Tag: blogging

Writing Tips For Self-Discipline, Motivation, Confidence

This is a continuation of the post I just posted. I split them up because I did not want to make the previous post too long (yea, I know about your attention spans). Below are some tips from Jennifer Blanchard to help Writer’s to stay disciplined, stay motivated, and hopefully, to also help to keep us confident in the areas we need it most:

Planning

When You Can’t Write, Think!

If all you can manage is semi-coherent babble on a page, it’s best to stop and think. Dream up suitable ideas and titles for projects you have to complete.

When you do some research and come up with key points, you may find that the topic invigorates you, thus providing you with additional motivation to write. Sometimes, the research is the most rewarding part of writing.

There is nothing like immersing yourself in a topic to spike productivity.

Embrace A New Environment

Good luck trying to be creative in a family environment! If you have children running around, a nagging spouse or the incessant noise of traffic to deal with, it won’t take long for motivation to dwindle.

If it’s at all possible, rent out a small office space where you can have complete control over your work environment. When you’re content, words flow far more easily on to a page.

Alternately, you could try writing at a public library or a coffee shop, where the environments are a little more controlled. Or if you have to write at home, invest in some noise-canceling headphones.

Set Your Own Deadlines

While many writers may curse a demanding client, the majority of freelancers are secretly delighted. Having someone give you a definitive deadline is an excellent way to keep you motivated.

You know that failure to finish the work on time loses you a client and brings you one step closer to that dreaded 9-5 job you left behind.

If you have relaxed clients, don’t allow yourself to slip into the comfort zone. Set yourself daily targets and meet them consistently. High quality work and productivity equals happy clients!

Rest When You Need To

This may seem counter-productive in a discussion about motivation, but working when you’re exhausted never ends well. You normally see a drop in quality and have to incur the wrath of your clients.

This in turn demotivates you as all you can think about is the hard work you put in which was not recognized.

When working on a computer, you need to take small breaks every couple of hours. Go outside and take in some fresh air for a minute or have a cup of tea/coffee and just relax. You’ll find that you return to work fresh and motivated.

Exercise Regularly

This almost seems to be a clichéd tip, but exercise releases feel-good endorphins and bumps up your energy level.

If you have a long day of work planned, break it up with some exercise. It doesn’t even have to be strenuous; a brisk 20-30 minute walk is just fine.

When your job involves sitting down all day, lack of exercise can cause severe health problems. Combine this with a propensity to feast on convenience foods all day long and you have potential issues.

Be Accountable

You need to confess your lack of productivity to a friend or partner. This isn’t as much about cleansing your soul as it is about getting a kick in the rear!

If you spent the day watching soap operas instead of earning money, you need to be held accountable. As there is no boss or co-workers to tattle on you, an accountability partner is the next best thing.

Hopefully, this person can chastise you when necessary and help you with motivation.

Join A Writing Class

Perhaps you lack the motivation because you don’t have belief in your own writing ability. One of the quickest ways to lose interest in something is the realization that you’re not good enough.

But you love writing don’t you?

If so, take a writing class and become an expert at something you love doing. There is a litany of scientific studies available which prove that people have the ability to learn anything in rapid time as long as they have a genuine interest in it.

Think of taking a class as an investment in yourself.

Get Off Your Backside!

A comfortable chair is necessary when you’re working long hours as a writer, but it can also be the very thing to stop you being productive. When you lack motivation to write, a nice soft seat is the last thing you need.

Invest in a standing desk and do some of the work standing up. Medical studies have shown that sitting down all day is very bad for your health and that standing burns far more calories.

Working from a standing desk is not easy, but it takes you out of that comfort zone and motivates you to work rather than waste time.

Set yourself targets: For example, you can’t sit down until you have completed five articles.

Also, be sure to stretch every day, which will help with the tightness in your lower back and hips from long periods of sitting.

Maintain A Laser-Like Focus

While multitasking seems to be a fantastic way to get things done, it isn’t a useful tool for writers seeking motivation. Avoiding the practice of writing by checking email and using social networking sites at the same time is only harming your work.

When you focus on a single task and follow through until it is completed, you will be infinitely more productive. When you try to work on several things at once, you’ll often find that ideas are lost along with motivation for the task.

While all of the above tips will not work for everyone because we are all unique, it’s virtually certain that at least a couple will prove useful to you. Keep motivation high and consistent top quality work and the accompanying plaudits will follow.

Beyond The Colored Line – Part 2 of Book 2

Book2****************************

Disclaimer: The following post is excerpted from a book written by Yecheilyah Ysrayl and is property of Yecheilyah Ysrayl. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stolen. Permission is only given to re-blog, social media sharing for promotional purposes and the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles and reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by Yecheilyah Ysrayl. (For permission write to: ahouseofpoetry@gmail.com)  Copyright © 2015, All Rights Reserved.
*************************************

Part 2
_________________________________________________
1928
5 Years Later
Age 12
*******************************
Daddy run off to who knows where on account of his life. Some racist whites had seen him and Mama together and threatened to lynch him if found. So he run off to nobody knows where. The community gossip is that his brothers know, but they won’t say. We weren’t alone though, Mama and me. Seems like Mama filled the hole where Papa should have been with our whole family. The house always stayed filled with guests: my people, and peoples of my people. My granddaddy was a colored man, and so owned this land. My name sake, his mama Stella, was a slave and was given this house by her owner. As the story goes, after Grandma died, I was born. Since Mama was the closest, she named me after her. We got stories going all the way back to her girlhood, and stories of Grandpa Solomon too. I heard the stories mostly on Sundays, since all the family come down. My aunts would gather around the table with my mom and they laugh and cry most of the night about they girlhood. I don’t have any uncles except from my daddy side, but they don’t come around much cause of my aunties. Uncle Roy say Mama acts different around her sisters and that they too uppity, especially Aunt Sara. She’s the youngest of my aunties and the most spoiled. She’s the one who convinced Mama to send me to a private school to escape all the worry, and boy were my uncles hot! They said we were breaking the law – that a Negro had no business in a white school. But Aunt Sara said I had all the right in the world since I was technically half white after all.

“But does the school know she colored?” one of my uncles would ask.

“That’s none of the school’s business now is it?” Aunt Sara would say and they’d just go back and forth until Mama break it up.

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. Speaking of race, not all talks were good talks. Not all round table discussions were filled with laughter and jolly drinking. I used to sit up until my eyes were red with fatigue to hear Mama and my uncles talk about all the killings that were taking place around the country, and especially in the south.

“That’s what I say,” said the voice of Uncle Keith. “Up there in Minnesota.”

“That close?” Mama gasped. I could just picture her now with her hand over her chest. Mama had a thing for the dramatics.

“Yea that close. What, woman you living under a rock? They just had one on over in DeKalb last month,” said Uncle Roy.

“It’s a crying out loud shame,” continued Keith. “Say they dragged the boys from the cell and a whole mob of ‘em lynched ‘em. Say it was bout least a thousand of ‘em.”

“My my,” said Aunt Rebecca.

“Well you know what I say, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” said Sara.

“Where did you come from?” said Deborah, annoyed.

“From betwee–,“ began Sara.

“Please, spare us,” said Mama.

“I didn’t ask the question,” said Aunt Sara, smacking her lips.

But there were times, of course, I witnessed for myself evidence of the events rocking the country. One day, Mama and I went to visit Cousin Mary in Texas, and drove the truck up to a general store. We walked in, and being only about five at the time, I picked up a post card hanging on one of the shelves. It was of a man hanging on a tree that supported an iron chain that lifted him above fire. The man didn’t seem to have much of a body left. His fingers were cut off, his ears and his body burned to a crisp. On the back of the postcard read:

“This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it.  Your son, Joe.”

I learned later the picture was of a 17-year old mentally ill boy named Johnny, who had agreed to having raped a white woman. And everybody at home still talked of the Cairo circus of 1909, the public lynching that took place here in Illinois. I asked Mama once if we could go to a circus like that, and she told me to never ask her of such things again. I couldn’t understand what had Mama so upset till I found out what kind of circus it was. It was events such as this that caused my aunts not to want much to do with the land or the house. They say it’s too close to slavery. So when Granddaddy died, Mama took on the burden of keeping it, and keeping it full too. I got kinfolk I see every weekend, and some I never met before. And some I don’t think are kinfolk at all; they just come for a hot meal and a bed. But that was alright with Mama. She didn’t care none about being taken advantage of. She just wanted to be around people she could feed and clothe. Her heart was just full of love like that. Sometimes they spend the night, but other times they just come and go. Sundays were the biggest days. Mama cook a feast of a dinner: fried chicken, yams, macaroni and cheese, fried brim and crappy, greens, pies, cakes. You name it, it was on our table. Everything except pork. Mama say Granddaddy was always talking about his Hebrew Heritage and teaching them about it too. Said he didn’t like being called Negro and African, and they weren’t allowed to call him that either, or themselves for that matter. Granddaddy say with his face all proud, “There are two things in the world I would never be: Christian and a Hog Head.”

Then he’ll light his pipe and go on rocking in his favorite chair, like the conversation was supposed to be over, even though folk mouths hung open. That’s another reason my uncles say we uppity:

“Everybody due for a lil fat back every now and again. Everybody Negro that is,” Uncle Roy would say, cutting his eyes over at Mama.

“Good thing we ain’t Negro then huh?” Deborah would shoot back.

Deborah, named after my great great great grandmother, fit right into her biblical name and was the most like Daddy, taking her Israelite Heritage seriously and practicing the laws of the Old and New Testament. Most of the family thought she was crazy. That didn’t stop her from speaking her mind though. But good eating and conversation was just the half of it. There was music, dancing, drinking, smoking, and gambling too. Cousin Walter would bring over some of his hooch and the grown-ups forget all about the children, which was just the way we liked it. I had a lot of cousins and friends, but no one was as close to me as Thomas. Tommy’s mom died off when he was just a baby, and his dad come across the road looking for direction one day when me and Mama come walking along. Come to find out they didn’t really need direction so much as a bed to sleep in. Mama let them stay with us for a while until Luther, Tommy’s dad, got off his feet. But that didn’t stop them from coming around. Luther and Mama became good friends and Tommy was over every weekend. My aunties used to think there was something going on between Mama and Luther till she shut up the gossip with news of Luther’s lady friend, who also became friends with Mama. So naturally Tommy and I were good friends, but we were also enemies and partners in crime. Tommy was dark as charcoal with big lips, nappy hair, and a wide nose. And I envied him for being so obviously Negro. It’s the same reason I liked him too.

“How you get so dark?”

“I don’t know,” said Tommy. “Just lucky I guess.”

“Lucky? What you got to be so proud for? Ain’t no girls liking no skin that dark.”

“Shut up white girl,” said Tommy.

“Shut up big head,” I say.

That’s usually when he punches me in the arm and I’d have to hunt the rest of him throughout the house.

We weren’t much of a church going family; party going is more like it. Except when Mama wanted to show off a new dress or hat, when somebody died or needed saving, and on Holidays and such. Folk would come from all over southern Illinois to hang out with “Cousin Judy”, as Mama was often called. Sunday’s sure were fun, my second favorite day of the week.

Saturdays was my favorite day of the week. It was the day for shopping and that only meant one thing: Chicago. First, Mama would wake me to the smell of biscuits or pancakes. This was to keep me full enough throughout the day so she didn’t have to worry none about food buying. Then, I was commanded to bathe down real good, paint my arms and legs with oil, untie my curls from the night previous, and we’d both put on our Sunday’s best and be two of the most beautiful women you’d ever seen. I was a young lady now and shopping was the best thing to a young lady next to boys (but you couldn’t like them in public). You could like shopping though. I loved going from store to store in search of the finest. Skipping along while Mama scanned the insides of magazines for stuff she only saw on TV. We would squeeze our way through crowds of people, just bumping into each other. They weren’t dressed as professional today. Instead, they wore their weekend wear, bought ice cream for their children and went inside movie theatres, and so did Mama and I. We could buy candy or jewelry, or perhaps a new hat or two with the money Mama made from the laundry. We drank from water fountains without label, and spent money without prejudice. Everything was so easy on Saturdays, life itself was better. We had us a good time on Saturdays because on Saturday, no one knew we were colored.

– Stella M.

**********************************************

What did you think about the second part? I hope it held your interest and you’re ready for chapter three. I am leaving you with a surprise part from  Book 1 below. For the prologue to Book #1, see last week’s post. If you like this story so far, would you do me the favor of sharing this post with your friends who might enjoy reading it also? Re-blog or share on your social networks. Thanks a lot! And I’ll see you next week for Part 3.

Click Here to Read a Surprise Part from Book #1

The Early Morning Wake-Up Call

The calculated drip of the early morning, we wake to the resurrection of the senses; of sound and smell and want. Time longs for me, stretches its arms beyond reach it begs like a full glass tipping over that I must catch before the skies break into singing. We early-morning-300240wake with fresh thoughts whistling new inspiration against the smell of dawn. The sun itself is like a tingling on my skin, a warm kiss against my face, a whisper against my thoughts. “It is a new day” utters the sound of the wind. It is too gentle to be anything but the language of angels. They watch me sleep and leave their feathers for me to clean up this morning. I am the walking embodiment of message. There is a song required from my voice, an action needed from my fingertips. The blessing of a new start and the chance to do again is every day. The dry mouth of the morning waits patiently for the screaming sound of tea pots; to be caught up in the arms of cinnamon spice or to feel the race of blood awakening to the likes of the coffee bean. Embrace you the early morning wake-up call. It waits.

Writer’s Quote Wednesday – The Closeness of Poetry

My contribution to this week’s episode of   Writer’s Quote Wednesday is from Babette Deutch:

Poetry

“Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.” Babette Deutsch

I had a different poetry quote in mind for today, but of the two I chose this one because it reminds me how powerful good poetry can be and the impact of its gift on the world. The result of words that live combined with a strong voice to deliver them has the capacity to change lives. I’m sure there’s so much more that can be said about this powerful quote, but that is all I have for you this afternoon.

About the Author:

Deutsch was a Poet, novelist, and editor. She was born and lived much of her life in New York City and began to publish poems in journals such as the New Republic while a student at Barnard College, where she earned a BA. Two years after her graduation, she published her first poetry collection, Banners. What is interesting about Babette is that she was part of what is called the Imagist Movement. Now I didn’t know what that was so I Googled it:

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It has been described as the most influential movement in English poetry. A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to isolate a single image to reveal its essence.

Aligned with the Imagist movement, Deutsch typically composed compact, lyrical pieces using crisp visual imagery. Many of her poems are responses to paintings or other pieces of visual art. Deutsch is the author of 10 collections of poetry, two of which are self-selected volumes of her collected work: Collected Poems 1919–1962 (1963) and The Collected Poems of Babette Deutsch (1969). She is was also the author of four novels and six children’s books. Babette died in November of 1982.

***********************************

And that’s it for Writer’s Quote Wednesday! Be sure to check out Silver Threading to see how you can join the fun!

writers-quote-wednesday

http://silverthreading.com/2015/04/15/writers-quote-wednesday-3/

Guest Feature – Top Five Reasons You Should Be Reading Poetry

by Nickole Brown

(Found this on BookPage, excellent piece on Poetry)

nickolebrown

5. Because it’s unnecessary.

Yes, unnecessary, absolutely so, but only in the way that beauty and truth are unnecessary. Like an elegant armful of cut tulips brought home dripping from the store among all your pragmatic sundries, like my grandmother’s false lashes glued on every morning to her come-sit-your-handsome-ass-down-here wink, like that baked-bread smell of a newborn’s crown.

Poetry may bear witness, but it is rarely the hardy mule carrying news or facts. No, its burden is unquantifiable, and similar to a penny tossed into a fountain, its worth is in the wishing. As William Carlos William wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Put another way, C.S. Lewis said, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

4. Because it’s a throat full of word music.

 
For the poet Patricia Smith, the word was anemone. She was nine years old when her fourth-grade teacher asked her to pronounce it. She writes that she “took a stab and caught it, and / and that one word was uncanny butter on my new tongue.” For the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, she loves it when plethora, indolence, damask, or lasciviousness work, in her words, “to stain my tongue, / thicken my saliva.” For me, some days, it’s the word fricative. Other days, it’s ardor, aubade, hydrangea; I’ve held each of those words like a private little bubble of air popping around inside my mouth. Donald Hall calls this “milktongue” and names it as the “deep and primitive pleasure of vowels in the mouth, of assonance and of holds on adjacent long vowels; of consonance, mmmm, and alliteration.”

3. Because it fosters community.

 
Robert Pinsky knew this when he started the Favorite Poem Project when he was U.S. Poet Laureate—people love to share poems that speak to them. And not just poets, either, but postal workers and dental technicians and racecar enthusiasts, too. Almost everyone carries a poem with them, even if only a scratch of a line or two deep in memory, and reading poetry can place you squarely in the chorus of people hungry to share those lines. Consider, for example, a casual late-night post I made on Facebook last February, making a request of the Internet for poems of joy and happiness. Within hours, over sixty comments magically arrived in my feed, recommending poem after poem. . . poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and William Loran Smith and Robert Hass, among many others. I read them all, and suddenly, I was much less alone; my dreary winter was flooded bright.

2. Because it welcomes what’s inexpressible.

 
I’ll confess: it was fiction I studied in graduate school. But when I finished my program, I found the cohesiveness required of a novel to be false and hardly conducive to the fragmented, often discontinuous memories I carried. When I wrote my first book, Sister, I needed the white space between poems to hold the silence between the remaining shards of my childhood. With Fanny Says, I needed a form that would allow me to mosaic together a portrait of my grandmother with only the miscellaneous bits of truth I had without having to fudge the connective tissue between them. You see, poetry doesn’t demand explanations. In fact, most poems avoid them, often reaching for questions over answers. Now, this doesn’t mean poetry is necessarily difficult to understand, no. It means that it simply makes room for things that are difficult to understand. John Keats called this negative capability, as poetry is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” To me, this acceptance of what cannot be explained is one of the best reasons to read poetry.

1. Because it calls for a life of awareness.

 
People often assume poetry exists in the realm of thought, lost in philosophical inquiry and romantic meanderings. And most early attempts at writing poetry fail because of this, or worse, because beginning writers travel those easy, hard-wired paths in the brain geared towards survival, which are inundated with years of advertisements, televised plots, and habitual speech. But poetry demands awareness, a raw, muscular devotion to paying attention. You have to live in your body, you have to listen hard to the quiet ticking of both your life and those around you. Like an anthropologist, you have to take down good notes. Poems require a writer to write from all the senses. As Eudora Welty said, “Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again.” To me, poetry can make even the most quotidian of things—a tomato on the counter, a housefly batting against the window, your bent reflection in a steel mixing bowl—something extraordinary. Poetry notices things. It scrubs your life free of clichés and easy answers, and the best poems make everyday life strange and new. Poetry requires you to be awake to write it, and reading effective poetry is a second kind of awakening.

To Schedule or Not to Schedule Posts

duratimezone_600px_animation

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.