is worthy of winning this year’s award.

To make the cut, a blog must be nominated more than once.

Need ideas? Here’s the 411 on me as a blogger over the past four years:

I’ve been blogging continuously since January 2007.

I started blogging my The Writer Mama Riffs blog and my Writers On The Rise blog.

I ran each of those blogs for two years, not only blogging regularly myself but also featuring many co-contributors such as Kelly James Enger, C. Hope Clark, and many more.

While I was already running those two blogs, I started my Get Known Before the Book Deal blog in January 2008 and ran it for two years with more great contributors such as Meryl K. Evans and Cindy Hudson, and many more.

Eventually running all of these overlapping blogs proved to be too much time and creative energy away from my paying work, so in November 2009, I built THIS blog and started phasing out my old blogs and pouring everything into this one.

I’m not sure that I have been the most perfect blogger in the extended writing community (if there is any such thing), but I have definitely experimented a lot, been pretty darn consistent for FIVE years, and I have learned a ton.

Along the way, I have helped to expand the reach of many writers, who have worked with me. Quite a few of them have gone on to get book deals and ramp up substantial platforms as experts. At some point I realized that I needed to either focus on expanding my classes and taking good care of my students or being the most popular blogger on the block.

But you know what? When I let go of being the most popular blogger on the block, that’s when I feel like I found my blogging legs.

When I stopped focusing on pointing the spotlight on others and just started standing in the spotlight myself and taking the mic and letting whatever I wanted to say come out, that’s when things got cool.

I hate to see blogging become something with too much peer pressure and parameters and unspoken rules.

I think the highest path for a blog is for it become what it wants to become according to what makes the most sense for the blogger, the audience and the topic.

That’s what I teach my students anyway. Because I don’t want them to have to spend years blogging “right” before they finally start blogging real.

My blog is a work in progress. I change the name as often as I change my hairstyle. I don’t blog only about writing because I don’t like that rule. In addition to blogging, I also write books, ebooks, curricula, articles, and things in forms that don’t even have names yet.

I blog because I want to blog. Because I love to blog. Because it’s a natural extension of who I am and what I do.

If you think any or all of this is worth a vote, then thanks for voting for me.

Hop on over to WriteToDone, Unmissable Articles On Writing and nominate me accordingly.

I always appreciate your support. Thank you for reading.

You may have heard, it’s my birthday today.

I have been around the sun 45 times. That’s a long way to travel and I’ve got the weathered vehicle to prove it.

I’m fairly happy by nature but I’ve had my tough go-rounds in life, just like anyone else. I was lucky enough to get a couple biggies over with when I was younger.

Hopefully you won’t ever mistakenly think that just because I am “successful,” I don’t have any challenges in life. Because, of course, that’s absurd.

Everyone has challenges and goes through tough times. Transcending (and okay, sometimes just surviving) them builds character. After all, if we’re not growing than what’s the point of being here?

In the past, whenever I would go through tough times, I would joke, “Well, since I’m learning all of this stuff now, hopefully I will get to skip the mid-life crisis.”

And guess what? It looks like I get to skip the mid-life crisis. (But check back with me at 50, just in case.)

In the spirit of my birthday, and because I have been instructed to be happy at least 200 times already today (thanks Facebook friends!), I thought I’d share a few things I have learned about being happy.

This way, if the mid-life crisis starts to rear its ugly head, I can come back and find this post and read it. Here goes:

The Keys To Happiness: At Least For Me

Choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice.

Eschew cynics and cynicism. Cynicism is like a deadly mildew that can potentially smother authentic happiness.

Happiness comes from within. A wise person once said that there is a kingdom within…there is a queendom, as well, and her name is happiness.

Happiness has nothing to do with perfection. Happiness is actually very wabi-sabi.

Everyone likes a person who is self-content. Nobody really enjoys being with a miserable person (except other miserable people seeking consensus).

Remember that your happiness is your job. Don’t expect others to make you happy, unless you want to embark on a lifelong pursuit of the elusive and unattainable.

Don’t always expect happiness to do cartwheels. If you can sit on the floor in an empty room and be peaceful and still, you are likely happy.

Know what makes you happy. For me, some classical or jazz music, a lit candle or fire, some comfty clothes and something to write in and with can pretty much make me happy any time, any where.

Once you know what makes you happy, do it. Don’t be a martyr or a masochist. Nobody asked you to. Besides, righteousness is a close cousin to cynicism.

If you are unhappy, unselfish giving almost always creates a happy uptick. However, if you are unhappy and you give just so you can get, that’s manipulation. It might work for you in the short run, but it will probably blow up in your face in the long run.

Once you discover your sources of happiness, grow and expand them. Don’t get carried away, though, a gradual approach works just fine.

If you have people in your life who cause you to feel persistently unhappy, take a closer look. What are you tolerating from them that you would never tolerate from someone else? Stop tolerating it and you’ll immediately feel happier. (But don’t try and change them, just change you.)

Remember that happy people are loving people. You can’t help but love others if you love yourself. Be on the lookout for ways to share your happiness with others.

This one is big: all those people who came with the package you were born into, accept them for who they are. You should change and grow and improve with time. They don’t have to. Deal with it.

Once you become happy, befriend others who are happy. When people are unhappy, give them space and let them work it out. Other people’s unhappiness is not your project. Try hobbies instead.

If someone you care about is dangerously unhappy, ask if there is anything you can do to help. But don’t rescue because it’s disrespectful.

Do what you can for others within reason, but don’t make needless personal sacrifices because you think it’s holy. There are no shortcuts to lasting happiness.

And this above all: never apologize for being happy. Your suffering is not a prerequisite to some future prize. The door to happiness is within. You were born with it. We were all born with it. Open the door and find out what’s inside. Make it bigger and then share your joy.

Happiness is your job, after all. Imagine what kind of world we would be living in if everyone believed they deserved to be happy.

Happy birthday to me! I’m going to go build a fire now. Because that’s my job.

~ Home fire 5 photo by anoldent

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 recently got back from a trip to Southern Oregon where Jason got to see several plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (he saw three, I saw two, and Samantha saw one). The purpose of the trip was for me to give a presentation at the Southern Oregon Branch of Willamette Writers and then to partake in the OSF while we were down there. Needless to say, in this case, a good time was had by all.

Now that I’m home, eying my to-do list, which includes so many tasks that I am thinking only a super-heroine could perform them all, I’m already looking forward to attending my next literary event next weekend: Wordstock. And then the weekend after next, it’s time for the Northwest Author Series again featuring Wilsonville’s very own Susan Fletcher.

We are crazy-lucky in Oregon when it comes to literary events. So fortunate that we can skip from literary event to literary event to literary event all year long. We are just incredibly, undeniably spoiled rotten when it comes to the variety of  writing-related events, organizations, and workshops. So I’m borrowing the tagline from the state of Virginia, and wondering aloud: if Virginia is for Lovers then maybe Oregon is for Writers?

Here are seven good reasons we might consider changing our state slogan from We Love Dreamers to Oregon is for Writers (although I have to say that I think We Love Dreamers is pretty good.)

1. Willamette Writers. Five branches for members all over Oregon including chapters in Portland, Eugene, Southern Oregon, Coast, and Salem. Annual membership is CHEAP (currently just $36 per year). I live right between the Salem and Portland chapters and I’ve traveled to all five chapters to give presentations and/or workshops. All are wonderful in their own ways and offer support, education and networking opportunities for writers in these areas. In addition to offering monthly speakers, Willamette Writers hosts the annual Willamette Writers Conference each August, sends out a monthly newsletter (this is my third year writing a column for them), offers workshops, writer’s and critique group referral services, and hosts an annual book drive, Books for Kids, which has donated over 25,000 new and used books to kids in the Portland area. If you haven’t yet joined, you really should. Visit the Willamette Writers website.

2. Wordstock. If you care about all things literary and you live close by, I bet you go to Wordstock every year. Likely you  would not even think of missing it. Originally dubbed “The Festival of Books,” and famously publicized by the same ad agency that is known for it’s work with Coca-Cola (and now Old Spice), Wieden Kennedy, Wordstock has morphed itself into a terrific annual community-building event for literary folks. About themselves they say, “We believe showcasing the artistic accomplishments of contemporary writers at our festival is one of the most compelling examples of writing’s power that we can provide.” I’ve taught workshops at Wordstock a couple of times, and although I didn’t apply to teach this year, you better believe I’ll be there, as usual. In fact, I’ll be at the Willamette Writers Booth with Cindy Hudson signing books from 10-noon on Saturday. Wordstock does an awful lot of programming including some for teachers, writers, communities, kids, and even a book-t0-film weekend. Visit the Wordstock website and hope to see you there this weekend!

3. Powell’s, City of Books. Within the city of Portland, you will find a city of books. Of if you visit, I  hope you have a some time to spare — maybe even a whole lot of time to spare. Because you will want to let Powell’s  swallow you up and spit you back out heavily encumbered with books. Or you could bring in a box (or ten) of used books after you clean out your library or get a new e-reader and trade some in for cash or a gift card. You could attend a book event. I just noticed that Nancy Pearl, whose platform I wrote about in Get Known Before the Book Deal, is coming this week to discuss her latest book. Or you could visit one of Powell’s many other locations, including Powell’s at Cedar Hills Crossing location, which also hosts lots of great authors. Go. Visit the Powell’s website.

4. The Oregon Writer’s Colony. There aren’t too many writing organizations I know of where you can join and gain access to a beach house! But that’s only one benefit you get when you join Oregon Writer’s Colony. And in keeping with out theme of this list, there is so much more. The Colonyhouse, dubbed “a quiet place for creative people” at Rockaway Beach is available for private or group use to the members of the association. OWC is currently holding a capital campaign to renovate the house and make it accessible to all. You can learn all about it here. Membership is cheap. Starting at just $40/year. Want to join? Visit the OWC website.

5. The Sylvia Beach Hotel. I spent a night in the Alice Walker room at the Sylvia Beach Hotel after a presentation at the Coast branch of Willamette Writers. (Which reminds me, check out the interview with Alice Walker — she on the cover of the latest Writer’s Digest magazine.) At the Sylvia Beach Hotel all of the rooms have a literary theme. The room themes are broken up into Classics, Best Sellers, and Novels. Classics include Agatha Christie, Colette, and Mark Twain. Best Sellers include Alice Walker, Dr. Seuss, and E.B. White. Novels include Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Lewis Stevenson. If you are driving through Newport, definitely stop and check out the hotel. You can also browse the gift shop. Or stay awhile. The hotel is right on the beach and your stay includes breakfast. Visit the Sylvia Beach Hotel Website.

6. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Continuing to travel further South and then cutting over from Crescent City, California to Grant’s Pass, Oregon (a neat drive, if you’ve never done it), brings us to Ashland, Oregon. Or you can easily get there on I-5. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a gem among theaters and Shakespeare festivals. I’ve been attending regularly since 1999 and have enjoyed every show I’ve seen. If money is a concern, don’t let it be, you can get tickets in the Elizabethan outdoor theater from late spring to early fall for only twenty dollars each. OSF is a great place to expose your kids to Shakespeare because the productions are so well-done that even a kid can understand the story. Say “yes” to Shakespeare. Visit the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

7. The Northwest Author Series and other grass roots literary events like it are springing up all over Oregon. The NAS is the author series that I started here in the Portland ‘burbs over three years ago with the support of my local library. Sure, starting your own literary anything takes dedication, effort, and an ongoing commitment. Or you could just start something up and then hand it over to other volunteers. The literary series I co-founded in graduate school many moons ago still continues today. I offer how-to instructions in my book, Get Known Before the Book Deal, for how to start your own grass roots literary event have also inspired others to start their own literary events, like the Terroir Creative Writing Festival in McMinnville. Thinking about starting your own? Visit The Northwest Author Series.

So what do you think, should we change the state tagline? Chime in!

This should help…images from the Lake Oswego Farmer’s Market and The Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts.

Money is what writers earn for their time and energy. Furthermore, writing careers are built over time not overnight. So don’t put your career in jeopardy by paying attention to everything else at the expense of your bottom line.

Here are nine prosperity-increasing tips that can quickly become habit and put more money in the bank for the same number of hours you already work or maybe even less:

1. Make a list of paid work vs. unpaid work, if you don’t have one already and update it monthly. Add to-dos like upcoming deadlines and prep for future efforts, to make sure you don’t have to scramble later.
2. Prioritize the work you do that is paid over the work you do that is unpaid. This doesn’t mean the unpaid work is not important or doesn’t need to get done. It simply means that you will get the paid work done first and then tackle the unpaid work.
3. Spend time with other writers who make money writing. If they are too busy (making money) to spend time with you, sign up for their newsletters, read their blogs or connect with them via social networking whenever possible. When contacting successful writers, keep your expectations realistic. There’s a reason they make the big bucks and it’s not because they are just hanging out all day. When you are working, whether online or off, be aware of folks who drain your energy or co-opt your time. You simply don’t have time for those people when you are supposed to be working.
4. Don’t confuse “nice” people with profitable people. Let’s say one writer invests all of his time trying to make sure everyone knows what a great guy he is, while another writer invests his time landing assignments, delivering on deadlines, and landing the next gig. Who is the more successful writer? I’d say it’s the more productive writer (the second example). And he’s the one I’d be more likely to trust, as well. So go ahead, broadcast your success!
5. Tackle the types of assignments that pay directly. Forget about any kind of writing job you “might” get paid for. Also don’t count writing you do for exposure as “paid.” And when someone offers you vague future money for today’s actual work, take twice as much time to carefully consider the offer. Why not just take on the sure-thing assignments, which are the projects that pay you directly for your work? If you keep things simple, you are more likely to prosper  in both the short run and the long run.
6. Spend the most time doing whatever you do best even if that means doing a few different things. For example, I don’t only write because if I only wrote all day, I’d soon be bored out of my mind, no matter how interesting the topics were that I was writing on. A restless person like me needs to do a variety of things. So I also teach and speak and the three efforts feed each other and increase my overall value as a writer.
7. However, don’t spread yourself too thin. I do a lot of different things but I’ve noticed that I can only do so many things before I hit overload, especially since I am a busy mom and wife, as well as a working professional. This overload point is going to be different for everyone and can change with your life circumstances, so adjust your expectations accordingly. You want to do everything you do well, not just scrape by.
8. Capture all of your business expense receipts as the year ticks along so that you can benefit from every deduction available to you when you pay your taxes. I am not the queen of filing things, so I just get a big basket and toss all my receipts in there until I’m ready to sort and report. If you need a primer on the specifics of what you can and can’t expense, pick up the March/April issue of Writer’s Digest magazine and check out the article, “Taxpertise For Writers” by Bonnie Lee. In fact, the theme of the issue is, “Your Economic Survival Guide,” so why not read the whole thing?
9. Be timely. Seek and adopt the simplest systems to help you meet your deadlines, pay your bills, get your taxes submitted, etc. It doesn’t matter which system you use. What matters more is that you make good use of the systems that work best for you and switch when one method stops working for you.

I bet you want to spend as little of your time as possible being inefficient, so that you can get back to writing. So keep things simple: write, earn and prosper. An efficient writer is a profitable writer.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have some writing deadlines to meet.

Photo by yomanimus

Feel like you need a kick in the pants to get you airborne as we head into 2010?

Seth Godin put together this terrific preso of writing by authors called What Matters Now. These messages will inspire all writers as we head into 2010. For all of us platform builders, the content offers great examples of how successful authors think. Click on each author’s  URL as you read along to catch a glimpse of how they have each designed their online shingles. Seth’s next book, coming in January 2010, is Linchpin (but the book of his that I wish everyone would read or reread is Permission Marketing).

Author Lee Silber created an inspirational end-of-the-year message on YouTube that will be helpful for just about anyone. What I like about it is that it asks each of us questions to consider. Watch it and get focused. His latest book is The Wild Idea Club.

Chris Brogan did a series of video posts on his thoughts about Overnight Success in 2009. I like to think that I might have been a catalyst in his coming up with this idea, because when he attended my session at The Writer’s Digest Conference in September, I emphasized that there is no such thing as overnight success for authors. I guess he didn’t believe me. (Chuckling.) Have you checked out his book that went straight to the New York Times Bestseller List? That’s eleven years of preparation for overnight success paying off.

Slow and steady wins the race. Hope these gems help you get pumped up for 2010. Enjoy!

Photo by artjunkgirl