For the last couple of days I’ve been playing around on Google’s new social networking site, Google+ and I have to say, I’m liking it a lot. Right now my favorite features are the instant photo upload from my Android phone and the way you organize everyone into circles. Some people might be in multiple circles, say, friends, family, writers, poets. Some might be in one all their own, like techies. You can choose to send your post out to everyone at once or just select circles. Another plus is that you can also post something and include someone via email.

Hangouts are a cool integrated video chat that worked great for me.

The UI is clean and intuitive. I think you have more privacy controls than on Facebook.

Right now it’s a small population but I think it will keep on growing, especially when Google formally opens the doors. For now, if you have a Google profile set up and you want to come play, send me your Google email address and I can open a door.

Oh, and they also have a vanity url. I grabbed mine right away.

http://gplus.to/susantaylorbrown

Yesterday was one of those days. One of those GREAT kind of days where everything seems to come together and I realize what a fabulous life I have and how it is populated with amazing and talented people.

What brought this about?

I’m so glad you asked.

I was asked to teach a class for SCBWI called Beyond Websites — Facebook, Blogs & Twitter — Oh MY! How to Juggle Your Promotion Efforts, Social Websites & Online Personalities and STILL HAVE TIME TO WRITE. Quite a mouthful, eh? :) 

Thanks to Jill Ann Cooke for making the lovely collage of our event. You can check out more of Jill’s artwork at her beautiful website.

I was lucky enough to co-teach it with Lynn E. Hazen. Lynn and I are related in a couple of publishing families – we are both published with Tricycle Press and we are both represented by the wonderful Jodi Reamer.

Thanks to Keely Parrack for taking the picture and thanks to Lynn for remembering "product placement" for us.

As my great, great auntie Louella used to say, anyway. . .

We had a record turn out of attendess. How cool is that? I kept watching people come in and wondering if we were going to have to set up another table. Although this was the first time Lynn and I had presented together, it felt easy and comfortable, as though we had been doing it for years. I hope to get the chance to present with her again.

It was a hard topic to condense into just a 2 hour session and we warned folks that they would be stuffed with info until their eyes glazed over. But Lynn and I split things into easy chunks so no one hit information overload. I did the tech talk for a bit and then Lynn would talk everyone down and give them a breather with some time management tips.The group had fabulous energy which I was able to feed off of as I spoke. They asked great questions. There is so much to learn about online social networking and using it for book promotion that I think we could have just answered questions for 2 hours. Thanks to Keely for arranging for us to be able to stay a little later and talk a little longer.

The responses to the session both via evals and emails I’ve been receiving have been overwhelmingly positive. What a thrill to know that we were able to help dispel the intimidation factor that often accompanies the idea of getting involved with social networking. It was nice to know that all the weeks of time Lynn and I put into preparing for this were worth it. Thank you, Lynn. It was great fun!

Because I only touched the tip of the iceberg in the presentation, I’m going to be offering a more in-depth class on using social media for book promotion. Since this is the first time I am offering this class I would really appreciate people helping me to spread the word. There’s also a downloadable flyer for the class.

Here are a few snippets of praise from the evaluations:

"Blogspicational!" Chad Cameron

"Great information on the various tech sites told in a user friendly fashion." Marya Ashworth

Blogging platforms. Here are some free ones for you to take a look at: Livejournal.com (which is where you are now. My blog is hosted by LiveJournal.) Blogger.com (that’s where Lynn Hazen has her blog. There’s also WordPress.com .beckylevine does something neat with her WordPress blog – she has made it her website and blog all in one. (Incidently, if you’re new to my blog and you see the little person icon next to Becky’s name, that means she’s on Livejournal too and you can "friend" her by clicking through to her Livejournal blog. Yes, she has two blogs.)
 

Okay, so there really is no time to blog but I do keep a list of things I might blog about and thought I would share that in lieu of an update. In no particular order here are 17 things I will probably blog about when I have the time to blog again.

1. Some books like WRITING IN FLOW: Keys to Enhanced Creativity, by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. and THE FOUR AGREEMENTS by don Miguel Ruiz and maybe even the ones I’m supposed to be writing.
2. Paint samples and the color blue and why I hate tile.
3. My office overhaul and my fear of change fighting with my need to be in control fighting with (I hope not) the decorator bringing designs for review on Wednesday.
4. My dog who used to like people a little more than she does now.
5. Going on the Native Garden tour 2 weeks ago and working on my garden design and why I can’t have the swing I want in the backyard.
6. My four day work week.
7. Sleep (ain’t it great?)
8. Fear of being a poet (Fred and Liz – I am claiming it already, really!)
9. Bosses and the lack of and its effect on my environment.
10. How to lose a phone.
11. Wikis (as in Wikipedia but in my case, pbwiki and wikispaces and more)
12. Biscuits.
13. Getting to meet Kerry Madden (okay, so I totally never blogged about meeting Libba Bray and Shannon Hale, nor did I share pictures but I am meeting Kerry tomorrow night and will hope to blog about it.)
14. Scrabulous (My name is Susan and I’m addicted to Scrabulous)
15. Letting go of worrying about your kids (ha – don’t expect this to be a how to)
16. Journals and notebooks and pens and other office supply obsessions
17. Rituals for writing

If you know author/illustrator Katie Davis by her books (Who Hops, Who Hoots, Kindergarten Rocks and more), you already know that she is a talented author and illustrator with a fabulous sense of humor.

If you are lucky enough to know Katie personally, you know that humor fills every corner of her life, she has an infectious laugh, a huge love for children’s books and a heart filled with people she loves and a joy for life in general.

And now she is blogging! Her blog home is on blogger but I set up a feed for her here on LJ so you can add her to your friends list.

brainburps

Just remember to click through the feed to post comments to her actual blog!

Katie’s newest book is The Curse of Addy McMahon. Check out her blog for info on the launch party at Bank Street Books!

If I were a more dedicated and more organized person I would blog every day. Of course if I were a more dedicated and more organized person I would probably write more which might mean I would publish more which could mean I would have even less time to blog. And if I were a REALLY dedicated and REALLY organized person I would eat better and exercise more and be an all-around healthier person.

Ha, like that’s going to happen!

I started this blog a year ago (yes, I had a blog anniversary last month and wasn’t even organized enough to celebrate it or acknowledge it) with the idea to record my writing life. I’ve never been good at keeping a paper journal and it appears I’m not doing a lot better with the online one. Thing is, I made a promise to myself to write about my writing life and try to keep my personal life (except as it relates to writing) out of it. Not that I don’t enjoy reading about other people’s adventures but the only part of my own life that is remotely interesting is my writing life. Sometimes there are weeks where it seems like I have no writing life. Working a fulltime job (as I know many writers do) means having to juggle my writing time. So I don’t blog and then I feel bad about not blogging and then I don’t blog some more and it becomes more of a vicious cycle. I know Dot and others have spoken a lot about guilt and blogging so there’s no need for me to go there. At one time I had this lofty vision of blogging a weekly essay about the writing life but for now I seem only able to cling to posting on poetry Friday.

Maybe I’ll try doing a roundup post of writing things. Like for the last two weeks it has been royalty time. That means I go home from work and check the mail, wondering if I will have a statement and then wondering when I open it if there will be a check in there. I still don’t have all the statements from all my books but I think it is a safe bet to say that with the money made from this royalty period I can either put gas in my car or take my husband out to a nice dinner, sans alcohol. Sigh. I knew there was no real money in the writing business but I really hate being reminded of it so forcefully every six months. Since it is too early to get a statement on Hugging the Rock I will allow myself to pretend that the next royalty period will be quite different.

I have been trying to work on a new project but there haven’t been enough blocks of time to do much writing. Most of it falls under the category of brainstorming, which is an important part of writing but still, I want to see words going down on the page. I have a couple of sentences, a good opening, but that’s it. I’m working up a talk for a school visit on Thursday and hoping that maybe I will finally hit upon a talk I can reuse so that each time I do this it isn’t brand new and a ton of work.

I am still looking for a new computer as the HP nc9430 I bought is on its way  back. Very frustrating to have the money for the computer and not be able to find one to buy. And I am preparing to move, which means packing over 5,000 books and the rest of our very cluttered household. It’s my hope that in the new place I will be able feel at home in the office. We’ve been in the current house for 2.5 years and I don’t think I wrote more than 10 pages in my office. It just never felt right. I’ve done most of my writing on the couch.

I’ll end with a question – what do you need to make your office feel “just right” as in right enough to write in?

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on the art of blogging. Okay, so he calls it how to suck up to a blogger and it seems to have pushed the buttons on a lot of people who left comments there.

I think it’s all about doing something nice for someone else BEFORE you need them to do something nice for you. Paying it forward. The Golden Rule.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever read was from Zig Zigglar who said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

 I’ve decided that a blog, for me, is a rough draft sort of thing. A place where I can spill my thoughts, try to tie them into some sort of sense, and then leave them there to simmer into something I can work with down the road. Sure, I should be able to do this in a notebook, and sometimes I do, but this blog has the focus of trying to help me take steps to live a literary life as well as define what a literary life means, for me. I’m also hoping it will help me find a focus, a voice, a definition of my writer-self. So I imagine that there will be fits and starts and bumps in the road.

In an ideal world a literary life means (to me) being able to work at my writing full-time. Since I live in the Silicon Valley where housing is outrageously expensive, that makes it tough. I could ask my husband to live in bad part of town where the environment seriously affects my ability to create (and not in a good way) but we’ve “been there, done that” and boy, that SO did not work. Which means I need to keep the DDJ where I work in the engineering department for a tech company. You might have guessed that has nothing to do with writing. And it is frustrating as heck. Go ahead, tell me how John Grisham wrote while he was working as a lawyer and any number of other famous writers, more famous than I could ever hope to be, did the same thing and I say, “Good for them.” I DO write while I balance the day job but it is not my ideal literary life and that is what I am trying to build. Maybe it is Pollyanaish of me to even imagine being able to do so while living here in the Silicon Valley (and moving out of the area is not an option) but Pollyana has worked for me over the years. She’s part of my “fake it til you make it” aresnal.

I love to write and I love the Internet and it seems to me that a writer ought to be able to combine her tech knowledge with her craft and make a living of sorts. That’s my plan. I am not so naive as to expect I stay home and write children’s books full-time and match my current salary. I know I need to work at many things and that’s okay. I just want them to be related to my career and not to building more widgets for a tech coblogginmpany. We have enough widgets in the world already, thank you very much. My thought is that it is time to get back to work on my adult book projects. One I could have back out in the mail in a week if I would just move it to the top of my list. (Note to self: finish BOR.) I love to speak but in order to make decent money at it with school visits I would need to do a lot of it which would mean taking the time off work (which cuts into my vacation) and right now that doesn’t seem like the best use of my time. I will be picky about the speaking gigs I take on right now merely because of the time investment required. I need to do more articles, maybe try some essays, branch out into other writing areas that appeal to me. But it is scary because it means starting over in a place where I am a beginner and have no connections. (sigh)

For now, the biggest project in front of me is still to finish the website redesign. Once that is launched I can promote it, and me, at the same time as well as my books and my writing workshops (taught online, of course) and anything else I can think of.

And that’s how it will happen. My literary life. Taking steps, little as they might be, toward my goal. One literary life step a day. That’s all I ask of myself-to do one thing every day that will help me live a literary life.

I feel like I need a pep talk. Time to go back and reread one of my favorite books Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See.

Write on, right now.

Previously posted on my original blog – Write on Right Now! 
I am moving all old post into this journal.

I can already see the temptation of blogging is going to be right up there with chocolate, day trips to Santa Cruz, and all the shows on the WB. Maybe if I wasn’t working a fulltime job AND trying to write new books AND trying to promote old books, well, maybe then it would make sense. But now, it makes no sense at all. Of course I’ve never let that stop me before so why start now?

I do need to budget my time though and hope I can get in the habit of writing first thing when I am at the DDJ (dreaded day job) at 6:30 in the morning and still trying to wake up. (I am SO not a morning person.) We’ll see. I’ve never kept a journal for any length of time so here’s hoping this will be different. Better somehow. My journals were probably pretty boring. Hmm, maybe that’s why I never kept up with them. Must keep the reader AND the writer interested in turning the pages. What I’m really hoping is that this will help me break down some of the walls I put up between myself and the words I head in my head so that I can pour out what is real.

I almost called this Blog ” 1 writer, 1 dog, and a lot of books ” just because I liked the sound of it but Write On Right Now is really what I am all about right now. I want to write. I need to write. And I am willing to play whatever mind games with myself in order to make it happen.

Okay, one goal of this is to help me record my steps on the path to lead a literary life. I try to do one thing every day that will help me in my career. It might only be a little thing, like sending an email about a publicity opportunity or following up on an interview for an article, but I have to do something related to my writing career every day or I start to feel like I am going nowhere because the DDJ sucks all the creativity out of me if I let it.

My current project isn’t actually writing but a complete website overhaul. New, updated design, interactive pages, writing exercises, brave writing workshops and a teaching guide database to help teachers use books in the classroom. I’m running behind schedule but I hope it will be up by the end of May. (Hence the race now to get the Blog up and running too.) I need to be done by then so I can get to work on the publicity for my new picture book, Oliver’s Must-Do List, coming out in the fall. (Note to self: find a suitable venue for the book launch.)

Literary Life Steps for Friday 5/6/05 1. Worked on the website. 2. Got this blog back up and running. 3. Worked on interview questions for article due on reluctant readers (Hi/Lo books). 4. Worked on interview questions for article on teaching guides. 4.

I’m done for. Bed calls but I know instead of falling asleep I’ll be thinking about what I should have said in this post or what I want to say in future posts.

Write on, right now.

Previously posted on my original blog – Write on Right Now!