yourpassions.tk

My holiday gift to you is a break from reading blog posts. It’s time to chill and focus your energies on celebrating Christmas or whatever you observe. If you have time and want to write, just do it. You’ll find plenty of inspiration in old posts if you dig through the archives. My hope for the coming year is that we can collectively use our writing to resolve some inner demons of our own and provide inspiration for others to do the same. As I’ve said many times, along with countless others, I believe Story can change lives, one at a time, and eventually those changed lives will fill the bucket of Earth with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and all that goes with it. Look for new posts in January with some fun announcements and new ideas. Write now: capture your thoughts on what peace would look like. Start with the personal level. What does personal peace mean to you? Move out to your neighborhood, your community, the larger area, your state, your country, and fin...

I met Herchel Newman, aka Herm, about a dozen years ago in the original Lifestory Group on Yahoo when we were both new to the genre. I’m always blown away by his richly authentic stories. Whatever the topic, gentle humor or compelling drama, I’m mesmerized from the first word. We’ve stayed in touch after that YahooGroup went poof, meeting in person one time, and we’ve both continued to write. Not long ago he emailed me some thoughts about his muse, the source of inspiration for his writing, both memoir and make-believe. He  graciously agreed to share those thoughts here on this blog. Hopefully Mr. Muse will guide you to tap more deeply into your creative forces. There’s a guy who lives inside my head. I call him Mr. Muse. Besides God and myself, I’m pretty sure he knows me better than anyone else. He is the contemplative as well as the whimsical part of me. He comes and goes as he pleases. It doesn’t matter if I’m asleep or awake. Sometimes he gives me rhyme and reason for things I’m h...

No, I have not been on vacation to the Amazon recently, though I wish I had – except not right now during its rainy season. I’m referring here to the unexpected twists and turns on the path to the CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) arms of Amazon.com  as I completed my journey toward publication of Adventures of a Chilehead. I wrote about early details of this project in three posts in June: “ Chile or Chile? Check it Out ,” “ Lessons Learned ”, and “ Story Album to Memoir .” In July that early manuscript flowed through email to a team of beta readers. After incorporating their sage advice about need for further detail, spots that needed an edit and more, I thought final layout as all I needed to do before the book was ready for publication. That predictably became complicated, and pressures of preparing for classes I was teaching in September resulted in setting the project aside for more than two months. When I reopened the project in late October, I was stunned. I re...