yourpassions.tk

Writers are recyclers par excellence. Especially for memoir and lifestory writers, the substance of words pouring  onto the page consists of recycled memories, insights and understanding. Many of us also recycle various materials. When I’m floundering with a concept, I raid my paper recycling pile for an oversized envelope. Something about writing on garbage frees me to write garbage, and my mental clog usually flushes right through. I keep a pile of discarded documents near the printer and print drafts on the backs. I recycle or refill empty toner and ink cartridges. Recycling is The Right Thing to Do. It’s ecologically correct. But I learned to recycle decades before anyone heard of overpopulation, landfill crises, or global warming. My parents grew up during the Great Depression, and money was scarce for the first many years of my life as my father finished his education on the G.I. Bill and began his career. Both my parents were amazingly resourceful and could find new uses f...

I’m a  soft touch when a friend or relative asks for help getting a manuscript ready for uploading to a Print-On-Demand service like CreateSpace . More than half a dozen times these requests have ended me saying, “Just send me the file and I’ll fix it, but before you start another one, you have to promise to learn a few basic skills.” T hen I spend hours cleaning up formatting garbage before applying the simple tweaks that convert it to a lean, clean, beautiful piece of work. For those who grew up in the typewriter age, it’s natural to position text with spaces, both horizontally and vertically. It’s hard to unlearn some of those old habits, but if you want to take advantage of recent developments in affordable and accessible printing technology, you’ll do yourself and your pocketbook a favor by overwriting those mental typewriter files. The tips below will ultimately save you time and maybe money. If you pay someone to do your layout, they will charge for the time it takes to find...

This week I’m pleased to feature an invited guest post from Linda Austin, author of Cherry Blossoms in Twilight , and a colleague from the Life Writers Forum and Story Circle Network . My mother has a lot of interesting stories of growing up in Japan during and around WWII. I wanted to write her memoir. Although it started out as a family project, this memoir became something I thought would interest a lot of people, particularly educators as Japanese civilian stories from WWII are rare. This project took so long that I began noticing signs of Alzheimer’s in my mother, and then the newspapers began writing about the 65 th anniversary of the end of WWII and I knew I had to get busy. After three months of drop-everything-to-write, I was able to hand a softcover print memoir to my mother in early September 2005, in time for her 80 th birthday, barely in time to publicize it in conjunction with the anniversary of the end of WWII. Cherry Blossoms in Twilight was self-published throu...

For better or worse, holidays are gold mines of memory material deserving a place in your life story. They are uniquely personal, with no two years quite the same, and universal, with  family, community and national traditions. Some people look forward to them, others dread them. Still others ignore them. Easter is a good example. When I was young, it meant a new dress for church, dying and hiding eggs, and eating lots of candy. Since we didn’t live within easy reach of any relatives, we seldom spent it with extended family. It was primarily a Sunday morning event marked by sermons filled with impassioned reminders of suffering and transcendence. Best of all, even now, it signals the time when the world is waking from winter’s slumber. Weather is warming, spring flowers blooming, and trees becoming green. It’s a season of hope, joy and rebirth, whatever one’s spiritual tradition. Any of these aspects makes good story content. One of the first stories I wrote after discovering the...

For several years I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of Lulu.com for those wishing to self-publish a small number of volumes of their lifestory or memoir. I’ve posted several times about my experience publishing my preschool memoir, The Albuquerque Years on Lulu.  Over the past five years, many friends and students have followed my advice and lead, using Lulu to publish their projects. I’m now recommending Amazon-owned CreateSpace , the no-fee Print-On-Demand provider of choice. Let me explain why I’ve removed The Albuquerque Years from Lulu’s website. Without asking for my permission or notifying me, Lulu converted my document to ePub format and uploaded it to the Apple iStore and the Barnes & Noble digital catalog, setting the price at $2.99. That was not okay with me! If that isn’t illegal, it’s certainly unethical. I immediately removed it from those catalogs. I was never given the opportunity to review the conversion for formatting errors. The Albuquerque Years i...