Guilty Good Reading: A Mash-up of Awesome
Happy late Thanksgiving everyone! Getting my post up a bit later today since I just finished working a 12 1/2 hour day in retail. *phew* Guilty Pleasure Friday will be back again in two weeks, but for now, I leave you with my favorite reads from the prior week!
On Writing:
Alica McKenna Johnson guest blogged at Myndi Shafer’s with great writing advice about how to add more diversity to your writing. She’s honest and open about the tips she uses to write characters from different countries and ethnicities. Check out her guest post Don’t Bleach and Iron Your Work.
On Reading:
Jillian, a literary student who blogs at A Room of One’s Own, informed me of The 2012 To Be Read Pile Challenge! For all you bookworms with that evergrowing list of books to get to, take this challenge along with me and see yourself accomplish some great books you’ve never given yourself the time to get through. The only real catch is they need to be at least a year old in publication. I’ll be posting my list and hope you’ll share your own!
Thanksgiving is still in season and August McLaughlin shared the Books I’m Crazy Grateful For and sparked a fun conversation in her comments. Share your own books that shaped your life and made you grateful you’d read them!
Tim L. O’Brien posted an awesome blog about Why Books are Important. This is part three in his series and focuses on getting kids to read. He’s got smart advice and an awesome link to a site where you can check out the perfect titles for your kid of any age to read and have them glued to the page rather than to the screen.
On Women:
If you don’t regularly follow the Life List Club blog hop every other friday, you missed an inspiring post by fellow co-founder, Marcia Richards all about long distance swimmer Diana Nyad. She’s a courageous woman who will inspire us all to do our own Xtreme Dream challenges. So after you’ve read Marcia’s post, check out Diana’s own blog about her recovery process from her attempted swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys after being attacked by box jellyfish.
What’s in a Name…:
If you haven’t been following Nina Badzin’s baby naming debacles, you’ve been missing out. She recaps the long nine month journey and also reveals her newest addition’s long awaited, and well thought out, name in Finally, His Name.
Because Humor is Necessary During the Holidays:
I love Sara Grambusch’s blog. She’s got the spunky and self-deprecating humor that I adore in a person, and she also provides delicious healthy recipes. In this post, Household Things I Do Wrong, she recounts the number of times she’s unsuccessfully mastered the art of housework. Let’s all pray she and I never become roommates; angels will weep for society.
The Good Greatsby will have you stitches with his headlines: Starbucks Announces: Come for Joe not John. Must read for coffee drinkers and users of public bathrooms everywhere!
Jenny Hansen serves up More Cowbell when she asks Is Adulthood Stealing Some of Your “Grooviness?” Dance parties are a known reaction to Jenny’s posts; you’ve been warned.
Charles Gulotta relives his edible memoirs in his entertaining tale toward intelligence; he calls it Chew on This.
Enjoy your weekend! See you all again Monday!
The Writers’ Bandwagon, RSVP Regrets Only
It’s time for the ultimate mash-up, in the truest sense of the word. I’ve met so many wonderful writers and bloggers on my Happiness Project journey and I wanted to show my vast love and appreciation for each of you. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so in the following post, might I recommend how we can each collaborate together to create a superpower of literary merit. Let the mash-ups begin!
Example of a literary mash-up.
This whole blogging/writing quest I’m on began with the simple click to a Freshly Pressed blog by Kristen Lamb. Kristen blogs about social media, author platforms, writing tips, procrastination pixies, and twitter. Her best selling book, We Are Not Alone, is essentially her years of hard work and love of writing all combined to help make YOU a better writer, and maybe a PUBLISHED writer! I do not claim to have the writing chops that Kristen does, so my mash-up suggestion to her is that she re-publish her book and call it We Are Not Alone: Kristen’s Watching; she could add in hundreds, probably thousands of quotes and comments by her readers on how they’re progressing in their writing and editing endeavors only to feel her experienced eyes drawing flies on their pages and pulling that lever on their office chair to make them bump way down and have to start over. Sounds like a great boot camp right? And then when you complete her book and your own writing piece, she will appear before you in a sparkly pink dress and tell you that you’ve earned the right to now call your blog Fairy Rainbow Glitter Dreams if you really want to.
Margaret Reyes Dempsey is another published author I know. Her book, The Benefector, is already quite a suspenseful read, but I know she too has toyed with the idea of a re-write/re-publish version in which The Benefactor is actually a champion wrestler. Since I’m convinced that Madge (my nickname for her) and I are roommates in a parallel world, I too needed a wrestling name. I decided on Pain Austen (instead of “Jane” Austen, get it?) I would like to go on the record as saying The Benefactor vs. Pain Austen would be a gripping read. Chapter after chapter of roommate wrestlers arguing over the proper way to brew tea, the exact amount of days one may go before changing into clean pajamas, and how much meat (or meat product in theory) is too much for a toddler going on twenty-something?
Writing from Portland, Oregon, my friend Mark details life as a freelance writer. Always keeping me up to date on Portland quirks and never failing to bring a laugh, I think we have a lot in common. My suggestion for a mash-up would be Tales from the Pacific Midwest: From Farmland to Freelance. It’s the story of two struggling writers who have to overcome regional obstacles like cheese factories at every off road stop and hippy bicyclists demanding strangers to recycle. Upon completion of the book, you get a mail in rebate for one Voodoo Donut and one glass of milk from a happy Wisconsin cow!
Shhh! Be quiet, we’re about to intrude on my pal, Hack, from over at The Hack Novelist. He’s editing. He needs to focus. My simple mash-up would be The Happiness Hack Novel Project where two writers ignore everyone and drink their usual coffees (Eh-hem, Hack will have a regular black coffee with dash of cinnamon/world peace in it, and I’d like a green tea latte). Page after page of fantastic, caffeinated ideas will emit themselves in this book, which may never get finished, but when we die, we’ll have a whole folder of material you can read at our funerals, and subsequent memorials, scholarship fund banquets, and inaugural addresses because we’re kind of a big deal, duh!
My final mash-up for today would be to work with Charles from Mostly Bright Ideas. I’m incessantly envious over his ability to tell stories. I would want a job as his assistant or a mini byline in one of his books: Jess Witkins, Extraordinary Reader. We could potentially co-author a book called Double Stuff Oreos for the Author’s Soul, in which we each chronicle the sometimes absurd, sometimes genuine moments of our family histories. He could write about the time he begged to help his dad hose off the driveway and ended up spraying water all over his father, and I could write about the time my dad left me for dead in a snowbank. Happy times, you know? Good ol’ published nostalgia!
So that concludes this week’s Writer Wannabe Mash-up! Send all query letters to Jess Witkins, 1111 Daydreamer Drive, Wishful Thinking, WI. I’ll have to limit my projects to five a week, but sit tight, there’s more to come!
Who are the authors/bloggers you are inspired by? I’m sure I’ve missed many and I always love a new read! Happy writing!
Jess Witkins' Happiness Project 