The PBS Blog

To Schedule or Not to Schedule Posts

OK, I just did something really awkward. The post that just came through was supposed to be for tomorrow (Friday). But it appears that WordPress timing is on accord with original time. That is, a new day begins when the sun sets. This is historical fact. In the beginning, people did not always have clocks and time zones. They did however have the sun, the moon, and the stars. But I am noticing a trend with WordPress that mimics this same thing in my Stats section. Have anyone else noticed this? If you go into your dashboard when the sun goes down on any given day, you’ll already begin to see the views come in under the next days date in your stats. For instance: The views you are all getting now will fall under April 10th although according to our current measurement of time, April 10th is not here yet (I’m writing this at 8:40pm CST on Apr 9th). I decided to schedule tomorrows post (today for those of you reading in the future hee hee, funny)because I know I will not have the time to manually log on so I scheduled that last post for April 10th. I thought I was being smart by using military time just in case WordPress isn’t on my time zone and so scheduled it for 0:00 hours to reflect 12am. The jokes on me though because I’m seeing likes from a post that’s supposed to come through tomorrow!

lol…

Oh well, maybe I’m just exhibiting my amateur blogging skills and the rest of you are having a good laugh. At least those of you in other countries are enjoying the post on time huh? I would appreciate however some wisdom from some of you blogging veterans though. I plan to schedule posts a lot more in the future and this is just not going to work. Are there any adjustments I need to make in the settings? Right now every thing pretty much falls under my time zone (USA, Central Standard Time). Thanks in advance for anyone who can offer assistance.

Wk 2: Love Poems Challenge: A Love Like Music

Welcome back everyone for another week of Looooveee with Lisa Tetting’s Love Poem Challenge brought to you every Friday. This one is a re-post, an oldie but goodie. Enjoy.

A Love Like Music…

the instant birth of calm
and racing anxiety slowed,
and slick,
and subtle
like splashes of sunlight chipping at our faces
warm and comforting
like tapping footsteps
love me
like drumming fingers
like dancing
bobbing heads and bodies contorted
into the full figure of violin
and singing like half notes
like puzzles brought together and connecting to the sky
we love like wireless
find us anywhere
find us weak and fractured
our experiences tugging against the others existence like tendons and muscles
our faces pulled back like nostalgia
an orgasmic melody of words to virgin ears
potent, and suspect, and anxious
like balls of flesh torn into stuttering syllables, and time signatures
and melodies and pianos
we play poetry like pianos
like fingers are feathers
every nerve tickled by the slightest touch
a Katrina of waves pleasurable and strong
like euphoria
brushing against the shores of truth
love me into music
like base that split atoms into frequencies that scrape the sky
that loves like stringed instruments
this is a love that sounds
like music

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And that’s it for my contribution to Lisa’s Love Poems Challenge. Click the pic (or the link below) to see how you can join the fun!

New Challenge for National Poetry Month!

18 Things Mentally Strong People Do

The Stella Trilogy – An update

As many of you know, I have a few projects that I am putting out this year. One of them is The Stella Trilogy. It began years ago when I was helping a student with a creative writing assignment. I am not sure what it was exactly, but it had to do with descriptive writing. To make a very long story short, I wrote the first scene to Book #1 which was at the time not a book at all. It wasn’t until years later, after the paper had collected enough dust on my computer, that I realized how much I adored the layout of the scene and how I wanted to make it better. I wanted to expand it and to add to it. But what I enjoyed most about it was how short it was. I noticed then how writing the short had made me so content. It was basic, sweet, and engaging. I decided then that I would try my hand at writing short stories, and The Stella Trilogy was born.

As I prepare to send Book #2 in for editing, I would like to share some of it (unedited) with you. Because of the length of this series, it is broken down into Parts instead of Chapters. And I intend to release the first 4 Parts to Book #2 right here on The PBS blog. As I do so, I would love your feedback. 🙂

About Stella:

The Book:

Stella is a work of Historical fiction, and is distinctive in its focus on one woman’s road to self-discovery against the backdrop of the African American fight for justice, racial equality, and freedom. The 3-Part series focuses on the history of one family in their struggle for racial identity. Discover in this Trilogy how 3 individuals living in separate time periods strive to overcome the same struggle, carefully knit together by one blood. Book #1 is Available Now in Print and E-Book.

The Character:

Just barely two generations from slavery, Stella is the daughter of Judith May. Mother and daughter share the blood of a black woman and her white slave owner. Unable to cope with the teasing and bullying from both the white and black kids, Stella struggles with identity and a place to belong. She does not feel she can find her rightful place among the blacks and neither among the whites. That is except on Saturdays. Stella loves Saturdays! Where her and mother take occasional walks on the town and enjoy all of the privileges that come with a light skin tone. Eventually, after a discussion with her Aunt persuades her to pass, Stella decides to live her life as Sidney McNair, a white woman. But living Saturdays isn’t as easy as visiting them.

I’m giving these parts away for free because one of the things I enjoy about blogging is the direct feedback at our fingertips. So before I publish this second part, I would like to broaden my platform and make it easier to connect with my readers. I am scheduling the post now and the first Part to Book #2 will post next Thursday, April 16, 2015. I will then proceed with the following Parts over the next 3 weeks:

Beyond The Colored Line:

Part #1: 4/16/2015
Part #2: 4/23/2015
Part #3: 4/30/2015
Part #4: 5/7/2015

“That’s the story of my life: Was I white? Was I Negro? Race wars always concerned these two groups of people, and there ain’t seemed to be much place for a mulatto” – Stella May

Dear Young People, how NOT to use Twitter

Today in Indie Author News, I found some great Twitter Tips. There are tons of Social Media outlets to use for your Self-Publishing business (or any business) but that doesn’t mean all of them will prove effective for you. For some Facebook is more effective, for some Instagram and for others maybe its YouTube. Despite your chosen outlet, we are all seeking to enhance our social media skills to be of service to the online community. So for all of my twitter people out there, I have the perfect link filled with all of the twitter tips you need to get started, but first I have a tip of my own for Young Twitter Users venturing to build businesses:

Tip: Create a separate business account for your business

Throughout our life we will learn new lessons, take part in new things, and overall become gradually different people. The older we get the more wisdom we will acquire (some of us). Experience will show us far more than words ever could and pain will become a great teacher in our lives. Needless to say, today we may not be the same person we were yesterday. Sure at 18 you probably loved to party and hang out with the home girls (or guys). But the truth is that you won’t always be that person. After turning 25 and witnessing some things you may in fact decide that the party life is just not for you anymore. Perhaps now you’ll desire to start your own business. If so, here’s the thing with social media:

If you’re going to use the same Twitter account for your new business as you used when you were rambling about your drunk friend at the club, I’m not here to judge. It’s just that you should probably take down some of the tweets that are not associated with the business itself. You are using Twitter obviously so that you can make new connections and to network with professionals and non-professionals alike. As a result, you want to project a certain professional image. Of course you have to be yourself, but you also want to be a proper representation of the new direction in your life as well.

It’s not that you want to necessarily be the physical manifestation of the business itself, (then you’ll just be boring. People will feel like they’re talking to a computer), you want to allow people the opportunity to see who you are as a person so you should definitely be yourself (as specified in one of the tips). For example, one thing that I’ve come to learn is this: People often want to feel themselves a part of something. They want to see that what you have to offer is of substance, and that it will be of benefit to their lives in some way. They want to see that you are offering more than just the product itself, or that the product itself offers more than a good price.

For this reason, it’s very important to build persona when networking online (this includes blogging). However, that persona should be a reflection, not just of who you are personally, but also your business sense and skill set. You don’t want the owner of The Best Company Ever to see pictures of you doing something wild and then you lose that connection. This same thing can actually also apply to Facebook most especially. Social Media is not a small thing anymore, it is practically everything. Employers and professionals alike do check out social media pages. I know many young people just don’t want to give the impression of being phony or fake, but that’s beside the point. It’s not about not being who you are, its about being of service to the people, and to therefore navigate both the online and offline community accordingly. You wouldn’t walk into a job interview wearing pajamas, so you probably shouldn’t portray the same nonchalant behavior online either.

Whatever you do, just keep it professional, and keep it you.

Psst: Also, if you’re switching your personal account to a business account, please also change your Twitter name. SexyChick_5 just isn’t gonna work.

Check out more twitter tips here:
http://www.indieauthornews.com/2012/07/twitter-tips-for-authors.html

Writer’s Quote Wednesday – Derek Walcott

Today’s quote for Writer’s Quote Wednesday is from Poet and Playwright Derek Walcott:

“… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element….” – Derek Walcott

I think this is such a great motivational quote for writers. It has a way about it that can be explained in much more detail than what I can give but in short, it reminds me of the living attribute of words. Just the power of words and how breathing language is. I think that when we seek to create vision for the reader it’s much more than the language aspect in the literal form. It is not merely collaborating strings of words together for English sake, but it is feeling. Experiencing the moment and then putting that moment into words. Personally, I think some of my best writing has occurred during times where I did not purposely set out to write, but the language itself was so moving, and so feeling, that I simply had to.

About the Author (from Poets.org)

“The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), exhibiting a wide range of influences, including William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems.

The founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, Walcott has also written several plays produced throughout the United States, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He founded Boston Playwrights’ Theater at Boston University in 1981.

About his work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said, “For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.”

He currently divides his time between his home in St. Lucia and New York City.

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And that’s it for Writer’s Quote Wednesday!

Don’t forget to check out Colleen on Silver Threading to see how you can join the fun.

http://silverthreading.com/category/writers-quote-wednesday/

The Body Language of Writing

I love simplicity, what a lovely analogy.

*Don’t Forget: I’m doing free #Book #Reviews from now until whenever. If you would like me to review your book for free, send me an email at ahouseofpoetry@gmail.com for details.*

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