Laura Roberts's Blog, page 16

New year, new reading challenges!

As you may recall, in 2018 I joined Nick Singer’s Les Misérables Read-Along Challenge. I successfully completed the book yesterday by reading a chapter a day, and it feels good to know that I’ve finally conquered the full and unabridged version of this story. Long-distance high-five through space and time to my high school self; we did it!

[image error]Challenge complete!

This year it’s time for something a little different: the 2019 Chapter-A-Day Reading Challenge is going to focus on reading four different books which total 365 chapters. The four books will be:

Don Quixote by Miguel de CervantesThe Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre DumasLilith by George MacDonaldThe Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens



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I’m not sure whether I will join the group for all four titles, but I’m definitely up for reading Don Quixote, as I had already added it to my reading list for 2019 when the challenge was announced. This will be a great way to get one of my big classics out of the way, along with a supportive group of readers going chapter by chapter.

[image error]War and Peace Read Along

In addition to reading Don Quixote, I’ve also decided to participate in the War and Peace Read Along hosted on Instagram by Jamie (@jsg402) and Steve (@bookstagramsteve). This challenge is about reading the entire book in three months (January through March), so I still have to work out my reading schedule for this one, but it should be exciting to tackle another big book with a reading group.

[image error]Unlikeable Female Characters Book Club: January selection

And finally, I am starting a little book club of my own! I’ve been obsessed with the Unlikeable Female Characters podcast since it started up, and I put in a bunch of hold requests at my local library for books they recommended on the show. The first one that came in was Tara Isabella Burton’s Social Creature, which I tore through in the final days of 2018, and which I am now dying to discuss in a group without having to label everything with a spoiler.

So, if you are also obsessed with this show – or its focus on “unlikeable” female characters, particularly in thrillers written by women – then I would encourage you to join my new Facebook group so that we can discuss a new books there once a month, using the podcast discussions as a starting point for some discussions of our own.

January’s pick will be Social Creature, and for February I would like to read Amy Gentry’s Last Woman Standing, which will be released on January 15th.

[image error]Unlikeable Female Characters Book Club: February selection

Those are my big 2019 reading challenges so far. What are you planning to read this year?

The post New year, new reading challenges! appeared first on Buttontapper Press.

2018 Year in Review

Last year I participated in a 7-day series of “year in review” questions put together by Lisa Jacobs, culminating in an “18 for 2018” list of goals.

Although I didn’t go through such a comprehensive look back on 2018 this year, I thought I’d compare my list of goals with reality and see how I did.

So, here was my original list. And here’s how I did…

Successes:

I read 33 nonfiction books (out of 63 books total) this year, which is about 2.75 per month, so I’d definitely consider Educational Goal #1 met – and then some.

Walk 10,000 steps and work up to 5 miles every day. I’d consider this goal a success. Although I didn’t manage to get my 10,000 steps in every single day, I did step up my game quite a bit in the quest to reach 1,500 miles for the year. Since I’m currently walking 8.05 miles a day to meet that goal, and I’m determined to hit it by tonight (December 31st), I’m going to call this a success overall.

Cut out alcohol to improve my health. I did cut out alcohol as part of a “Dry January” challenge, but ultimately I didn’t think it was particularly helpful (nor harmful) in terms of my health and fitness goals, and added it back into my diet in moderation. In 2019, I will stick with this more moderate approach to drinking, rather than going totally “dry.”

Move into a new home that better suits my family’s needs. Mission accomplished! Although our new place in Sacramento is a bit smaller than our place in San Diego was, it’s more affordable, comes with laundry in our space (no more crusty laundromats and shared laundry!), and we are enjoying the attitude and pace of our new city a lot more.

Book and enjoy a 10th anniversary getaway with my husband. YES! By some miracle of fate, I actually won a spa trip to Lake Tahoe, so my husband and I were able to take a little weekend vacation to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in style. The flight and hotel were covered, and we had a couple hundred bucks to spend in the hotel, which we ended up using to pay for most of our meals (the spa looked nice, but every single one of their services cost more than the total amount we’d been allotted to spend in the hotel!), including a nice anniversary dinner together. We also rented a car to drive from Tahoe over to Sacramento to scope the city out, so it worked as a bit of a fact-finding mission when we were deciding where we wanted to move. And now that we live in Sacramento, we can have more Tahoe getaways in the future, too!

Practice the Miracle Morning routine every day. Well… I would say this was a partial win. I definitely didn’t stick with the MM routine, but it gave me some good ideas for creating my own morning routine, and I think that’s the most important thing. I will probably never jump out of bed and get straight to exercising in the first 3 hours I’m awake, but I do typically get up at the same time each day; make time for reading, writing and exercising; and try to make sure my mornings are as focused and uncluttered as possible.

Track the things I want to change each month. Yes! Although I may not always stick with the trackers themselves, I do find that the idea of what gets measured gets managed is true for me. Keeping track of the things I want to change is key to getting off my butt and actually doing it. It’s a good habit that I plan to stick with in 2019.

Goals Not Met:

Read 1 children’s book per week. Not quite! I read 19 children’s and/or YA titles this year, which is 33 short of a book per week. But I also decided that I didn’t really want to focus on writing for kids this year, which is why I decided not to keep up with this goal.

Finish SCBWI class with a manuscript I can publish. Since I decided about halfway through this class that I wasn’t super passionate about pursuing writing in this genre, I also abandoned the manuscript I was working on.

Publish 3 issues of Black Heart. This didn’t happen, and in fact I didn’t even manage to get one issue published this year. In short: there is just so much work to do to put together a single issue of the magazine, and I’m doing it solo, so for right now I’m putting the whole thing on hiatus. I’m still trying to decide whether I can put out one issue per year, or maybe every other year.

Create 12 “Buttontapper Challenge” ideas and post daily on social media. Although I mostly stuck with my daily posting on social media throughout the year, the Buttontapper Challenge never seemed to gain any traction, so I scrapped it halfway through the year due to lack of interest.

Create a class around my existing ebooks. Not quite. Instead I put together a workbook based on my Preptober posts from last year, which you can purchase here.

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Travel to Chicago to add material to Chicago from A to Z. Although my husband and I originally hoped to move to Chicago this year, we realized it was just too far to go (especially with two cats who definitely do NOT travel well), and that moving to a state that wasn’t nearly as progressive as California was not a good idea, given the psychotic man-child currently running ruining our country. Instead, we moved to Sacramento, and I am thinking of writing another A to Z guide about my new hometown.

Land an agent. This was related to my YA publishing goals, and since I never finished the books, there was nothing to pitch.

Secure a book deal. Same as above. No manuscript + no agent = no book deal.

Do another 5K Walk/Write weekend. I never scheduled one for myself, and didn’t have a group to encourage me to do it, so I didn’t participate this year. Maybe next year?

Run a 5K with Jenna. I haven’t even trained at all for running a 5K, but I have been walking a lot more, so perhaps I will work my way up to actually walking in a real 5K in 2019.

Take a train trip to LA. Just didn’t have time to do this one before the big move. Maybe next year?

MORE Successes:



Created and completed a Positivity challenge, based on an online class I was taking, along with reading and blog postsFinished the audiobook for San Diego from A to Z Had my first erotica novella traditionally published: Montreal Mischief Completed the A to Z Challenge in AprilPublished No More F*ing Weirdos! Started my Wife for a Weekend manuscriptPublished my Preptober! workbookDid two virtual 5Ks for Read A Book Day and my 40th birthday

All in all, I’m counting this as 15 Successes vs. 11 Goals Not Met, so this will help me narrow down my focus as I create a new list of goals for 2019! (Pssst! Check back tomorrow to find out what some of my new goals are.)

How was YOUR 2018?

The post 2018 Year in Review appeared first on Buttontapper Press.

Buttontapper End of Year Sale begins today

In partnership with Smashwords, Buttontapper Press is celebrating the end of 2018 with a huge sale. Some of our best-selling titles will be available at 50% off, starting today!

The sale runs from December 25 to January 1, so you’ll have plenty of time to stock up on holiday reading with titles like:

Everything I Need To Know About Love I Learned from Pop Songs,Sexy Haiku,Naked Montreal, parts 1 ( Sex and the Underground City ) and 2 ( Porn Stars and Peccadillos ),Haiku for Lovers,The Vixen Files,All of our Quickies , and How to Suck Better



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You can also grab a FREE copy of The Portable Laura Roberts any time.

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To purchase one or more of our books, please use the links above – and don’t forget to use the coupon code SEY50 at checkout to receive your discount.

Merry XXXmas, Happy Holidays, and best wishes for a fantastic New Year from Buttontapper Press!

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One week of 7.85 miles/day

After an entire week of walking 7.85 miles a day I am feeling pretty good!

I was pretty wiped out on Saturday, as I had almost missed getting my steps in on Friday and had to do a marathon session to hit my goal before midnight. So then I did a bit of a “cheat day” on Saturday, and only got to 10,000 steps (4.3 miles) before I quit for the evening.

Which, of course, meant that I either had to make up the missing mileage on Sunday (11.67 miles in one day? EEK!) or spread it out over the remaining days left in the year.

Being a sensible person, I’ve opted for the latter. Which means that this week I need to walk at least 8.02 miles a day to reach my 1,500 mile goal for the year.

There are 8 days left in 2018 (including today!), so I think I can sustain this pace for a bit more than a week.

But once the clock hits midnight and we cross over into 2019, I am dropping my daily goals back down to a reasonable figure. 5 miles a day sounds extremely doable, and if I decide to stretch it out from there, it’ll all be gravy.

If I walk 5 miles each and every day in 2019, that means I will walk a total of 1,825 miles for the year!

I think that’s a very reasonable fitness goal, since it’s a little higher than my 10,000 steps per day goal (which nets me about 4.3 or 4.4 miles each day), without being so tiring and time consuming that I have no time for anything else in my life.

Plus, once I get into the 5 miles a day habit, it’s just a bit of a stretch to get to 2,000 miles in a year!

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As an interesting thought experiment, I found that New York is 2,505 miles from Sacramento, so if I walked 2,505 miles in a year, I could essentially say I walked the distance from the west coast to the east coast!

It’s also 1,880 miles to Mexico City from Sacramento, so if I stretch my annual goal this year a bit, I could give myself a virtual “Walked to Mexico City” badge for my efforts.

I wonder what is 1,500 miles from Sacramento? According to this chart, Minneapolis is 1,514 miles from here, and Des Moines, Iowa is 1,486 miles away, so I guess… somewhere in a corn field in the Midwest?

[image error]Apparently I have already walked further than the distance between Sacramento, CA and Winnipeg, Manitoba (1,429 miles)!

I guess I will have to make myself a virtual “Walked to the Midwest” badge at the 1,500 mile mark, unless someone has a more exotic location they can pinpoint. Suggestions welcome!

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2018 Goals: And I would walk 1,500 miles…

Sometime back in 2017 I discovered the wonderful world of Moon Joggers, a group dedicated to participating in “virtual 5Ks.”

If that whole sentence sounded totally confusing, I hear you. Basically, the idea is this: instead of entering a real 5K race, this group challenges its members to participate in “virtual races,” where the time-keeper is you and all members are on the honor system when reporting times. You can log your miles (or, rather, kilometers!) at the gym, outside on a trail, a city street, or wherever you feel most comfortable. You don’t have to be a runner, either. You can walk, jog, run, or even bike your miles.

Basically, the only rule is that you need to challenge yourself and keep logging those miles.

The group maintains a log where you can input your daily miles and times, and combines the totals for a group tally. Every year they select a new space-themed “destination” to aim for (this year it was Journey to Jupiter), and members do their best to propel the group forward by walking, running and biking their way to fitness, one day at a time.

I found this fascinating and motivating, and immediately signed up for a free account. (You can do so here if you are also intrigued!)

I then began logging my miles, using my Fitbit’s daily records as my official counter.

[image error]My 2017 Fitbit totals

Last year I managed to reach a grand total of 1,164.55 miles (according to my Fitbit), which was quite the accomplishment for a slothful writer like me.

Every year the Moon Joggers ask what “rank” you’d like to try to attain with your annual mileage. So in 2018 I decided to go for the rank of Ensign, which requires a total of 1,500 miles for the year.

I’ve currently risen through the ranks of Official MJ (1 mile), Space Ranger (100), Cadet (500), Private (750), and Officer (1,000 miles!), and am quickly closing in on that Ensign ranking!

[image error]My 2018 Fitbit totals thus far

Right now, my yearly total is 1,366.66 miles. This means that to hit the 1,500 mark I’ll need to log 133.34 more miles between now and the stroke of midnight on December 31st.

If my calculations are correct (and math is not my strong suit, so they may be not be!), this means I need to log 7.85 miles a day (rounding up, just to be sure) in order to reach my goal.

On an average day, where I walk about 10,000 steps, I hit about 4.4 miles. So this means I almost need to double my mileage per day.

Hence this blog post!

I’m here to hold myself accountable, and to make a plan for accomplishing this goal.

The Plan

Walk 7.85 miles per day. (Straightforward, if not necessarily simple!)

[image error]Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash



How to Achieve Said Plan

Break the goal down into two parts:

Walk 1,000 steps each hour, from 9 AM to 5 PM = 8,000 steps.
Walk for a dedicated 30 minutes each morning (before 9 AM) and evening (after 5 PM) until the 7.85 miles have been achieved.Schedule these blocks into my day, so that they start to become a habit. (Also, making them into appointments or meetings is a good trick to get yourself to take those blocks of time more seriously.)




[image error]Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash



The Backup Plan

Since I know I am more likely to hold myself accountable if other people are involved, I’m also going to participate in Fitbit’s weekly challenges with a group of folks that I regularly invite to face off, step-wise. There are two types of challenges that work best for this plan: the Workweek Hustle and the Weekend Warrior.

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One of my Fitbit pals has been inviting me to participate in a really motivational Weekend Warrior challenge with a bunch of other hustling women, and I managed to beat them all in a surprise victory last weekend, so now they are out for revenge! This ought to be a good way to get in my weekend steps.

Then, I need to step up my Workweek game to out-walk another Fitbit friend who lives in The Netherlands and seems to walk constantly. Even though the challenge is tied to the timezone of the person who invites others to participate, I always find myself losing to this friend who is a whole day ahead of me, and whom I should be able to finish off while he is literally sleeping. (Yes, strategy is important!)

Both of these challenges should, hopefully, push me to keep up with my daily walking goals.

[image error]Photo by Peter Fogden on Unsplash



Maybe you also have an End of 2018 goal?

What kinds of goals are you working to finish up as 2018 comes to a close? How do you plan to meet them?

The post 2018 Goals: And I would walk 1,500 miles… appeared first on Buttontapper Press.

Christmas attitude of gratitude

This year has been quite a challenge, so I have quite a long list of things I’m grateful for, and in this post I’d like to highlight a few of the people I’m grateful for, as 2018 slowly draws to a close.

As noted in my previous post, California has experienced some pretty crazy wildfires this year, and I’ve personally lived through two of them. As such, I am extremely grateful that my family and cats are all safe and sound.

I’m also grateful for all of the folks who reached out to say “we’ve got your back,” when I wrote my last blog post. It was a scary time, and it felt really good to hear from members of the San Diego Writers & Editors Guild – especially President Mardie Schroeder – who told me they were eager to help in any way they could. This was incredibly helpful when I was freaking out about the toxic smoke over Sacramento.

Another big shout-out to Mother Nature, who helped clear all the smoke out by Thanksgiving Day.

[image error]The air quality map on Thanksgiving Day – hooray!

I’d also like to thank my parents, who helped calm my fears from afar, and who were able to get some protective masks mailed to me and my husband before even Amazon’s suppliers. They’ve been incredibly supportive throughout this whole year, as well, helping us with the move from San Diego to Sacramento both physically and with various expenses. They have been the ones that have pulled us through, time and again, and both my husband and I are always asking ourselves, “How can we ever repay them?” Huge debt of gratitude to mom and dad, for always being there for us.

Another important person that I’ve been grateful for this year is my BFF, Jenna. We’ve been texting back and forth most days, just checking in on each other and sharing random news, and she has been great at motivating me to keep up with things like physical health goals. For whatever reason, it seems that if I actually tell someone about my goals, they become more real to me. I guess it’s the accountability of knowing that once my goals are revealed to a person in my life, they’re probably going to keep asking me about those goals until I meet them. My most recent physical fitness goal is walking 6.89 miles per day (an average I discovered I needed to hit when I checked my Fitbit yearly stats the other day), in an effort to walk a total of 1,500 miles this year. I’ve been slacking off periodically, and not always getting my 10,000 steps per day, but when I do keep up with my steps I can usually get about 4.4 miles in. She reminded me that it was just for 3 weeks, so I might as well go for it, so here I am, stepping away like a fiend. Wish me luck!

I fear this blog post is going to get unwieldy if I go on with too many more tales of gratitude, but those are some of the most important folks I wanted to publicly thank. I’m also planning on writing some more personal letters of gratitude to other important people in my life, as part of my annual Christmas letter-writing tradition, and since it’s already December 10 I guess I’d better get on it!

Do you ever write gratitude notes to the people you care about?

Who are some of the people you’ve thanked over the years?

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Out of the frying pan, into the fire: California is burning and I am afraid

I don’t normally talk too much about my personal life here on the blog (at least, not in terms of day-to-day minutiae), but I’m currently living through a well-publicized statewide disaster that even our horrible President has commented on, so I thought it might help to capture a few thoughts while I’m in the midst of it. It’s mostly to make myself feel less crazy, living in such a clearly crazy situation.

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Someone please throw his phone into the nearest body of water or fire pit or toilet. Yes, he really tweeted this; click the link if you don’t believe me.

It seems like a million years ago, but just before my husband and I moved to Sacramento this summer we lived through a wildfire that was less than a mile from our apartment in Alpine (dubbed by social media as the #WestFire). We actually missed a mandatory evacuation order that was given late in the day on Friday, which meant that we stayed overnight in our apartment inhaling the smoke from the fire and wondering and worrying about whether we should get our things together and flee with our cats.

Thankfully, nothing happened to us, and just as we were about to have to evacuate to a hotel room for a weekend we couldn’t really afford, we got the word that the fire had been contained and the evacuation orders had been lifted. We breathed a sigh of relief, and continued to monitor the situation until the fire was fully contained. I was on Twitter during that time, trying to get news about the area and make sure my family was safe. It was really helpful to know that other people were also keeping an eye on the community, watching out for one another, and discussing what to do online.

Cut to today. I am over 100 miles away from the Camp Fire in Butte County, safe from the immediate danger posed by this fire, but Sacramento’s air quality is being horribly affected nevertheless. Indeed, the Spare The Air website is currently advising that our air is “Very Unhealthy,” with a rating of 239 at 1 PM. This means that the amount of Fine Particulate Matter in the air (“a complex mixture that may contain soot, smoke, metals, nitrates, sulfates, dust, water and tire rubber”) is very dangerous, and should be avoided.

Local schools are closed because of the air quality, to put that number into human perspective.

We don’t have any masks or respirators at home, because we’ve never had to prep for the possibility of smoke inhalation for any extended period of time. As a result, it’s not advisable for us to leave the house unless we really can’t avoid doing so. We’ve been trying to find masks at local stores, but of course they sold out immediately, and even the local fire station (which is supposed to be distributing free masks) is closed.

I ordered a pack of three masks with respirators online from Amazon last night, but they aren’t projected to arrive until November 20th at the earliest – five days away – or November 26th at the latest – which is more than a week away.

We can’t breathe the air without a mask. It’s too toxic, too dangerous. Even going out for groceries yesterday, when we couldn’t have been outside for more than 15 minutes total, both my husband and I had horrible headaches afterward.

Staying indoors seems fine, so far. We have all our doors and windows closed tight, and have central heat/air, so we aren’t breathing the smoke. But it’s frightening knowing that we are surrounded by toxic air, from the deadliest fire the state has ever seen, and there is literally nothing we can do about it.

My husband works as a delivery driver, and he hasn’t been working because neither of us want him inhaling toxic smoke and particles. We are waiting for those masks. Again, they may be here in five days, or maybe not for more than a week. We just don’t know. (Ordering a rush delivery wasn’t an option, probably because so many people are trying desperately to get their hands on these kinds of masks.)

We don’t have any money to pack up our cats and our belongings and decamp to somewhere safer, where the air is still breathable, until who knows when. When will the air be normal again? When will the Camp Fire even be contained? When will we be able to go outside without masks?

There aren’t any answers. No one knows. It’s a natural disaster, with the emphasis on Mother Nature clearly in charge here.

On the one hand, I feel lucky that we aren’t in danger of dying in a fire, like we were in Alpine. Our home isn’t being threatened by flames. On the other hand, our home is being threatened by toxic smoke, and that is almost worse. After a fire, one can rebuild. In the toxic swirl of smoke, however, what can really be done?

I feel like I don’t have any right to complain. After all, I’m not one of the 300 missing, nor one of the 56 dead. I am relatively safe, here in Sacramento city limits. But I cannot leave my house without putting my health at risk. My husband cannot work. We are both glued to the news, worried. I am working as much as I can, to keep on paying for this shelter that is keeping us safe from the outside world. But what about all the people who can’t afford shelter? What about the people whose homes have been destroyed? What about the people who, like me, cannot simply leave town until this all blows over?

What about those of us that have nowhere else to go?

People outside of California can be callous. They may say we “deserve” this, because they believe – like our ignorant, arrogant President – that this fire was due to improper forest management. But that is simply not true. As the New York Times notes, “California’s current wildfires aren’t forest fires.” They’re actually starting in a zone called the “wildland-urban interface,” where more people are living and where fires are even more unpredictable. This applies both to NorCal’s Camp Fire and SoCal’s Woolsey Fire.

But even setting facts aside, people outside of California seem to believe that everyone who lives in this state is part of the 1%, and that is entirely untrue.

Like I said, I can’t afford to just pack up and leave until some unforeseen endpoint. I don’t have any savings to fall back on. I’m a freelancer who needs to work every day in order to keep paying my bills on time. So is my husband, who physically cannot work right now because it’s a health and safety hazard. We don’t have employers who will pay for our healthcare costs, nor any time off work, so it’s all on us.

And that’s not so different than many others who live here in California – as well as so many people just like us who live in the other 49 United States. I don’t say this so that others will pity me, but so that they will understand the truth. Californians are just like other hardworking Americans, and most of us are struggling to get by, too.

Meanwhile, on the east coast my friends are reporting freak snowstorms keeping them indoors. Having grown up in the Midwest and lived most of my life on the east coast, I would be perfectly happy to trade this toxic smoke for a snowstorm right now.

Of course, that is impossible.

So what are we to do?

People say this is simply “the new normal,” and that is horrifying. But if it is, then I think we all need to understand just what the new normal really is.

This new normal involves isolation, worry, fear. It makes me nervous, agitated. It keeps me trapped indoors.

I am sleeping a lot.

I am reading a lot of books.

One is Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously, where he quotes Samuel Beckett:

“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Life feels very much like that, right now.

I feel like I’ve moved out of the frying pan and into the fire, where the smoke is the thickest.

California is burning, and I am terribly afraid.

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Epilogues: What are they good for? (Absolutely nothing?)

This post is part of the 52-Week Blog Challenge, hosted by the Marketing for Romance Writers Blog. (Image above by Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville – “Eine Andere Welt” von Plinius dem Jüngsten, illustriert von J.J. Grandville. Diogenes Verlag Zürich, 1979. ISBN 3-257-26002-4, Public Domain.)

This week’s challenge is to consider the question Epilogue or No?

Given the fact that my first novel does contain an epilogue, but so far the rest of my novels do not, I suppose you could say I’m torn.

Epilogues do not particularly trouble me. Then again, nor are they something to trifle with.

What is the purpose of an epilogue, and why should one use or avoid one?

Per Merriam-Webster, an epilogue is is “a concluding section that rounds out the design of a literary work.”

My first book, Ninjas of the 512, seemed almost to require an epilogue, as I didn’t want people to think my main character had died, and thus a bit of additional explanation was necessary.

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On the other hand, most of my other works are either serial fiction (which lead from one into the next) or stand-alone erotica (which doesn’t require additional explanation, I would presume!). There isn’t really any need for these kinds of conclusions, no matter how literary the work may be.

I feel that most epilogues exist to tie up loose ends and send the reader off on a positive note, although I could be mistaken (is there such a thing as an unhappy epilogue?), and therefore if you are a writer who prefers to end on cliffhangers or leaving things open for sequels or questions in the reader’s mind, an epilogue would be counterproductive.

So, to answer the question: Epilogue or No? I suppose my ultimate answer is: Maybe?

What do you think? Are you pro or anti epilogue?

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Clothes make the writer: What to wear when writing your next book

This post is part of the 52-Week Blog Challenge, hosted by the Marketing for Romance Writers Blog.

This week’s challenge is to consider What I Wear When I Write.

Writing is one of those gigs where you can work from home, and so frequently my uniform of choice is a t-shirt and PJ bottoms, freshly rolled from the bed and plunked in front of my desk.

But on certain occasions, something a little more upscale is called for.

Since I live in California, the need to dress “weather appropriately” is rare, but on the few days when the sunshine and mild weather turns cold and gloomy, I will indeed put on what I have dubbed my Thinking Cap: a warm, fuzzy hat that is both slouchy and great at trapping the heat near my noggin.

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This is NOT what my hat looks like, but I love this wrinkly brain as a potential upgrade to my Thinking Cap!

When particularly stumped with a scene, I might put on one of my infamous writing t-shirts, such as a piece from the NaNoWriMo Collection:

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The 2017 NaNoWriMo shirt, my current fave!

I’m also partial to Chuck Wendig’s foul-mouthed shirt, which I think was a limited edition item, and currently have my eye on this delightful typewriter shirt (inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, over at the Litographs store):

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In addition to writing shirts, I also have a few pairs of socks that feel particularly inspirational, such as my ninja socks:

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Combining two of my interests, I’m not entirely sure why I don’t own a pair of THESE, to be honest:

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Ninja cat socks!

In conclusion, clothes really do make the writer, and the more I can tie my writing and my wardrobe together, the better I tend to feel about whatever it is I’m writing. What about you?

What do you like to wear when writing?

The post Clothes make the writer: What to wear when writing your next book appeared first on Buttontapper Press.

Writing Rituals to Live By

This post is part of the 52-Week Blog Challenge, hosted by the Marketing for Romance Writers Blog.

This week’s challenge is to consider my writing rituals.

In some ways, I’m a very ritualistic writer. I must have coffee before I begin. I must have (relative) silence. I must have a little food in my stomach so I won’t be distracted.

But at the same time, I’m also proud of my ability to write under most any circumstances. I’m not really precious about any of this, though I certainly prefer to perform my simple rituals before I begin. I can write in a coffee shop, although I typically choose not to (too noisy, too many distractions, and who wants to pay for coffee when they’ve got an unlimited supply at home?). I can write in a hallway or standing up scribbling in a notebook on the sidewalk as I wait for a bus, but I’d rather be sitting at my own desk.

I also have little mini-rituals that I consider part of my personal writing process. Like busting out a brand-new notebook for every new novel idea (usually one of those old-school composition books from the Dollar Store, or the absolute cheapest single-subject notebooks that I got on sale during Back To School season, usually green!). And scribbling down my brainstorming notes by hand, which I will later revise into a nice, relatively organized outline on my computer. Or using Scrivener for my first drafts, but also typing in a frenzy in Text Edit when I’ve got a great idea and can’t wait for the program to load.

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It’s funny, too, that I consider coffee part of my ritual, even though a) I only drink one cup of coffee each day, and b) my coffee tends to get cold while I’m actually in the midst of writing, so I’m really drinking it either before I get started or (more frequently) after the writing is done.

When I was in college, I even had a regular café I wrote in where the barista actually offered me a second saucer to cover my coffee in an attempt to keep it warm longer!

Ultimately, I think writing rituals are useful if they help you get into your groove, but require the occasional shake-up to make sure they’re still helping you produce your best work.

What are YOUR writing rituals?

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