Fundrazr for Lauralynn Elliott Now With INCENTIVES

NOTE: This is a sticky post.  If it is past May 10th, please scroll down for the newest content.

Okay, so I’ve been woefully slow getting this out here.  Part of it has been personal scheduling, part of it was the close occurrence of other, more well publicized disasters.  Thankfully Susan Bischoff helped me out by creating the entry form.  THANK YOU SUSAN.

So, here’s how this is going to work.  A whole bunch of paperbacks and ebooks have been donated by various and sundry authors and have been assembled into prize packs.  Everyone who donates will be entered into a drawing to win one of the prize packs.  For simplicity’s sake, you have just as much chance of winning for donating $1 as you to for donating $100 (trying to figure out how to do it in some weighted fashion was one of the other things that held me up).   When you click through to the form, you will see that we ask for your paypal email address that you used to make the donation.  This is so we can confirm that you donated and also in order to notify you that you have won.  I know a great many of us write under pen names and therefore donated anonymously (since our Paypal accounts are under our real names).  This gets around that without breaking your privacy (certainly *I* won’t be sharing your real name or paypal address with anybody).  Only Lauralynn and myself will have access to those names (due to our access to the Fundrazr itself).

So, without further ado, the prize packs are as follows:

• Kait Nolan: paperbacks of Genesis, Red, and Magical Mayhem
• Kait Nolan: any of her ebooks
• Susan Bischoff: paperbacks Hush Money, Heroes Til Curfew
• Susan Bischoff ebook bundle of Hush Money, Heroes Til Curfew
• Tia Bach: 2 signed paperback copies of Depression Cookies
• Buffy Greentree: ebook: The Five Day Writer’s Retreat: Preparing for a Lifestyle of Writing
• Beth Camp: paperback The Mermaid Quilt and Other Tales
• Michelle De Paepe: paperback of Eaters (zombie apocalypse), ebook copies of The Gardner (paranormal fiction), Vampire Music (YA PR)
• Sharon Gerlach: paperback of any one of her books; any of her ebooks
• Janet Parfitt: for the Brits: ebooks Blood Addiction, Butterflies, Numerology for Daily Life
• J. R. Pearse Nelson: ebook Queen Witch
• K. L. Schwengel: signed paperbacks of Witch Hunt anthology and First of Her Kind
•  Deborah Gafford 10 copies of any of her books.

So hie thee to the Fundrazr to DONATE if you have not already.   And then go FILL OUT THE INCENTIVE FORM to select which price pack you’d like to be entered for.  We have raised a whopping $1766 so far.  I really want to see this top $2500, y’all!  SPREAD THE WORD!

What Place Does Writing Have in Your Life? by Elizabeth Mitchell

Kait’s opening post this Round contained a quote from John Wooden as quoted by James Scott Bell.  In part, Wooden said, Don’t worry about trying to be better than someone else. . . . You have no control over that.  Instead try, and try very hard, to be the best you can be.  That you have control over.

 

Ever since I joined ROW80 8 Rounds ago, I have struggled with comparing myself to others, so Wooden’s advice seemed targeted at me and my green-eyed monster. So many in the group have published, write very well, work diligently at the craft, and in many ways have the fire in the belly that denotes dedication. Me?  The fire doesn’t burn in the same way.

 

About a year ago, I accepted a more complicated day job; it offered good pay, excellent benefits and life in an interesting part of the country. More immediately, I wasn’t in a place to strike out as a writer. After several months of juggling the two lives, I was bemoaning my difficulties to an instructor in WANA International, who replied with, “It’s okay to be a hobbyist.”

 

Her words entered my brain like liquid nitrogen, freezing the speech center, while I sputtered to myself, “I’m not a hobbyist, I’m a writer.”  After some thought, I realized that writing is an avocation for me, done for the love of writing. I  am proud to be counted with many writers who held day jobs while practicing their avocation.

Although William Carlos Williams is better known as a poet, he was a pediatrician; Peter Mark Roget of thesaurus fame was also a physician. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Geoffrey Chaucer had an active career as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat until his death. The Renaissance poet Veronica Franco was a cortigiana onesta, an intellectual courtesan. Not all writers had demanding day jobs. Brian Jacques was a milkman, and I can well imagine that he treasured the freedom to think about his novels.

 

So how do I become the best hobbyist writer I can be? Perhaps not surprisingly, in the same way I would become the best professional writer I can be, with a few differences. I cannot be lazy because writing is “only” my avocation.  It is an avocation that requires hard work, honing the craft, writing and editing and rewriting. I write because I want to make people think, recognize the human struggles I am describing, and think some more.  None of this sounds very different from what I hear from many of you.

 

There are differences, to be sure, but they seem to be in terms of time and product. It takes me a long time to write.  I try to write before work, but sometimes all that comes out is dreck.  I also edit while I write.  It makes sense to do that in the day job, so I live with the difficulty of turning it off with my avocational writing.  It does mean that I would set myself up for frustration if I joined NaNo or Fast Draft, or any of the other quick-writing tactics that many in this group have found helpful.

 

Another difference is that my product  can be anything I want to write, and not a means to put bread on my table.  It is freeing not to worry what an agent, the market, or my freelance client will think of my work.  I don’t always get to write what I want in the academic arena, so it is freeing to be able to play in the sandbox with my fiction/creative non-fiction.  It means I can be experimental and write, say, steampunk, or my horror piece about sentient boxes.

 

As Wooden said, all we can control in life is to be the best we can be. What “best” entails is up to the individual; only you know if you have done your best.  I used to wince when my sons’ teachers would write something about doing their “personal best” on their papers, but I now understand the philosophy behind it. Many of us in ROW80 have advocated finding the habits and goals that work for you.  I will now add finding who you are; find what place writing has in your life;  what place you are able and willing to give it; and own that place, whether it be best-selling author or hobbyist. No matter which you are, you are in good company. I can only speak for myself, but I am proud to embrace my amateur status.

~*~

Elizabeth Mitchell

Sunday #ROW80 Check-In

Celine Dion performing “Taking Chances” at Celine Dion ‘Taking Chances Tour’ Concert @ Bell Centre, Montreal, Canada in August, 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All by my seeeeeeeelf.  Don’t wanna be all by myyyyyyyyyself, any mooooooore!  So go visit your fellow ROWers and let them know they AREN’T ALONE!  (C’mon, I’ve been doing this for 3 years…I run out of non silly material…)

If you are interested in BEING A SPONSOR (so that I, your illustrious leader, am not by MYself) for Round 3, email me at kaitnolanwriter (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Midweek #ROW80 Check-In

Middle of May already!  Wow, where is the time going?  I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the last days of spring.  Swing by and cheer on your compatriots!

And because I’m me, I’m already thinking about Round 3 sponsors.  Round 3 begins July 1st.  If you’re interested in being a sponsor, email me at kaitnolanwriter (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Vulnerability Makes Strong Writing by Shan Jeniah Burton

Vulnerability scares me. More than that – it flat-out terrifies me. It clenches me, makes me cower, eyes huge and darting, looking for the direction and nature of the coming attack.

But I can’t share my deeper self by hiding.

I’ve been vulnerable, split wide open. As a child, I was often the target of frustrations and rages that rolled through our home like wildfires. Years later, I sobbed as I held a dying fiance, and again as my husband sat in a tiny NICU room, holding the body of our twelve-day-old son, unable to let him go.

I’m in no hurry to feel these things again, but I’m realizing, now, that there is strength in these raw and broken times. There’s understanding and growth that can’t come except through such catastrophic shreddings of the fabric of our lives.

I was raised in a home where parents hit and humiliated, in a milder version of what had been done to them. While I was still very young, I started to learn how to read people – body language, tone of voice, actions, the deeper meanings that lie beneath their words, the things they choose to focus on. More than that, I’m highly sensitized to others’ emotional energy. I can feel people from an empathic place deeper than language.

It was a survival skill, a way to know when danger loomed, maybe forestall it, and it’s saved me from many altercations with people who were not in control, or who intended me harm.

It’s made me a better writer, too, because adding these elements and frictions to the interactions between characters breathes deeper life and more complex motivations into the ways they think and treat one another.

I am the mother of a baby who died without ever crying. That’s a hard thing to live with, a forever shadow in my bright and happy life. I am the mother of two thriving children, and a dead one. There’s an unspeakable paradox in that.

It hurts – and hiding only makes the hurt worse, makes it impossible to share that paradox, to claw my way back to the brighter places when the shadows grab me.

Writing about vulnerable topics tends to be roundabout, for me. With Elijah, it began, several years ago, with fantasy fiction. I worked through much of my own heartache when my female protagonist had a child who died shortly after birth. Her life, like mine, was irrevocably altered, on nearly every level.

Within the last year or so, I have begun writing poetry about Elijah, and there is still deeper healing, nearly ten years after his death, in honoring all that happened, and all that it has meant in my life, my marriage, my mothering.

I’ve come to feel and value the healing strength of writing this way, along with the honest life in the writing itself.

And yet, I often fear and resist it. I hesitate, dancing written flamencos around powerfully emotional topics, without delving into them on a personal level.

Here’s an excerpt from the previous draft of this post:

~~ As I read others’ blogs, books, interact with people, and watch TV, I see that I am not alone. Many others, it seems, share my fear and unease with vulnerability. There is an incredible amount of marketing and political maneuvering that plays upon vulnerability. ~~

This passage splashes impotently on the surface of thought, never rippling the pools of my personal vulnerabilities.

That’s right.

In the midst of an essay on openness and vulnerability, I was hiding, protecting my soft underbelly, afraid to expose myself to you, or maybe even to myself.

We’re all vulnerable. We all die – the ultimate vulnerability. We grow older, we lose loved ones, jobs, sometimes homes and even our memories. We are stabbed by thoughtless words, broken apart by tragedies large and small.

Instinct says to shield our vitals, curl into a fetal position, and hide from the pain of our own frailties; gird ourselves in armor, to stay safe.

I’m challenging myself, and you, to go deeper– and, sometimes, to do so with pen and notebook, or keyboard, daring to record what is within us, laying ourselves bare – and giving ourselves the chance to find peace, healing, connection, and strength in the sharing.

I’m looking forward to the opportunity to honor your vulnerability – and your strength in embracing and sharing it.

~*~

Shan Jeniah Burton

Sunday #ROW80 Check-In

I’m fresh out of pithy remarks.  Report in, troops!

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Midweek #ROW80 Check-In

The semester is drawing to a close here in my world, so I’m tying up one set of loose ends, getting ready for summer semester, and still juggling words.  How’s life in your universe?

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