Happy New Year, writers near and far!

I offer many resources for writing career goal-setting, but this month I’ve drastically lowered my phone consult fees for first-time clients.

Many writers get all revved up for the New Year, but could use a sounding board or help trouble-shooting to start the year off right.

If this sounds like you, go ahead and register for a session. Spaces are limited and will be scheduled first come, first served.

I’ll even throw in my Dream Team year-end/New Year questionnaire for free for everyone who registers for an hour consult during January.

Monthly one-hour consults come with weekly check-ins. If you are interested, register for your first consult in January. Appointments will be scheduled within 24 hours after payment is received.

Discounted slots are only for first-time clients only.  Returning clients can sign up for regular rates below or on my Phone Consult page.

I hope to work with you in 2016!

Discounted Rates:

Half-hour Phone Consult: $100 $75

One-hour Phone Consult: $150 $100

Regular Rates:

Half-hour Phone Consult: $100

One-hour Phone Consult: $150

I look forward to speaking with you at our designated time!

Did you know my website has a shopping cart?

If you put something into your cart in error, no worries. You can take your time, look around, and select items until you are ready to check out. To view or alter the contents of your shopping cart, click the button below.

All this and more! Please subscribe to The Prosperous Writer Blog and sign up for The Prosperous Writer Newsletter, for exclusive discounts you won’t find elsewhere.

I hope this is your most successful year yet!

~ Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Hello, writers! Happy New Year!

Maybe you have already cleared the decks in anticipation of being more productive in January. But if you have not, you are in luck, because this week feels perfect for cleaning your digital house and setting yourself up for more streamlined success in the New Year.

We’ll talk about what to add in the next post, but first, clear the clutter both actual and digital!

Keep a to-do list handy as you work through these steps because insights and desires will come to you, and you may wish to put these into a list.

Step One: Streamline Your Email Subscriptions

Step Two: Respond To All Social Media Requests & Delete Spammers

Step Three: Quickly Go Through Your Office & Pull Useless Items

Step Four: Take Down Dated Inspiration

Step Five: Put Away Last Year’s Tax Materials

Step Six: Clean Off Your Desk

Each of these steps takes time. But rather than feeling impatient, pay attention to how you feel as you perform each task.

Lessons come from doing. Lessons do not come from planning to do. Lessons do not come from daydreaming about doing. The only way to learn lessons about you and your career is to actually engage with your process and pay attention to what you notice.

Information is just waiting to bubble up as you dive into your office and start tidying and sorting. If you want your writing space to work for you and to inspire you, you must take charge of it.

By the time you are done, your office and your computer should feel like a breath of fresh air.

In the comments, feel free to share about how and where you get stuck in de-cluttering your literal and work spaces. I’d love to hear if you enjoy this process or dislike it.

I am a veteran journalist, author and coach with over a decade and a half of experience and a wealth of techniques to share. I am focused on making the world a saner, more expressive place. I help folks become more creative for personal enjoyment, professional development and transformational growth. Whether you are a professional creative or hope to become one some day, I can help you embrace your personal strengths, explore your creative possibilities, and evolve incrementally into your most inspiring self. If you are ready to achieve creative consistency in your life and career, email me about monthly coaching calls. To learn more about increasing your creative confidence, please check out my online school. Stay tuned for ways to save money by becoming a Beta User for my next new course by subscribing to The Prosperous Creative. And don’t forget to get these blog posts delivered to your inbox, so you never miss a post. If you appreciate my work—school, products, blog and social media posts—you are welcome to make a contribution of any size at any time. Thank you for your support!

I hope you had a cozy and wonderful Christmas. We sure did.

Visit The Christina Katz Writing & Publishing School to learn more.

Happy New Year, friends! I hope you will take advantage of these discounts on courses designed to inform and empower your writing career this year and every year.

We went to see Joy yesterday, the new film directed by David O. Russell, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, and Bradley Cooper.

And I loved it.

I knew I would as soon as I heard that it was about the life of a woman entrepreneur.

I mean think about it…when is the last time you went to the movies and it was a film about:

A. a woman

B. a woman entrepreneur

???

The last time I saw a similar film was when Big Eyes came out with Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz.

I loved that film, too, although it is about an artist, not an entrepreneur. However, Joy is even more inspiring.

We might imagine that “the force” is the only awakening happening in movie theaters right now.

But it isn’t. Important films about and by women are also awakening.

And if we want to keep them coming, we have to go watch them.

So thanks for joining me in watching Joy in theaters. I know you’ll be inspired.

Here’s the trailer for Joy:

Here’s the trailer for Big Eyes, in case you missed it:

My family is pretty good about trying new foods. We have found sampling unfamiliar dishes to be a great way to explore different cultures and flavors. So we often add new restaurants and foods to our family bucket list. Plus we welcome fresh recipes to bring variety to our cooking. But butternut squash soup hadn’t even crossed our minds – until my sister introduced it to us one Thanksgiving a few years ago.

Having a soup course as part of our Thanksgiving dinner was a novelty in itself, but the biggest surprise was the soup itself. The thick, creamy texture, accented by a zip of cayenne won us all over. Even my husband and brother, who heartily avoid vegetables, became instant fans. My kids didn’t want to have to wait until the next November to have their aunt’s Butternut Squash Soup, so I copied the recipe and added into our monthly meal rotation.

Pleasant discoveries like this delicious Butternut Squash Soup recipe make it easier for me to encourage my kids to keep checking off culinary adventures from our bucket list.

Butternut Squash Soup

prep 25 m ∙ cook 35 mins ∙ makes 6 servings

INGREDIENTS

6 tablespoons chopped onion

4 tablespoons margarine

6 cups peeled and cubed butternut squash

3 cups water

4 cubes chicken bouillon

1/2 teaspoon dried marjoram

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese

DIRECTIONS

In a large saucepan, saute onions in butter or margarine until tender. Add squash, water, bouillon, marjoram, black pepper and cayenne pepper. Bring to boil; cook 20 minutes, or until squash is tender.

Puree squash and cream cheese in a blender or food processor in batches until smooth. Return to saucepan, and heat through. Do not allow to boil.

Lara Krupicka is a parenting journalist, author, and mother of three. Lara is best known for her Bucket List Life Manifesto and her books Family Bucket Lists and Bucket List Living For Moms.

Thanks to Christine Fonseca for this awesome recipe. Now I know what I’m doing with the Thanksgiving leftovers!

This stew is perfect on a cold winter’s night.

Sundays are relaxing days in our house, filled with sounds of football, family and serious R&R. Sometimes I write on Sundays, sometimes I just enjoy my family. Regardless, I cook a nice family dinner and invite extended family.

Since it is a relaxing time, I am always on the hunt for easy recipes that I can fix without a lot of trouble. Of course, I want it to “taste” like I slaved – all without the work. This recipe, fit the bill beautifully. Cooked in the slow cooker with very little fuss, I was able to throw this together and not think about it for 6 hours – taking away any of my normal excuses for not writing. Even better, this is an easily adaptable recipe. I plan on making a yummy day-after-thanksgiving stew using similar ingredients on Black Friday.

Chicken Pot Pie Stew

2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cubed

2 ½ cup frozen mixed veggies (I like peas and carrots)

3 cups peels potatoes, cubed

4 cups homemade cream of chicken base (see recipe below)

Put cubed chicken in crock pot. Add frozen veggies on top, followed by the potatoes. Top with the cream of chicken base. Cover and cook on high for 5-6 hours. STIR and serve with your favorite bread.

Recipe for cream of chicken base:

3 cups water

4 chicken bouillon cubes

½ cup half and half

1 cup milk

¾ cup Wondra Flour

Salt

White Pepper

Garlic powder

Onion powder

In small bowl, mix flour and milk together until smooth.

Bring water and half and half to a boil. Stir in chicken bouillon and reduce heat to simmer. Add flour/milk mixture in a slow stream, stirring constantly. Season to taste while stirring until thickened.

Christine Fonseca is an acclaimed and award-winning author of nonfiction and young adult novels dedicated to helping children and adults find their unique voice in the world. When she isn’t crafting new worlds and new stories, she can be found sipping too many skinny vanilla lattes at her local coffee house. Find out more about Christine or her books at ChristineFonseca.com.

~ Adapted from the recipe for “Slow Cooker Chicken Pot Pie Soup” at The Gunny Sack

Christina’s Post-Thanksgiving Update:

I adapted this recipe to use up Thanksgiving leftovers and the soup turned out great. Here’s what I did, in case anyone wants to try it:

1. I boiled the turkey carcass right after Thanksgiving dinner. As we cleaned up from the meal, I tossed all the turkey bones, turkey scraps, and leftover drippings into a large pot with onion, celery, and herbs and boiled it for a few hours.
2. I strained the broth and chilled it, so I could skim the layer of fat off the top more easily. This is the broth I used for my stew (instead of water and bouillon cubes).
3. I used FOUR cups of my turkey broth, for my Cream Of Turkey base, and then added about a quarter teaspoon each of garlic powder, onion powder, and garlic salt. (You could always purchase turkey broth instead of making it if you have leftover turkey meat to use up but no homemade broth.)
4. I did not think it would take 6 hours to cook this stew because I wasn’t using raw poultry meat, but it still did take that long to cook the potatoes. I used red potatoes and added the potatoes first with a small bag of frozen pearl onions, topped them with the Cream Of Turkey base, and cooked it for two hours. Then I added a bag of frozen petite peas, crinkle cut carrots, and about a cup and a half of chopped, cooked turkey meat (leftover from Thanksgiving) and cooked it the remaining four hours. In retrospect, if I had cut my potatoes a bit smaller, it would not have taken so long. So I would suggest cubing your potatoes into about the same size as the pearl onions, which could slash an hour off the cooking time.
5. And that’s it. The result is delicious! Thanks so much to Christine for sharing this recipe. I will definitely make it again.

Folks may be wondering what caused me to choose a course on creating more joy as my most recent class.

Over the years, I have put a lot of positive messages out into the world, and folks often ask me how I do it.

The answer is, I don’t do anything. When you are joyful, bringing someone else up doesn’t require extra energy, it just spills over naturally.

Of course, I do not feel exceedingly happy every moment of every day 365/6 days of the year.

If I did, I am sure someone would want to give me a pill to bring me back down.

But you know what? I am joyful most days and most of the time during the day. I go to bed joyful and I wake up joyful. So basically I feel like one of the richest people in the world every day, no matter what is going on out there in this crazy world of ours.

This was not always the case in my life. But I have done a lot of work in this arena over the past 20 years, especially in the past three years, and I share my strategies for becoming and staying joyful in my new class, More Joy Now, Stop Surviving & Start Thriving.

Notice that this course is not called, My Life Is Perfect & If You Take This Course Your Life Will Magically Become Perfect Overnight, Too.

However, this brings up another reason I wanted to create this class. I am so weary of messages online that if we would all just follow complicated and expensive formulas for becoming rich, we could become rich too, and therefore we would finally be happy.

I do not know if the people (mostly men, I notice) who constantly share their revenues online in order to hook people into their mailing lists are happy or not. I am sure earning huge amounts of money is a kind of adrenaline rush, I grant them that. But I think most people are smart enough to realize that adrenaline and joy are not the same things.

So I created my course in joy because I believe joy is a worthy enough of a goal in and of itself. And I know from personal experience that joy comes with a very low price tag, contrary to what many online entrepreneurs would like us to believe.

Joy is readily available to every person on the planet, no matter what the circumstances. You just have to want a more joyful life today than you had yesterday. That’s it. No hundreds of dollars price tag. No complicated formulas.

Smack dab in the middle of my course, I share seven simple strategies that anyone can incorporate into the life they are already living to create more joy. I also share thirteen ways to get unblocked when the joy isn’t flowing and a plan for times when you feel like you don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning.

It is no coincidence that I am launching this course during the holidays. I know a lot of people suffer from the winter blues, and I am hoping that this course can create a positive shift for anyone who is suffering for any reason.

Just a desire to feel a little bit better every day, until you cross the invisible line to a level of joy you can sustain no matter what else is going on is the goal of this course.

I had more fun creating this course than any course I’ve created thus far. I think it is because of the nature of the topic and also because this is a course that is so incredibly helpful. I even helped myself while creating it. I couldn’t help it. You can’t even dabble in this topic without benefiting from it on many levels.

The trickiest thing about joy is that nobody can give it to you. You have to cultivate it and grow it yourself. So if you are in waiting mode, as in “I’ll be happy when…” maybe you’d like to try some of my strategies so you can stop waiting and experience joy sooner rather than later.

Whether you are currently happy or currently unhappy, I have created a course that may, at first glance, seem radical, but which makes complete and utter common sense.

I hope you will give it to yourself as a holiday gift. I would be honored to have you join the private conversation going on in the classroom of More Joy Now.

So thank you for registering and taking the course at your leisure. Like all of my courses, it’s designed for busy people who love to fit learning into their already full schedules.

Hope to see you in there!

~ Photo by Austin Schmid

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Good morning and happy Black Friday!

Lots of people in the US bond over the adventure of Black Friday shopping. And I am definitely one of those people who prides herself on saving money at the cash register.

So if you are not BF shopping today, I hope you have a lovely, peaceful day.

And if you are BF shopping today, I hope you score some great deals!

Speaking of deals, I have the lowest prices of the year right now on all of my video courses, including my latest course which is launching today!

I’m going to give you coupon codes and links that will take you to drastic savings on all of my best writing courses and on my brand new course, More Joy Now.

Whether you are positioning yourself for increased writing success in 2016 or whether you simply want to experience more joy in your life starting today, I hope you will check out all of these courses at amazing, limited-time prices.

Appreciate yourself by purchasing a course for yourself and sharing these great deals with your friends and family.

Visit The Christina Katz Writing & Publishing School to learn more.

Happy holiday season! All offers end Monday, November 30th at midnight.

~ Photo by Maja Petric

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Registration opens soon right here. Sign up for my ezine to make sure you get the best price possible!