Hello from Marlene, host of The Write Spot Blog, I originally read the post below by Julie Valerie on Anne R. Allen’s Blog with Ruth Harris. Today’s guest blog post is longer than my usual posts. Take it in small bites. There is a lot of content here. All good stuff. I learned so much I didn’t know about things such as bookstagrammers and influencers (the book kind). Guest Blogger Julie Valerie: From Book Blog to Book Deal Julie asks: Does a book blog still land a book deal? Of course they do. Great writing and great content will always find an audience, and where there’s an audience, especially a sizable one, there’s typically a book deal waiting to happen. Think Julie Powell, Candice Bushnell, Jen Lancaster, and Jenny Lawson. Not to mention, entire empires (with books launched along the way), have been built on the humble foundations of blog…
Month: October 2019
Weather. Prompt #452
Strangers do it. Neighbors do it. Friends do it. We all do it. Talk about the weather. Now, write about it. Write about how weather affects you. What is your favorite type of weather? Does weather play a small or large role in your life? How? Why? Write about weather. Me? I like rain, as long as I don’t have to be out in it. Photo: View from my front porch on a lovely rainy day.
The Secret Spice Café Trilogy
Patricia V. Davis, author of spellbinding and captivating stories and creator of complex characters, weaves stories with unique twists aboard an unusual location in The Secret Spice Café Trilogy. Book One of The Secret Spice Café Trilogy: Cooking for Ghosts A Vegas cocktail waitress. An Indian herbalist. A British chemistry professor. An Italian-American widow. Four unique women with one thing in common: each is haunted by a tragedy from her past. Cynthia, Rohini, Jane, and Angela meet on a food blogging site and bond over recipes. They open The Secret Spice, an elegant café on the magnificent ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary, currently a floating hotel in Long Beach, California. Rich in history and tales of supernatural occurrences, the ship hides her own dark secrets. The women are surrounded by ghosts long before they step aboard, and once they do, nothing is quite what it seems. Not the people they meet, not their brooding chef’s mystic recipes,…
An experience in nature. . . Prompt #451
Today’s writing prompt is inspired by Poetic Medicine by John Fox, Infusing our poems with what nature teaches us: A forest fire is awesome and frightening but clears the forest floor for new growth. Metaphors and poetic images of earth can often express such feelings better than plain descriptive words, which seem to crack under the pressure of deep feeling. Feelings of grief might bring to mind images of winter’s coldness. Pablo Neruda crystalizes a wintry grief image: Yes: seed germs, and grief, and everything that throbs frightened in the crackling January light will ripen, will burn, as the fruit burned ripe. The insights we gain by observing nature, and the poems we make which include these insights, help us cope with our rage, grief and pain. The poetry of earth offers us a chance to experience something more about life than our self-definition and ordinary language usually permit. Like…
Manifest with Brad Yates
Today’s Guest Blogger is Brad Yates. In Manifestation 101 (& Taking Likely Action) Brad talks about a five-step process for manifesting what you really want. 1. Create It 2. Clear It 3. Live It 4. Let Go 5. Likely Action Step One: Create It Decide what you really want. Write it down. Start with something like: “I am so happy! I have . . .” Then list the qualities and features of what it is you want (as if you already have them). It’s important that you write it in the present. If you write “I want this,” then you are vibrating at a frequency of want – and the wanting of it is what you will continue to attract. You want to be vibrating in harmony with already having it. Write positive things, stating the positive aspect (what it has), rather than what it doesn’t have. If you write, “My…
Paint a word picture. Prompt #450
Paint a word picture about anything you want, perhaps something that happened over the weekend, or during this past week. Or, paint a word picture of what you look like to others. Or write about what you experienced (saw, heard, felt, sensed) during a walk. Write about your garden. Or a community garden. Or a public garden. Just Write!
Joy School
Elizabeth Berg creates characters so lovable you want them to solve their problems and live happily ever after. Joy School’s Katie is adorable. Her growing pains are palpable and yet she carries on with admirable determination. Berg’s story endings are satisfying, leaving the reader hopeful for a better future and an improved world. Excerpted from the end of Joy School: “Now a cold wind blows suddenly, pushes my hair across my face and I get to see everything in slats. I put my hands deep in my pockets, find Jimmy’s stone. I take it out and look at it. It’s a pretty thing . . . I put the stone against my face, right where he touched me. And then I fling it far out into the pond. . . I didn’t mean to throw it. I wish I hadn’t done that. I’m cold. I start for home. Winter will…