Guest Blogger Alisha Wielfaert encourages us to work through the difficulties rather than be stuck in the mud. This excerpt is from her December 4, 2017 blog post, with her epiphany about her year of travel. The glowing orange moon rose over the cypress swamp as we drove home with tired limbs, hungry bellies and full hearts after a long day of kayaking. I had almost bowed out of this trip before it even started. Maia called me on my last trip to DC before I left for Paris and said, “We’re camping at Carolina beach and taking a few of my students to kayak the three sisters swamp to visit some of the oldest cypress trees in the world. Can you join us?” Maia, full of energy and excitement, just isn’t someone you tell “no” even though I knew saying yes meant two days away from home after only…
Author: mcullen
Marlene Cullen is enthusiastic about encouraging people to write, even those who think they can’t write. Her series of books, The Write Spot anthologies, features writing that entertains as well as inspires writing. Every story, vignette, and poem in The Write Spot books include writing prompts motivating readers to become writers.
Marlene hosts The Write Spot Blog, a treasure chest of inspirational gems for writers.
Fulfilling her passion for writing and sharing with others, Marlene has created unique writing environments such as Jumpstart Writing Workshops, where participants often experience transformational changes. Her workshops provide essential elements for successful writing.
Marlene is the founder of Writers Forum of Petaluma, a monthly literary event featuring presenters talking about the craft and business of writing.
Marlene's awarding winning short stories and essays have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and newspapers, including Tiny Lights, Building Bridges, More Bridges, Redwood Writers anthologies, and The Write Spot anthologies.
She is a member of the California Writer's Club.
NaNoWriMo-Is it for you?
Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? National Novel Writing Month. “NaNoWriMo believes in the transformational power of creativity. We provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” —NaNoWriMo website “A month of NaNoWriMo can lead to a lifetime of better writing.” Grant Faulkner, founder and creator of NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel during the thirty days of November. Each year on November 1, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with 50,000 words of a brand-new novel — but that’s not all that NaNoWriMo is! NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit organization that supports writing fluency and education. It’s a teaching tool, it’s a curriculum, and its programs run year-round. Whatever you…
True to Form
True to Form by Elizabeth Berg. Elizabeth Berg has a unique ability to create characters who could live down the block, or they could be characters who peopled my growing up years. Berg’s writing style draws in readers to nuances and complex relationships, revealed through subtle actions and detailed dialogue. Her characters face the consequences of their decisions in ways that are remarkable because they are so familiar and yet told with such grace and eloquence that the story seems fresh and heretofore untold. It is such a pleasure to read an Elizabeth Berg Book.
New Delta Review
New Delta Review is an online literary and arts journal produced by graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. Since 1984, NDR has published the work of emerging and established writers. Each issue includes original fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, reviews, interviews, and artwork. “In our 30 years of publication, authors of international renown — Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Robert Olen Butler, J. Robert Lennon and Alissa Nutting, to name a few — have shared our pages with tomorrow’s literary stars. Our contributors are regularly included in anthologies such as Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, and Best American Poetry. As a journal we are committed to publishing underrepresented voices, and aim to foster diversity in our issues. Although we ask for a small fee for our general submissions, this fee helps us sustain and extend this practice into our community by hosting and supporting readings and…
Changes and challenges. Prompt #453
What are disappointment and disasters all about? What is your first reaction when you hear or read disturbing news? Write about how you, or your fictional character, deal with changes and challenges.
Bookstagrammers & Influeners
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…
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…