Sally Ember's Blog, page 52
January 20, 2016
Submit Your 2015 Nominations
Sure would love to see one of my books nominated (Volume III came out in 2015…. hint, hint). The Planetary Awards especially include indies/self-published authors’ sci-fi! Share and nominate (if you’re eligible to do so).
It’s time for book bloggers, podcasters, and booktubers to nominate their favorite science fiction and fantasy books and short stories published in 2015. There are three categories for the 2015 awards:
1) Shorter story (under 40,000 words/160 paperback pages)
2) Traditionally published novel
3) Small press / self-published novel
Nominations must be received by February 14th, 11:59PM US Pacific time.
Here are the steps required to nominate a story (A, B, and C are required. D, E, and F are optional):
A) Establish your credentials. Make a comment to this blog post, with links to three reviews posted in 2015 on your blog, podcast, or booktube channel. If you have a multi-topic podcast/video, please give us time references.
B) Post on your blog (or podcast/booktube channel) nominating a story and explaining why you think it’s the best.
You may nominate in all three categories with one post, or you may…
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Filed under: Writing
Almost Everything You Need to Know about #ISBNs
To read this article, click on the link or photo of Author Laurie Boris below: almost-everything-you-need-to-know-about-isbns/
Source: Almost Everything You Need to Know about ISBNs
Filed under: Writing
8 #writing #competitions to enter in January and February 2016…
To see this list and article, Click on the link or image below: 8-writing-competitions-to-enter-in-jan-feb-2016/
Source: 8 writing competitions to enter in January and February 2016…
Filed under: Writing
January 18, 2016
Homage to and Review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems
Homage to and #Review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s
Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960 – 2010
Ursula K. Le Guin is my favorite writer. No contest.
I have enjoyed, admired, appreciated, envied and learned from her novels, novellas, short stories, essays, and poetry for over forty years. She is about my mom’s age (in her early 80s, now) and still going strong. She is my idol, my mentor, and my role model. I also found out, after reading this collection, that she and share not only a love of writing, speculative fiction, feminism, social justice, pacifism and environmentalism, but Buddhism and meditation. Ah, pure bliss!
This latest collection of her poetry so delighted me that I had to write not just a short review on Amazon or Goodreads, but an entire blog post, complete with images, video, quotes. I hope you run right out and buy, borrow or sit and read aloud from this collection ASAP. You will be glad you did.
Poetry is meant to be read aloud. I enjoy reading poetry aloud as if I am the poet, wondering as I hear each word, line, idea, image, stanza, what the poet was imagining and how this exact turn of phrase came to capture it. Knowing how long many poets take to conjure the precise manner in which to describe and evoke every part of their intention, I want to savor it.
I do NOT read in that artificial, almost-questioning (upturned inflection on the end of lines), drawling almost-monotone that many poetry readers make the horrible mistake of using.
No.
I read poetry aloud as if each poem is its own story, because this unique version of that story is interesting, new, and not mine. I use the line breaks and punctuation as suggestions to help me go with the poet’s flow. I smile, I laugh, I pause, I taste the words on my tongue.
Try it. You’ll like it!
Le Guin has many poems rooted (pun intended) in nature. This little bird caught her attention several times. She mentions the Swainson’s Thrush by name; sometimes it is unnamed and alluded /referred to throughout this collection.
I had to find what the Swainson’s Thrush looks and sounds like. Enjoy!
I marked pages of this book with pieces of scrap paper so I’d remember which stanzas, poems, titles, lines caught my heart. Here are some, in no particular order. I sometimes annotate or explain. Find your own parts to love and for your own reasons.
I want to give this poem, For the New House, to my son and his wife when they find their first home to purchase. I adore the entire poem, and here are my favorite lines:
For the New House
And may you be in this house
as the music is in the instrument.
I also welled up with tears reading this next one, Song for a Daughter, imagining myself as a new mom hearing this from my mom, and sharing this with my son’s wife should she/they be lucky enough to have a child. Le Guin captures so much of the complexity of these relationships elegantly and succinctly, with beautiful turns of phrase, like these from the first and final stanzas:
Song for a Daughter
Mother of my granddaughter
listen to my song:
A mother can’t do right,
a daughter can’t be wrong….
Granddaughter of my mother,
listen to my song:
Nothing you do will ever be right,
nothing you do is wrong.
Soldiers perfectly depicts the horribleness of most wars, particularly our most recent USA-led wars, in which the military industrial complex—to enrich corporations—sends/inspires young men (and women) to go to their deaths or disfigurements with lies and for specious causes. The anguished images of this powerful poem end with this, which completed the breaking of my heart:
Soldiers
And soldiers still will fill the towns
In blue or khaki clad,
The brave, the good, who march to kill
What hope we ever had.
Unsurprisingly, given the title, and with Le Guin’s being both a Buddhist (we meditate daily on impermanence) and in her 80s, much of the poems in this collection are concerned with the end of life: the end of her own life, the changing of the seasons, the ruination of nature and places. She draws upon rich and varied imagery from many religious/spiritual traditions, employing words and phrases from several languages and invoking aspects of the rituals of Native Americans/Native Canadians and other indigenous peoples (harkening to her anthropologist father’s influence, as always), among others.
I especially liked Every Land (which starts with an epigram from Black Elk), in which she repeats this line, “Every land is the holy land,” at the end of each of the three stanzas, like a wistful refrain.
From one of the longer poems, At Kishamish, which is divided into named sections, these lines from “Autumnal” were quite moving. They eloquently evoke the juxtaposition of being somewhere now, when we’re so much older, suffused with so many memories of having lived and been at that same place so many times with our children as our younger selves:
At Kishamish
AUTUMNAL
It’s strange to see these hills with present eyes
I hold so clear in my mind always, strange once more
to hear the hawk cry down along the meadows
and smell the tarweed, to be here—here at the ranch,
so old, where I was young—it hurts my heart.
One of the “good-bye” poems here could make a statue cry: Aubade, which means “a song or poem to greet the dawn.” The term is unironically used here as the poem’s title. Le Guin simply depicts what might be said between lovers or long-time intimate friends or family members who must now part due to death. She frames it perfectly in two gorgeous stanzas, which I quote here in their entirety:
Aubade
Few now and faint the stars that shone
all night so bright above you.
The sun must rise, and I be gone.
I leave you, though I love you.
We have lived well, my love, and so
let not this parting grieve you.
Sure as the sunrise you must know
I love you, though I leave you.
Tibetan Buddhists talk about the “between place,” the Bardo, the state between a person’s pre-birth to our birth, and of the time between our body’s death and the shifting of our consciousness to our next incarnation. Le Guin speaks to this and illustrates her readiness, willingness, almost eagerness to “move on” to be In the Borderlands. Fittingly, this poem is placed on one of the last pages of this collection. Le Guin leaves us considering her perspective in this way, putting her thoughts of yearning to leave her body into this poem in the form of a conversation between her soul and her body, ending it in this final stanza with gentle humor and grace:
In the Borderlands
Soon enough, my soul replies,
you’ll shine in star and sleep in stone,
when I who troubled you a while with eyes
and grief and wakefulness am gone.
Thank you, Ursula, for sharing your deep and soulful moments with us all. Once again, due to your artistry with words and your generosity and intelligence, you have paved the way for me and others to follow with some surcease from pain and lighter hearts as we face our own partings, disappointments and deaths.
image from her website, photo ©by Marian Wood Kolisch
May your contributions to our literary and emotional landscapes always be known as blessings while you still live and after you die, and may all beings benefit.
Find these poems, this and all her other work here: http://www.ursulakleguin.com Her latest poetry collection, Late in the Day, is my next poetry read!
Filed under: Poetry, Reviews Tagged: Bardo, Book Review, Buddhism, death, meditation, pacifism, poems, Poetry, Ursula K. Le Guin
2015 Publishing Retrospective: Feminist Bloggers – The 2014 Collection
As a lifelong Feminist, I can’t believe I didn’t know about Feminist Fridays. How do I get hooked into it?
Sally Ember, Ed.D.
The first volume I published last year was a free eBook that gathered the several Feminist Friday posts that had been written by multiple authors during the year 2014. It is available for free on Smashwords in multiple digital formats.
This collection of 20 feminist essays by 8 authors, covers a broad range of topics from feminism as a political label, to rape culture, to various perspectives on education. This volume also includes several pieces about how marketing addresses women and how mass media represent them. Every essay was originally published as part of a blog series hoping to generate a discussion.
If you’d like to find out more about the Feminist Friday discussions, you can find all links on this page on Part Time Monster.
Cover designed by Jennifer Miller.
Filed under: Writing
What 4.5 Years and 1 Million Views of Blogging Have Taught Me
Thanks, August. So glad for you!
Keep going!
Sally Ember, Ed.D.
About four and a half years ago, I asked my then agent what I could do to better my odds of success as an author, other than writing and writing some more. Among his chief suggestions? Start a blog.
Write for free in the spare time I don’t exactly have? It sounded like dreadful homework, but like many writers, I was eager to do whatever it took to move forward. That “whatever” turned out to be one of the most important professional decisions I’ve made.
Over the weekend, my blog reached 1 million views. While numbers are by far not the most important thing and all relative, this felt pretty awesome—especially considering I recall very well a time I nearly pleaded people to check it out. (Uh, that’s not a suggestion.)
PLEASE? I’ll do anything!
Some writers might hear “a million views” and think, “Yeah, but it was all for FREE!”…
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Filed under: Writing
James Jones $10,000 Fellowship Contest for First-time Fiction Novelists: Entries Close 15 March
The James Jones Fellowship Contest is now in its 25th year. It awards $10,000 to an American writer with a first fiction novel in progress in 2016.
Source: James Jones $10,000 Fellowship Contest for First-time Fiction Novelists: Entries Close 15 March
Filed under: Writing
January 17, 2016
How to Add a Mailchimp Newsletter to WordPress.Com Blog – with Style!
Great post. Thanks!
The true gift of having a clearly defined definition of success is that you begin to find exactly what you need to achieve that success. I discovered YOUR FIRST 1000 Copiesby Tim Grahl exactly when I needed a guide for book marketing. I want to get the word out about my books, and I want to do it without being subservient to a cumbersome system I neither understand nor enjoy. Grahl gives me a blueprint to achieve that, and having a newsletter is an integral element in his system. In this post, I share what I’ve learned about setting up a Mailchimp newsletter and integrating it into your (free) WordPress.com blog.
Here are the main points I will cover:
Getting started with Mailchimp
Customizing Your Mailchimp sign-up form to coordinate with your WordPress.com blog
Use Google’s built-in developer tools to find the hexidecimal code for colors on your site
Set the font or…
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Filed under: Writing
January 14, 2016
How Do We Know if Our #Meditation Practice is “Working”?
How Do We Know if Our #Meditation Practice is “Working”?
So many of us learn to meditate and then wonder: how we are supposed to be able to discern the effects of our practice?
More specifically, how can we tell if we are doing it correctly? Or, how do we know if we are meditating for enough time each day? How do we know whether we have the “right” practices and if these the ones we ought to continue doing?
Many of my Tibetan Buddhist meditation teachers have given talks in which these and similar questions arise. The teachers’ responses are usually to turn it around and ask us practitioners to consider these simple “measures” of our practice’s effectiveness:
Am I more patient?
Am I angry less often?
Does compassion arise in me more often and spontaneously?
Am I kinder more often and more easily?
Then, if we are studying with a meditation teacher, we are asked to contemplate these questions:
Do I have strong faith in my heart in my teacher and in the dharma?
Does my teacher come to my mind spontaneously while I am in a sleep state, while dreaming and/or in times of crisis?
Do I have less hope and less fear?
Do I experience clarity more of the time?
How are YOU doing, by these measures, with your meditation practice? If the answer to most of these questions is “no,” please find a qualified meditation teacher to discuss your practice with you and get you on the right track.
Maybe you need to meditate more time per day or keep your practice time and session length more consistent. Possibly, you need to “mix it up,” change what you’re doing. Get up and walk or go sit outside, change your shrine or altar around.
If you’re chanting or visualizing, maybe you need to return to calm abiding (shamatha). If you’re unfocused, maybe vipassana or mindfulness practices are better for you for a while.
There are over 80,000 methods of meditation and practice for “taming the mind.” One or more of them is right for everyone at some point, but many of us need to change our practices throughout our lifetimes and changing circumstances.
We need a qualified meditation teacher, someone we can trust to guide our practice and help us keep it fresh and effective. Books and groups are great and support our practice, but nothing takes the place of having a spiritual guide.
It is said that the spiritual teacher that fits us best has the key to open our hearts. Merely to hear the teacher’s name or see his/her face, even in a photo, can have a profound effect. I hope you can find the right one for you.
Here is mine: Lama Padma Drimed Norbu (Lama Drimed).
May all beings benefit. May he live long and flourish. May all practitioners be so fortunate as to find your living teachers and be able to study under their guidance.
How to choose a spiritual teacher, what kind to select, and how to know if your relationship is worthwhile and effective as well as healthy? Read my review, then get the excellent, comprehensive book by Alexander Berzin, Wise Teacher, Wise Student: Tibetan Approaches to a Healthy Relationship, on Buddhist Door, from last fall (2015): http://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/wise-teacher-wise-student-tibetan-approaches-h
Filed under: Buddhism, Meditation Tagged: Buddhism, Buddhist, Buddhist Door, Lama Drimed, meditation, meditator, spiritual teacher
January 13, 2016
My recommendations are on “SF SIGNAL” “MIND MELD” “This Is What We Want To Read In 2016”!
My recommendations are on “SF SIGNAL” “MIND MELD” “This Is What We Want To Read In 2016”!
Andrea Johnson was kind enough to invite and include me in this amazing roster of #speculative #fiction authors’ recommendations for upcoming spec fiction books we are looking forward to reading this year.
Mine are near the middle of the list, this time.
Visit, comment, subscribe!
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/01/target-113mind-meld-want-read-2016/
What about other 2016 new releases in Speculative Fiction? There are so many lists/books!
Goodreads has a list:
https://www.goodreads.com/genres/new_releases/science-fiction
Here, via Barnes & Noble, some editors/publishers/bookstore owners are tooting their own horns, so to speak (hawking their own company’s books)? First:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/2016-books-sff-editors-want-you-to-read/
then, with lots of overlap, this one:
If you’re focused on #Fantasy and want to know when most upcoming releases (from predominantly/exclusively MALE authors, which I’m sure is some kind of weird accident… sure, it is) that are already scheduled are due to be available, use this new-releases calendar (most do not have covers, yet):
http://www.bestfantasybookshq.com/best-fantasy-books-2016/
A much better and more inclusive list, here, from Locus Online:
http://www.locusmag.com/Resources/ForthcomingBooks.html
Filed under: Blogging and others' content, Opinions, Science Fiction and Fantasy Tagged: books, Mind Meld, reading, recommendations, Sally Ember Ed.D Author, SF Signal, speculative fiction
