You Are A Writer

In the past few months, I stumbled upon Jeff Goins and his fabulous website. I found myself reading all the archives and searching for everything he's ever written. When Jeff announced a free copy of his next eBook in exchange for a review, I jumped at the chance.

(To be clear, I am on a book publicist's mailing list, and I've NOT reviewed some pretty terrible free books. This book is amazing and I'm reviewing it because I believe in it.)

If you ARE a writer (and believe Jeff, you ARE a writer), and want people to pay you for your words, You are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) is for you.

He spells out, step by step, how to build a platform, how to create, how to establish a brand, and how to get people to notice. In fact, this eBook has already radically changed how I am going to work, write, and share in the future.

Everything is different. This book changed everything.

Defying Gravity

Bored? Everything always more of the same, day after day?
Guess what?
You can change that.

You can break the rules (yours, heavy, imagined.) You can do anything you want. Stop asking for permission. Just change something.

Source: 25.media.tumblr.com via Trish on Pinterest

Set up an automatic savings account to pay for a trip. Write during your lunch break. Run before work. Start talking to strangers and meet someone new. Take a different road home. Give something (everything?) away. Stand up and walk around. Ask someone smart out for coffee.

Change one thing. Then change one thing. Then change one thing.

Suddenly, everything is different and all because you made it happen. Good work.

Two Weeks

Two weeks of presentations.

Two weeks of papers.

Two weeks of crazy and late nights and not sleeping and eating too much sugar and drinking too many coffee drinks of varying levels of actual coffee.

The best part of becoming an academic is that you live by the calendar. The worst part of becoming an academic is that you die by the calendar.

Die by the calendar? Die? Dying?

My grandmother is dying. She fell and she had surgery and she's not eating and she's violent and she can't walk and she forgets.

Source: bit.ly via lynn on Pinterest

Dying is so hard. I always thought it was the easiest thing in the world... the letting go... but it may be the hardest.

The body doesn't want to let go. The body fights, fights to stay, refuses to give up, refuses to go. Good byes go on and on and on.

This isn't what I started to write. I started to write that in two weeks, my academic year would be done and that my writing life and my blogging life are going to look very different and I am very excited!

Instead, I'm telling you about my dying grandmother and how in two weeks everything is going to be different.

Funny how words work that way. The mind wants to say one thing and the heart, another. 

Gone Away

We learn to speak because of a fundamental lack.


We want a bottle so we cry for “baba.”

We ache to be held so we try to say “mama.”

We lack something and so we speak. We ask. Our whole (personal) language was built around asking for something we don’t have.

But then we grow up. We have words, but no longer know how to use them.

We have days when we feel the ache, the lack, and we’ve forgotten what we’re asking for.

We say please because that’s all we can say. We say it to God, or to the room, or to the air.

Please.


It’s empty and missing and I lack.

Heartbeats

Do one thing that scares you.

Today. Right now. That thing that seems too big, too far away, too overwhelming? Do it.

(Your big, scary thing doesn’t have to be anyone else’s. If you are terrified of people, talk to a stranger at lunch. For “people people,” this sounds absurdly easy. Ignore "their" list.)

Do YOUR big thing.

Turn off your phone for a day. Sit in silence. Lace up the trainers and run out the front door. Submit that piece you've been editing for too long. Call her. Write that letter.

Can I tell you what this, doing the one big scary thing, will do for you? 

It will be like holding a secret. But this secret will be the best kind.

This will not be a heavy secret. (I know those. Those break you.)

This secret feels light. It feels free. This is what BRAVERY feels like.

Your secret and very brave thing?

Everything will change.

This will be terrifying.

Fantastic.

I'm Not Afraid

I seriously love this kid.

I am terrified of heights... not so much the highness, but more of all the falling and landing. This is today's tiny reminder that everything is awesome and amazing after you close your eyes and jump.