Caroline A. Shearer's Blog, page 12

Getting To Know New Author: Meredith Ethington

Absolute Love Publishing welcomes Meredith Ethington to its publishing house.

Meredith is a mom of three and the writer and creator of the popular parenting blog, Perfection Pending. She is a born-and-raised Texan who loves real talk and laughter, mixed with a little bit of sarcasm. Meredith earned her degree in Psychology and then began writing in 2007 as a way to document her life as a new mom. She quickly realized she had a passion for writing.

She writes mostly to commiserate with other parents and to remind herself that she doesn’t want to be a perfect mother­­–she wants to be a real one. She is a staff writer for Scary Mommy and Momtastic, and her work appears regularly on Babble, The Huffington Post, and CafeMom. She also has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine, and Today.com calls her one of the funniest parents to follow on Facebook.

Most recently, Meredith was recognized as a #BlogHer17 Voices Of The Year honoree in the Impact category for Written Works (short writing) for her article “Why I Take The Pill.” Her authentic writing truly touches and resonates with readers everywhere. Congratulations, Meredith!

Meredith’s first book is scheduled to be released later this year. To learn more about Meredith or to follow her on social media, please visit our author page.

 

The post Getting To Know New Author: Meredith Ethington appeared first on Absolute Love Publishing.

Happiness With Migraines – Migraine and Headache Awareness Month

June is Migraine and Headache Awareness Month (#MHAM). Approximately 13% of the population experiences migraine disease, and the World Health Organization lists it as one of the top 10 disabling conditions in the world. Our editor, Sarah Hackley, is a chronic migraineur herself. Sarah realized through her own experiences with the disease that illness doesn’t have to strip our lives of joy. You can live a full and joy-filled life even with headaches and migraine attacks!

“No matter how simple or complicated our migraine treatments, they never provide a complete fix. This means that even the best doctors, treatments, and medications can only take us so far. To create happy and joyful lives with migraines, we need to do a lot of the heavy lifting ourselves, especially when it comes to day-to-day living,” says Hackley.

“Finding Happiness With Migraines: A Do-It-Yourself Guide” is an actionable and affordable resource that provides five steps to immediately begin changing your life. Practical tips, guided practices, positive affirmations, compassionate understanding, and science-based DIY therapy can be found in this short digital read. Start taking these five steps to change today. You will feel empowered and more in control of how your everyday life unfolds.

Click to purchase “Finding Happiness With Migraines: A Do-It-Yourself Guide” for just $2.99! Available for Kindle and Nook! Don’t have an e-reader, or migraine making it difficult to read online? Don’t worry! You can purchase a PDF version for home printing through the ALP store.SaveSave

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Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … By Steve Schatz

At Absolute Love Publishing, we believe in creating goodness in the world. This post is one of a series in which we’ve asked our authors to explain why they choose to align themselves with our publishing house and why they use their craft to create goodness…

Absolute Love Publishing Author Steve Schatz

Goodness is an ever-moving target and a very personal one. Each of us has a different and evolving definition of what goodness is. But whatever the definition, why I pursue it, promote it, try to dance with it, is easy. I have seen in my life that the things I feed with my attention and energy tend to grow and take up more room in my mind and in my life.

When I concentrate on my fears, they grow. When I concentrate on resentment, it grows. So, when I concentrate on joyous work, that is what grows. They say if you have two dogs and feed only one, the dog you feed is the one that grows.

When I write, I am completely consumed with figuring out the plot, how the characters talk with each other, and how to move the story along. However, what really feeds me, what keeps me going during the 15th rewrite, is reaching toward a better understanding of a way of life that exists not only in the Adima Chronicles, but—more and more—in my own life as well.

In that life, each one of us has come here to experience, learn, and share. In that life, each of us is responsible for creating sacred spaces, places where we focus on that which is just beyond our reach, that to which we aspire. With every action I take, I strive for awareness—of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. As I take each aware action, I take responsibility also for those actions. If things turn out the way I wanted—great. If not, I seek learning, not blame.

I am troubled when I look at Young Adult bookshelves in stores. So many books are post-apocalyptic killing sprees. Many are updates of old stories of youth railing against fate and then escaping or being rescued. The Adima books intentionally tell a story of responsible action. The characters are not passive. They must decide which teachers to listen to and what lessons to take. They must direct their own change. At the end of the story, each character is different.

I believe there is always hope. There are always lessons. And it is each person’s decision what dog to feed. I strive to communicate these beliefs in my books, using my words to reach toward the sacred and the good. I’m thankful to work with a publisher who also strives for the good and believes in taking creative action for change. Together, we spread light through action. It is my hope that we also show others how to do the same.

Additional posts in the Creating Goodness Series:

Why I Use My Craft To Crate Goodness … Janet McLaughlin

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … Jennifer Farnham

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … Sarah Hackley

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … Michelle Hastie

 

Your Most Powerful Weight Loss Tool By Michelle Hastie

Want to learn about your most powerful weight loss tool? It’s not what you think…

Most people think they need to eat less and move more to lose weight. When doing that doesn’t get them the results they want, they try to force it by eating even less and working out even more. As if they could will their bodies to change through good ol’ hard work and perseverance.

The problem is this strategy doesn’t work. And trying to make it work is extremely frustrating and defeating. Trust me, I’ve been there.

But then I learned about the most powerful weight loss tool, and my entire life changed. My emotional eating ended. My movement went back to being loving and intuitive, and my body transformed to its ideal number. Most importantly, those changes lasted. I have been living this way for almost 10 years now.

Our bodies aren’t simple, and we aren’t robots, but the age-old advice to eat less and move more acts as though both are true. It’s a broken strategy. Instead of doing the same old thing over and over again, why not try something new?

For real results, we need a tool that actually leads to less emotional eating, faster metabolism, and an overall healthier relationship with food, exercise, and weight. A tool that honors the complexity of our ever-changing bodies. That tool is called … meditation.

That’s right. Swap your dieting strategies for relaxation strategies, and watch your body transform.

Trade your calorie counting for deep breathing. Instead of starting your morning with caffeine and a run, try meditation and chamomile tea. Meditation, relaxation, and deep breathing enable your body to move out of the sympathetic nervous system “fight or flight” response and settle into the parasympathetic nervous system where you can relax, heal, and digest food.

At this point, what have you go to lose?

And if you really want to see your body transform, click the link below, let me know a bit about your situation, and we will set up an “emotional eating freedom call” during which I’ll share the exact formula that’ll help you relax your way into weight loss. It’s totally free! Click Here

Bridging the Gap Between Middle Grade and Young Adult

Excerpt from Author Guest Post for Unleashing Readers by Janet McLaughlin, Author of “Haunted Echo” and “Fireworks” in The Soul Sight Mystery series.

There are different delineations for the age of a ‘tween. For clarity’s sake, I’m talking about the twelve to fifteen-year-old child. For me, this age group is the most intriguing. Tweens are both wise and naïve at the same time. They are testing their boundaries, but most still think twice before defying parents and teachers outright. They are discovering who they are; where they fit in the world; and the excitement, joy, and pain of innocent first love.

Unfortunately, books for this age group can be hard to find. It’s a tough sell to agents and publishers, because they don’t have a specific place for them in bookstores. There are no “‘Tween” shelves that I’m aware of in libraries. Many writers know this so they concentrate on the more accepted and defined groupings. But there are those of us whose hearts can’t be denied. We simply love writing for ‘tweens.

Read the full blog here.

Thank you Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers!

 

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … By Janet McLaughlin

At Absolute Love Publishing, we believe in creating goodness in the world. This post is one of a series in which we’ve asked our authors to explain why they choose to align themselves with our publishing house and why they use their craft to create goodness…

Absolute Love Publishing Author Janet McLaughlin

Do you remember the thrill of reading your first book? I do. It was one from The Bobbsey Twins series. I can still remember the feel of it. The smell of it. Reading that book set something free inside of me. Even at that very young age, I knew. The knowledge of the world was available to me. All I had to do was find the right books.

That same feeling came over me in my early twenties when a chance comment set me in search of information on Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet. I knew instinctively that this was a path I needed to explore. In the following decades, I moved from Cayce to Jane Roberts, to Wayne Dyer, to Deepak Chopra, to Lee Carroll, and others. I personally interviewed several psychics, or intuitives as most prefer to be called. Their stories were inspirational and sometimes chilling.

After years of research, I had a cache of knowledge that I wanted to share. I also was aware that, starting around the early 1990s, the children who were being incarnated into our world changed. They were savvier, more skeptical, and less malleable. Many were coming in with abilities that frightened them or made them feel “different.” In fact, those were the most common themes I found with the intuitives that I interviewed—fear and isolation.

I wanted to use the knowledge I’d accumulated over the years to help these special kids to feel more comfortable about who they are. To see that they aren’t alone. That’s when I decided to write a novel about a gifted teen who felt isolated in her world because she was different. A girl who eventually learned to share her secret with close friends and to use her gifts to help others. That was the birth of The Soul Sight Mysteries series.

Finding Absolute Love Publishing was the Universe’s gift to me. Working with like-minded women who “get” what I am trying to do; who don’t try to change the essence of my story but instead work to enhance it; whose underlying message—“to create and publish projects promoting goodness in the world”—is so in sync with mine. Together, I believe, we are creating an opportunity for the children who read my books to not only have hours of enjoyment losing themselves in the world of Zoey Christopher but also to learn that helping others is rewarding in and of itself. And, maybe, even realize that being different isn’t so bad after all.

Additional posts in the Creating Goodness Series:

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … Jennifer Farnham

Writing To Change The World … Sarah Hackely

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … Michelle Hastie

 

Why I Use My Craft to Create Goodness … By Jennifer Farnham

At Absolute Love Publishing, we believe in creating goodness in the world. This post is one of a series in which we’ve asked our authors to explain why they choose to align themselves with our publishing house and why they use their craft to create goodness …

Absolute Love Publishing Author Jennifer Farnham

I’ve always loved people … but from afar. I am an observer—the fly on the wall who hoards experiences, interactions, stories, and ideas. However, I also have taken my Bodhisattva Vow, making it my life’s mission to be of aid and service to all beings for as many lifetimes as it takes to end suffering. Therefore, I have had to find my own quiet path of doing so.

Words. Experiences. Ideas. What better way of relating and growing with people than with the use of these powerful tools?

Words have been my favorite tool since I was a small child writing poetry on napkins. Now, as a mother of five children, my world is surrounded with the purity, love, and sweetness of these tiny, blooming people who are learning their worlds and preserving their purity and sanctity as kind and compassionate individuals in a world where there are so many distractions.

Driven by my devotion to all people, as well as my unconditional love for my own children, I utilize the tool of words and write to instill what goodness I can into the world. I want nothing more than to help others see how it is possible for us to compose a more beautiful and loving reality, not only for my children but for all the children of the world.

Through words, I hope to touch the lives and hearts of children and their parents so that they also feel inspired to spread kindness and compassion to those they encounter and to take those small, yet powerful, steps closer to a more gentle and loving world. Though my work, I hope to illustrate to all that they already have the power to change the world for the better … they just have to wield it.

I’m so grateful to have found and to work with Absolute Love Publishing, a publishing house, with its own drive to spread goodness in the world through words, comprised of a group of incredible people who gather as one to share in this mission of love and kindness. I’m honored to be part of their family of altruistic writers.

 

Additional posts in the Creating Goodness Series:

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness… Michelle Hastie

Writing To Change The World…Sarah Hackley

 

Using Books as a Stepping Stone to Exploration

Author Guest Post for Unleashing Readers by Steve Schatz, Author of “Adima Rising” and “Adima Returning” in The Adima Chronicles 

A good book serves as a stepping stone to further explorations. Before I wrote The Adima Chronicles, I spent many years teaching teachers how to use writing and technology to support their students’ learning across the curriculum. Here are two of my favorite activities:

Creation and Origin Myths

A powerful way to use stories to encourage writing is to use them as a springboard for other activities. After reading how the rhino got its wrinkled skin or how the leopard got its spots in Kipling’s “Just So Stories,” for example, most students are primed to imagine just about anything. From these imaginations, they can make up their own stories about how something came to be like it is. This writing activity also can be extended by adding illustrations and using the internet and resource books to discover the evolution of the animals the students have written about.

This basic idea also can be easily adapted for older grades. For example, my first book in The  Adima Chronicles, “Adima Rising,” creates a parallel world. The rules of this world, and the interaction between the world of light and our usual world, are a crucial part of the story. Older students can use this idea as a springboard for world building by creating their own worlds, including that world’s people, creatures, actions, and natural rules. Teachers can further expand this exploration through science—if a being can jump across a ravine, how strong would it have to be or how weak would gravity have to be?

2. Research

Books also can serve as stepping stones to understanding other cultures and beliefs. In “Adima Rising,” there are many references to Rory’s anthropologist father and past cultures in the Americas. This is a rich starting point for an exploration into the advanced technologies of ancient cultures. In the forthcoming second book, “Adima Returning,” there is a great deal of information about Kachinas. Teachers could use these books as stepping stones to historical research.

Areas to consider:

Differences between Kachina dolls, Kachina dancers, and Kachinas.
History of Pueblo Bonito.
Artists of the Southwest.
The decimation and near extinction of buffalo herds.
Anthropological finds in Peru.
Advanced cultures in South America.
Religious practices of different cultures.

Together, these activities foster creative thinking and independent learning—two skills children and teens need for academic success.

Happy reading and writing! Additional lesson plans and suggestions for research are available on www.AdimaRising.com. Want to purchase Adima Rising? Visit www.AbsoluteLovePublishing.com. Steve Schatz can be reached at steve@stevewrites.com and www.AdimaRising.com.

Thank you Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers!

Why I Use My Craft to Create Goodness … By Sarah Hackley

At Absolute Love Publishing, we believe in creating goodness in the world. This post is one of a series in which we’ve asked our authors to explain why they choose to align themselves with our publishing house and why they use their craft to create goodness…

Absolute Love Publishing Author Sarah Hackley

As humans, we are innately drawn to meaning. We want to know what someone’s words mean, what their actions mean. We desire knowledge of the meaning of life and of our place within its circle. We need to know there is meaning and that it exists in everything.  

Writing gives us this. Writing—good writing—creates meaning. It takes the confusing, the disparate, the chaotic, the traumatic, and transforms it into a narrative that offers us a shimmering shard of truth, a shard we can wield or protect as we see fit.

As a reader, I have always needed that truth.

As a child and teen, I poured over the texts available to me, leaving the library week after week with books—stacked knees to chin—precariously held between two hands. Once home, I’d devour the words, greedily looking for shards strong enough to pierce my fears, fragments large enough to cover the holes left behind by uncertainty. And, over the years, I found them.

With books by my side, I uncovered countless pieces of truth, long-dead voices offering solace. I used these pieces, these fragments, these shards. Through words, I unearthed meaning. Through words, I began to make myself whole.

As a writer, however, the insight gained from other writers wasn’t enough. To heal completely, I needed to create my own insight, to turn my own pains and confusions into transformative truths. In doing so, I hoped, I also would be able to pass on to readers the small pieces of meaning I’d managed to gather, as had the writers before me. From those pieces, I hoped, other readers would unearth their own small, shimmering shards, and thus the cycle would continue.

It is this desire to share in the continual passing of meaning, to transmute negativity into something worthwhile, something understandable, that compels me to write the books I write. It is also why I choose to publish with a house that is in alignment with those goals. Alone, I am one writer speaking to myself. Together with Absolute Love Publishing, I am one writer speaking to the world. Together, we help spread meaning and goodness in an otherwise muddled world.

Additional posts in the Creating Goodness Series:

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … Steve Schatz

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness…Michelle Hastie

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness … Jennifer Farnham

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness…Janet McLaughlin

Writing to Change the World: Why I Use Words to Create Goodness … By Sarah Hackley

At Absolute Love Publishing, we believe in creating goodness in the world. This post is one of a series in which we’ve asked our authors to explain why they choose to align themselves with our publishing house and why they use their craft to create goodness…

Absolute Love Publishing Author Sarah Hackley

As humans, we are innately drawn to meaning. We want to know what someone’s words mean, what their actions mean. We desire knowledge of the meaning of life and of our place within its circle. We need to know there is meaning and that it exists in everything.  

Writing gives us this. Writing—good writing—creates meaning. It takes the confusing, the disparate, the chaotic, the traumatic, and transforms it into a narrative that offers us a shimmering shard of truth, a shard we can wield or protect as we see fit.

As a reader, I have always needed that truth.

As a child and teen, I poured over the texts available to me, leaving the library week after week with books—stacked knees to chin—precariously held between two hands. Once home, I’d devour the words, greedily looking for shards strong enough to pierce my fears, fragments large enough to cover the holes left behind by uncertainty. And, over the years, I found them.

With books by my side, I uncovered countless pieces of truth, long-dead voices offering solace. I used these pieces, these fragments, these shards. Through words, I unearthed meaning. Through words, I began to make myself whole.

As a writer, however, the insight gained from other writers wasn’t enough. To heal completely, I needed to create my own insight, to turn my own pains and confusions into transformative truths. In doing so, I hoped, I also would be able to pass on to readers the small pieces of meaning I’d managed to gather, as had the writers before me. From those pieces, I hoped, other readers would unearth their own small, shimmering shards, and thus the cycle would continue.

It is this desire to share in the continual passing of meaning, to transmute negativity into something worthwhile, something understandable, that compels me to write the books I write. It is also why I choose to publish with a house that is in alignment with those goals. Alone, I am one writer speaking to myself. Together with Absolute Love Publishing, I am one writer speaking to the world. Together, we help spread meaning and goodness in an otherwise muddled world.

Additional posts in the Creating Goodness Series:

Why I Use My Craft To Create Goodness…Michelle Hastie