Posts for category ‘writing’

That’s right! Yay Shelly, it’s Share a Square 2010! I won’t (although I could) tell you at great length about The Share a Square project. I could tell you about it’s awesome inception by a crazy Texas RedHead with a heart as big as her home state, about the amazing bloggers and other folks from around the world who made squares and sent them to Shelly to be sewn together into colorful expressions of love and support for the kids with cancer, (about the huge mess in Shelly’s spare bedroom that overflowed into the rest of her house… hahaha); but I won’t. I’ll let you go check it out at This Eclectic Life if you want to know more about the history if this great project.
Instead I’ll direct you to the FaceBook group page that Shelly has set up for this year, and the FAQ that she put together with her experience of 2 years doing this great thing.
What I’m here to do today, is give ya’ll some visual images and ideas for making your tags. (I’ll be crocheting like a madwoman come Fall/Winter. In the first place it’s too darn hot in the Mojave Desert to crochet in Summer; in the second- I admit… I’m a last minute kinda gal).
Having learned the lesson of crumpled and torn tags in previous years, and knowing that part of the thrill for the kids is being able to see and keep the tags from 150 different people from all around the world, Shelly has come up with a basic format for tags this year, and has graciously added to her workload by offering to laminate, punch and tie them all on to our squares when we send them. She’d like them to be standard business card size, and plans to include a binder ring for the kids to use to keep their tags.
Idea Number 1:
What I did last year was to use my business card. This may seem impersonal to some of you and I suppose it depends on your business, but I kinda thought the kids might get a kick out of having a square crocheted by a tattoo artist (and my cards are pretty colorful, which I like.) If you choose this option, be sure to write a personal note on the back! It will mean so much to the kids.
Idea Number 2:
Print your own and cut them with a paper cutter. Easy to do. Most WP programs these days have business card templates that make it super easy. Just pick something colorful or fun and type your message and print n cut! Perfect! My printer is having fits right now, and jams the paper every time, so I think I’ll be mixing my tags up between Idea 1 above, and
Idea Number 3:
Buy a pack of blank (or already decorated) micro perf business cards and add your own personal flair. I’m using stickers and a hand written message, (but if I can dig out my stamping and embossing stuff I may do some of that, too. If I do, I’ll post pics.) Have fun and do good. What’s better than that?!
Peace!

Some years ago when I was a vendor on the small Renaissance Faire circuit here in our tri-state area of California, Nevada and Arizona, we were doing an event in Corona, California called the Koronenburg Festival, held at the Crossroads Riverview Park. We had been doing events with Crossroads for awhile, but this particular event was only in its second year at the new permanent site in Corona. A couple of good friends of mine, Cyndi and Darren, vendors of wonderful magickal and mystical items as well as some East Indian resale goods, had a booth next to my stained and leaded glass set-up, where I sold and demonstrated the creation of a wide range of stained glass items.
At set-up, the day before the festival opened we were given our vendor packages which included a hand drawn map of the festival grounds. It was a simple, if nicely done black and white drawing and as the promoter handed them to Cyn and I he said sheepishly, “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t remember the name of your shop when I was drawing this up and had to rush it to the printers” as he pointed at a corner of the drawing. I looked and saw “A Hartjoy Design”, the name of my shop, clearly printed in the space that designated my spot, but beyond my place, where Cyn’s should have been, there was only an empty square with the words “more fun” and an arrow pointing in the direction of her booth.
Cyndi, a good natured gal just smiled and told Tom not to worry about it. We laughed a lot about it throughout the event. It was pretty funny, because Cyn actually was more fun. That girl could have fun doing anything and we all had fun with her.
Well, until it came time to pack up and go home for the weekend. I tend to lose some of my good humor after a weekend on my feet, working hard in 90 degree and up heat, without a shower. When the gates closed I was ready to get the hell outta there and home to a nice hot bath and my extra firm king size bed. But before that can happen all of the glass that didn’t sell had to be carefully packed and loaded onto the truck along with the myriad ice chests and dirty clothes and bedding and myriad stuffs that I just couldn’t live without for the weekend.
So come time to pack up, yer Thornie got pretty serious… focused, I like to think.
Cyn, on the other hand, managed to keep being silly and playful and I had to face it, more fun.
I’ve been a bit less than exciting, silly, fun or anything else for some time now. Winter doldrums, life crap, whatever. But I have this neighbor… you have simply got to check out what Shelly has been doing over at This Eclectic Life. Her Bare Nekkid Ladies are definitely “more fun“!

Well, I kinda fell down on the job for NaBloPoMo, but I’m rockin’ n rollin’ with my annual noveling efforts for NaNoWriMo during the month of November.

After an agonizing month of worrying about the fact that I wasn’t excited about it this year, and that despite NaNo founding father’s advice to “not worry if you don’t have an idea; just write”, I was devastated by the wasteland of my personal creative landscape. It appeared barren beyond any desert and as far as the eye could see. The closer November first came, the more worried I got. My thoughts continually returned to last year’s NaNo Novel… 51K words of a projected 150K word novel that I hadn’t touched all year. Every character, scenario, story line or idea I had seemed to circle back and be a part of the unfinished ’08 Novel.

I came to a decision. Despite the suggestion to start and complete a 50K novel with a complete story arc for NaNoWriMo, this is my time to write! This month and the daily word count goals and the permission I give myself to be self absorbed and totally immersed in writing seem to be the only way for me to maintain the self discipline to actually pound out a story.
Imagine my surprise when I dropped in to the NaNoWriMo site forums to discover that I was in good company with other rule breakers. I am an official Nano Rebel, (as attetested to by the badge). Hee hee!

When I wrote last year I was only about 20k in when I realized that it would be impossible to complete my story arc in 50k words at the rate I was going. My story was going to need a lot more words than that. So I began summarizing the story here and there, and writing scenes as they sort of needed to be written. I’d find myself slipping from summary to dialogue and prose and then back to summary. Writing this way got me to 51K, a NaNoWriMo “winner” by Nov. 31. I had a complete story arc, albeit one with a lot of HUGE holes!
This year it’s all about filling in those holes to the tune of the monthly goal of 50 thousand words, which breaks down to 1667 words per day. I started writing a bit late, between my cleavered typing finger (a story for another day- and no; you don’t want pictures!!) and the necessity of going through the manuscript and identifying the holes. I went to sleep this morning sometime after 3 AM having knocked out 3,048 brand new words, which is about 5k short of being on schedule, but I’m back to it today and tonight, and hoping to catch up in the next couple of days.

If any of you lovely bloggy peeps write novels or screenplays, you absolutely must get Scrivener, by Literature and Latte. It is the most phenominal writing program I have ever used, and it’s making it soooo simple for me to keep a word count of this year’s writing separate from the entire manuscript form last year. It has super cool meta data, you can make notes and links and stick index cards on a corkboard on a spilt screen, color coded labels and, and, and… it just rawks! Check it out!!

Okay. I gotta go. I’ve just spent over 500 words, and I don’t know if there exists a finite amount of them in me each day or not. Lawl! Wooo hooo!

Peace, out!

* Peggy, please email me again. I lost your addy in comp switching and many of my passwords aren’t set yet, either so I can’t comment at Utah Savage