Authorpreneur: Motivation for March

This month's reading from great authorpreneur blogs has been filled with motivation and challenges, both for writing and for working your writing business.

Writing Inspiration

January — pitiful!

The 5-minute video How to Write More and Create A Daily Writing Habit, by Joanna Penn, kicked my butt! I was already jotting my word count on a calendar, but life is busy. Besides, I'm grappling with difficult scenes and plot holes, so — why not just write a blog post instead? Right? Most days were blank, and I just couldn't seem to get going.

February — tradupled!

After watching Joanna's video in mid-February, I set a new goal for 300 words a day, Monday through Saturday, to earn a purple checkmark. If I didn't make that word count, the punishment was a black X! That may not sound like many words, but this novel has already been through two NaNoWriMos and word count is not my primary goal. I'm filling in gaping plot holes and smoothing transitions: fixing problems with my draft, but it's still more writing than revising.

Just like earning a "green day" during NaNoWriMo, those purple checks are a huge motivator for me! To earn them, I wrote at bedtime when I was tired, or in the morning when I had no idea where the story was going next. (The dreaded black X's represent one migraine and two overtime, multi-job days.)

Hopefully I'll keep this momentum going through March. Thanks, Joanna!

Online Marketing

Call me crazy, but I signed up for the Great Online Marketing Scavenger Hunt. Danny Iny and his team have put the fun into online marketing with this challenging contest. It started Feb. 22, but you still have four more weeks if you want to give it a try. (If you sign up, please mention my username, Bibliotraveler — I'll get extra points). The challenges vary from simple tweets and comments to tasks that stretch your (new) skills, like creating an introduction video.

If you want to make your blog more user-friendly and professional, Tom Ewer offers insights on improving old content with A Simple Checklist for Editing and Optimizing Old Blog Posts. For example, search traffic brings lots of visitors to my blog for last year's post about men's colonial clothing. I went back and added a link to the post about women's colonial clothing. Now history buffs will have an easier time finding related content.  

For more improvements to your website, visit Lorelle VanFossen's list of Blog Exercises.

CJ Lyons's eye-opening post explains how you're not just an indy author, you run a Global Publishing Empire.

Better grab a cup of tea or coffee and a notepad for Mauro D'Andrea's massive post, 101 Experts Share Their Tips for Online Success.

Here's wishing you a productive and creative March. I'm off to hunt scavengers and write 300 words!

#amwriting Blog Party!

Happy 2nd Birthday, #amwriting! #Amwriting is a hashtag — a code word writers use to connect with each other on Twitter. Another way to put it: #amwriting is a conversation, that anybody can pop in and join, and that conversation's been going on for two years! We're having a blog party to celebrate!

Around 2008, I said, "Twitter's too A.D.D. for me." I wasn't interested at all in short, seemingly random fragments about what strangers had to eat for dinner. By 2009-2010, I was checking Twitter before my e-mail. Now, I pretty much check Facebook and Twitter everyday and avoid my e-mail as long as possible. Here's why I became a tweetaholic:

1. Twitter is completely customizable. Through searching on certain words and hashtags, I've connected with genealogists and writers around the world. One of the first people that ever followed my blog was an American ex-pat writer in Turkey. Johanna Harness, creator of the #amwriting hashtag, is a shepherdess in the midwest. How else would I have ever found these interesting people?

2. It's community. After finding people that have something in common (like writing the great American novel), we cheer each other on. Yes, there are a few self-styled gurus and "coaches" that have found us and use the hashtag to plug their websites while ignoring the conversation that's going on (often the people with links in their posts), I just ignore them back. You can tell the people who are really there to write. They're saying that the kids are still in bed and they can steal a few pages. Or they suddenly want to kill off their main character. Or what's another word for chaos? We cheer each other on and sometimes answer. "You can do it!"..."I know the feelin'"..."Mayhem!"

3. No guilt. While my e-mail inbox gets so full it blinks red lights at me, — full of read me-reply to me-put this on your calendar-buy me — I can come back to Twitter (or Facebook) after several days of busyness and still have one page to read. Or more, but only if I want to. It's like running into your friends after not seeing them all week. You just catch up, and nobody feels bad that you've been apart for a few days because that's life.

Thanks, #amwriting tweeps, for the funnies, the tips, the kindred angst, and most of all the writing encouragement. Even when I've been gone for a while. (And happy #amwritingversary, Johanna!)

For those of you joining the party by blog tour, step on over to Robyn's TheOneAMPen. If there's no path to the next blog, knock on Nikki's door for the final blog party post.

2010 Goals - How are we doing?

Last year started off so hectic I didn't even write down goals until June. This year, I started thinking about them in January, but tweaked them for a month. And the tweaking continues.

Things I want to do in 2010 (priorities are in blue)
1. Finish novel: write missing scenes, fix timeline and facts, add descriptions and background, and revise and edit.
Thanks to my nanowrimo friends, I work on this at least once a week. I've added lots of the missing scenes, but I feel overwhelmed at all the other things I still need to do before I even let anybody read it.

2. Declutter. Hah! Ahem, well...
3. Get published in a magazine.
I sent out my first query in years, but forgot to follow-up when I didn't get a reply.

4. Make a Storybook for a relative who has a big birthday this fall. That includes scanning Daddy's negatives from the 50s and getting names and information.
I haven't even started on this! But I still have months to go.

5. Make a Storybook of my trip to Ireland.
I labeled the photos and made some notes. The good thing is, I have a June deadline to get one of these books done because I have a prepaid certificate. Deadlines are good for me.

6. Index the 18th-century church records from the meeting in Ireland.
I made good progress on this until the past month, about 160 pages done. This also helps with my novel, which is based on the people in the records.

7. Run in a 5K.
This got dropped for schedule conflicts, but now it's back on - in two weeks!

8. Go on a mission trip.
I got to do this in March. We went to Jean Lafitte, Louisiana to build a house for a family still in a FEMA trailer from Hurricane Katrina.

9. Other items: Blog and network (I've done this, but it's very time consuming). Market and sell my first book (Got a review, but haven't done much). Scrapbook back to 2004 (haven't).

I love alliterative goals (inspired by FlyLady). I tried Monday minutes (indexing church records - this went well until last month)
Tuesday tweets (fell by wayside)
Tuesday taxes (very useful. The rest of year, this means business paperwork)
Wednesday walking (in full force)
Wednesday weed-out (decluttering - forgotten)
Friday finances, Freelance Friday and Saturday sales (business) mostly fell by the wayside.
An early "Nine-o'clock Novel" turned into the Morning Write, 1 to 3 days a week.
Sunday scrapbooking/scanning/see people (made progress on visiting older relatives)

Some of these went well, like Monday Minutes, until my work schedule changed, I went away on a trip and then I had meetings every night for three weeks. Hopefully I can get back to my own goals and routines now.

It's Sunday. I'd better start scanning. How are your goals coming along?

Shared information will outlive you

Sometimes I worry about how much to post online, especially since I plan to publish a book about one of my family lines. I shouldn't worry. The information I share will outlive me, while most of the things I keep a tight hold on will be lost when I'm gone.

One of my Twitter friends sent out a list of 25 popular genealogy blogs. Fortunately, I decided to check them all out before retweeting. Some were interesting to me, many were not, but the next to last one on the list got my attention. The author was in the U.K., where some of my ancestors lived. But he hadn't posted in months. I thought, why is this the most popular blog when he doesn't write that often? I skimmed the page and saw that he had been a prolific blogger - until December. The last post said he was dialing 999 and going to hospital.

What? I looked, in vain, for anything more recent. Was this another April Fool's joke? Finally, I went back to the 25 list and saw a note that said he had passed away, and the date was a few days after that last post. Oh, and the 25 list was from last year.

I feel so sad, for someone I've never met. It's haunting see Genealogue, Hugh Watkins' web page, and see that last post. But scroll down - there's five and a half years of genealogy searching and tips. Hugh's work is still out there, in cyberspace, to help anyone he can.

Hittin' the road

I enjoyed reading the genealogy blogs this week, and would like to visit even more of them. However, I realized that I didn't spend any time working on my own blog. I did write a few paragraphs for my historical novel. With about 77,000 words in the file, I'm at the stage where I need to write more missing scenes to add transitions, add description for people and places, research some of those missing scenes (genealogy) - and then cut, cut, cut.

This week I also helped a cousin work on an "emergency family history" for her vacation next week. We may work on it some more later - our family history of bird dog trainers and hunting in the Piedmont, N.C.

I reluctantly lay my genealogy aside for the coming week - but only for another trip! This time I'm traveling light, going with a group of volunteers to Louisiana, where people still don't have homes in Hurricane Katrina-affected areas.

Week 9 challenge - Tuesday

Southwest Arkie wrote a list of all her ancestors that she doesn't know where they are buried.
TNHG posted a page of an Annual Register, which gave interesting statistics on deaths and births in 1820, I think for England. I asked them, "What's an Annual Register?"
Footnote Maven - no post today. I'm amazed at how many of these people blog everyday, while I do well to write once a week.
I just realized that Tonia's posts are condensed, and you have to click on them to read the whole thing. She wrote about her great^3 grandmother, with a photo, that I almost missed because I didn't know how her blog worked!
At AnceStories, I looked again to make sure there's just one author - four posts since yesterday! Even if she schedules them, prolific is an understatement. And she has a teaching dayjob.

Week 9 challenge - Monday's blog reads

Southwest Arkie has one of those brick walls that makes you keep staring at her post, hoping you can think of some great piece of advice that will help her break through. Her Peter Sumner and John Maes remind me of my own brick walls, including Thomas Maness, who might have come from Arkansas like he said, or might have come from the next county with a few too many wives. And my Wall cousins, who disappeared for about 20 years between Illinois and Missouri.

TNHG wrote about elaborate 16th-17th century gloves. They are so good about posting beautiful photographs, and this time had extra embedded links to museum pictures. Where do they get all this?! Susan kindly replied to my comment from yesterday - Dolley lived in Philadelphia at the time of the story, which was Quaker country, so very likely wore the distinctive plain clothes.

FootnoteMaven wrote about her strange comment from yesterday, that one year on the internet was like six human years - and the fact that one of her readers noticed it. Funny, I had didn't consciously notice it, but I took it with such a big grain of salt that I simply said she was having her 3rd blogversary (she wrote 18). Funny how, when I see a "fact" that I don't believe, I just go right past it.

Tonia met her goal of writing 10 posts in February - Go Tonia! Today she celebrates her ancestors that were born in March (hmm, some software search to find them?). It's an interesting summary; we both have ancestors from Chester County, Penn. and Ireland. She adds lots of tags (keywords) to the end of her posts (I put GoogleSearch on my blog and don't worry about it. I'm afraid I would forget to use the exact same terms).

The AnceStories blog is huge. It takes page-downs to find out that Miriam writes it, not some of the people mentioned in the posts. For the first day of March, Miriam posted a calendar of all kinds of dates: from holidays to themes to carnivals (blog prompts). March 1st is data backup day. The next Scanfest is March 28th, 11 AM - 2 PM, Pacific Daylight Time. This time, there was a link to tell what Scanfest is about, plus some good scanning tips.

52 weeks to better genealogy - week 9

This week's challenge (from Geneabloggers and Amy Coffin at We Tree) is to read five genealogy blogs every day for a week, preferably some of them new or outside one's normal field of expertise. Just reading, just a week - sounds do-able, right? Here's my semi-random list.

- Southwest Arkie - one of the newest blogs on Geneabloggers
- Two Nerdy History Girls - love this one, want to read more often
- footnoteMaven - one of my Twitter "friends"
- Tonia's Roots - also a Twitter "friend," and has a different style of blogging
- AnceStories - just found, through Twitter search.

Sunday's reads: Southwest Arkie posted her 5 geneablogs to read, mostly about graveyards. She has a great list of blogs and websites on the side of her page, including Genea-Musings. Good stuff, but I could go on overload pretty quickly! My "Maness" in Arkansas is not one of her listed surnames.

TNHG got a preview of costumes for a show about Dolley Madison (she was mentioned in Sunday School class this morning; did you know she was a Quaker?). Hard to imagine her in that oversized bonnet in her early years. Went back and commented about the displays of her clothes here at the Greensboro Museum.

Footnote Maven is celebrating her 3rd blogversary today. She was also selected one of the top 40 geneablogs in Family Tree magazine!

Tonia won a platinum medal in Geneabloggers' Winter Games, for citing her sources. She bullet-posted her accomplishments through the week.

Ancestories was kinda scary - something called ScanFest was going on. At least, I thought it was going on, live, but it was a replay of a chat that happened a couple of hours before. I think people are chatting as they scan photos, the last Sunday of the month, but there was no explanation, just the chat box.

Geneabloggers - Let the Games begin!

This blog has grown, in a wonderful way, into a travel-genealogy-books (aah, those words just make me happy) niche. I thought it might change the tone too much if I tried to promote my Creative Memories business here, even though pictures and history naturally overlap into preservation and scrapbooking. So, Travels with Books has been sorely neglected the last few weeks because I divided myself into a new blog for my business (Save the Pictures), a Facebook page and a new Twitter identity. All that has been a bit overwhelming - feels like I have multiple social personality disorder!

To give this blog a boost, on a lovely snowy Saturday, I've signed up for Geneabloggers' Winter Olympics. They have six competition categories: 1. Cite your sources, 2. Back up your data, 3. Organize your research, 4. Expand your knowledge, 5. Write write write! and 6. Genealogical Acts of Kindness.

Already overwhelmed, I don't think I'll tackle 1, 2, 3, and maybe not 4 at this time. I cite sources as I enter facts into Reunion, and I haven't added much to that file since I backed it up last year. And although I'd love to put more photos into albums, I have to order some things so this is not the week to do it. I'm going to try events 5 and 6, which include things I hope to do anyway, like blogging and indexing.

Opening ceremonies are Monday. You still have time to sign up! You can start with your own flag, like this one: it represents the English family, who came from England and Ireland to the U.S.