Sunday, March 31, 2013

Easter Memories

Bird's Nest Cake

Today is Easter Sunday and it got me thinking about past Easters in my family. My dad loved to play the Easter bunny, hiding baskets for my brother and me to find Easter morning. He always had a bowl of candy and colored eggs on the counter for him and my mom. He told us that the bunny didn't want the adults to feel left out. My husband and I carried on the holiday tradition with our kids as well. They helped us dye the eggs, but we hid the baskets after they went to bed Saturday night. One year we hid the colored eggs outside before going to Mass so that the kids could have an Easter egg hunt when we got back home. We could not figure out why the kids found so few eggs in the yard. Then we noticed a big crow who swooped down into the yard and grabbed one of the eggs that Andy had found. I guess the birds enjoyed an egg hunt of their own while we were at church. After that we filled plastic eggs with candy and left them out instead. That left the birds with nothing to crow about! What Easter memories do you have? Are you writing the stories down?

Easter 1994

Friday, March 15, 2013

People Are Sh!T

Poodi
I debated whether or not to write about my new endeavor on here as it contains a swear word. But we all know how imperative it is to get the maximum exposure on the Internet, and I need to tap into all of my existing contacts and relationships to get this off the ground. So, I will apologize in advance if I offend anyone, but today I launched my new website peopleareshit.com. The intent of the website is to give people a forum for writing their stories. While it may sound a little negative at first glance, I am thinking folks may find out that their parent, kid, teacher, boss, etc. isn't so bad after all when they read what someone else has to put up with. All submissions are anonymous and names of people, places and things will be removed if the author hasn't done this already. If things go as planned, I envision a book or series of books containing the stories being produced down the road. So, to all my writer friends out there, submit your stories!

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Getting Your Book Published

Kim Wolterman, Getting Your Book Published
On Saturday the St. Louis Publishers Association held a four hour workshop on what authors need to know about publishing. Held at the St. Louis Community College Meramec Campus, the course covered traditional versus self-publishing, getting your book into print and the marketplace, making your book look good from a design standpoint, eBooks and book marketing. We had 27 attendees of all ages and writing backgrounds, and they certainly had a lot of wonderful questions. It is always fun to hear what other people are writing about, and this group was no exception. I am hoping that we see some of them at future St. Louis Publishers Association meetings!

Friday, March 1, 2013

Family History Writing Challenge 2013 Wraps Up

Joe, Mom & Me
Yesterday was the last day of the Family History Writing Challenge. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my approach to the challenge this year was to write each day before getting out of bed. This was incredibly successful for me, as normal daily activities did not distract me from my writing. I knew that I had written quite a bit, but even I was surprised by the word total that I tallied at the end of yesterday. Nearly 36,000 words - 35,918 to be exact! I plan to keep up with this new system as I have plenty more to say on the subject of me.

But I did just learn that March is National Women's History Month, and for the fourth year The Accidental Genealogist is challenging everyone to write about the Fearless Females in their family trees. As this comes on the heels of discovering Elsie's travel journal from 1912, it seems like a challenge I just can't resist. So it is not a question of if I am going to do the challenge but rather how I want to do it. I can obviously write about Elsie in this blog or I can use Scrivener as I have been doing for my memoir. A third choice would be to set up a new blog just for her, but I am just not sure if I am up to keeping track of another one. I already have three blogs that I post in, and a fourth might just send me over the edge of blogsanity. It bears some thought.