Look at me, I’m Kreativ!

Thanks muchly to Elizabeth Twist, for passing the ‘Kreative Blogger’ award on to me!

KREATIV RULZ:

1. Thank and link back to the awarding blog.
2. Answer the seven questions (or alternates, as provided by Elizabeth).
3. Provide ten random factoids about yourself.
4. Last but not at all least, hand this on to seven deserving others.

DHE QWESTIONS:

1. What’s your favorite song?

Varies with the day, but I’ll send some love out to ‘You can Always Reach Me”, sung by Amanda Stott, especially because I forgot about it when I did the Top Ten Song Blogfest. It doesn’t appear to be on Youtube, but it’s a very sweet love song full of great imagery about staying connected. I ended up working it into a Roswell fanfic I wrote, “Love will Last Forever”, because it summed up Isabel and Alex’s relationship in that story so perfectly.
Alternative Question:Name one song you listened to over and over as a teenager.

2. What’s your favorite dessert?

Just about anything ice cream – possibly a soft serve vanilla cone. Ahh, so delicious, but so fattening.
Alternative Question:What are you having for lunch today?

3. What do you do when you’re upset?

It depends. Often, sulk for a while and do things that aren’t good for me to try to cheer myself up – unhealthy food, watch some television or whatever.
Alternative Question:Describe the last time you were bored.

My ‘Garret’ has been profiled!

Callie Leuck has posted a profile of my writing space, for her Garret Tour Tuesday series, so go over and take a look at my armchair o’ writing, as well as finding out what I had to say about when I like to write.

The joy of being tagged and tagging.

So, I’ve been tagged. (Kinda had to hint around for it, but anyway…)

Two different batches of questions to answer today, and one more to ask of my tagees. First, from Mina Burrows:

- Where do you find inspiration?

All kinds of places. Sometimes I trip over a story idea from something random, sometimes it’s something in a book or tv show that gets me thinking of a different twist, sometimes I go and look for story prompts. And sometimes my muse brings me notions and I don’t ask her where she got them from.

- What’s your favorite TV show?

Of all time? Has to be Firefly. (Sigh.)

- What are you reading now?

‘Currant Events’ by Piers Anthony. ‘Inheritance’ by Christopher Paolini. ‘Star Trek New Frontier: Martyr’ by Peter David. ‘Deja Dead’ by Kathy Reichs. ‘A Twist of Malice’ by Jean Rae Baxter. (Yes, I multitask my reading.)

- What’s your favorite recipe?

A spaghetti sauce that I partly got from my Mom, and partly tweaked until it’s just the way I like it.

February joinings

Okay, I’ve joined or decided to join a few things recently, so I thought I’d just take a moment to share them with all of you.

First – though I’ve considered myself a writing Ninja for many a month, ever since I first heard about NiNoWriMo, I have finally taken the plunge, joined the Writer’s Dojo, and done the placement workout to find my ninja rank. As you can see, I’ve got the blue belt, with one red stripe, and I think I’ll be there for a while, because to get to green belt I need to go through the blue belt with two red stripes, and that one is unexpectedly hardcore! (Pitch to an agent or editor in person, or get an agent contract.)

But I suggest that you check out the ninja dojo if you haven’t heard of it, there’s lots of great authors, and they’re holding an online writer’s conference on Saturday the 4th!

Second bit of news is that I signed up for the A to Z challenge this April. It was a lot of fun doing A-Z in 2011, and I got to meet a lot of fun bloggers. This year, I’m going to make my theme… Script Frenzy and script writing, to raise awareness for the Script Frenzy event, and avoid having to split my focus so much between A-Z and the Frenzy.

I’ve also signed up for the Hook, Line, and Sinker blogfest, which looks like a lot of fun. If I don’t post an entry for that on February 13th, remind me, okay? I have this horrible habit of forgetting blogfests that I’ve committed too. Hopefully, I’ll have the first 1000 words or so of ‘The Scroll’ ready to tease by then.

And in just a few days, signups will open for the Fourth Platform-building Campaign! I’m looking forward to that, and hope to bring back the ‘Campaigner Spotlight’ interview series!

So much fun stuff happening, even in dreary February, huh?

A writer’s community Holiday giveaway

Happy holiday season, everybody!

I’ve decided to start a holiday giveaway contest as part of my recruitment drive for the Stringing Words writer’s community. YOU could win a twenty dollar Amazon.com email gift card. Want to enter? It’s simple.

1. Go to Stringing Words
2. Register for the forum, if you don’t already have a membership.
3. Wait for me to activate your membership and email you that it’s active.
4. Find the ‘Holiday Giveaway thread’, which I will make sure is always in the ‘Latest Active Forum Threads’ on the Stringing Words home page.
5. Post a reply to the thread, saying that you want to enter the contest.
6. Also, optionally mention up to ten interesting things about you.

I’ll announce the winner in the Holiday Giveaway thread on Jan 1st, 2012. Hope to see you all there!

Stringing Words Day 2: Word Game threads

Sometimes you just need to relax and have a little bit of fun before going back to writing. That’s what word games are for.

There are two long-running word games on the Stringing Words forum. One is fairly simple, a word association game where you type in the first word that comes to your mind in response to the previous word:

Stringing Words Day 1: Monthly project threads

One minor announcement first - I’m going to be posting a special interview with somebody who’s a part of the Office of Letters and Light and afiliated with Nanowrimo. Look for it in the week leading up to Christmas! And I’m taking suggestions for question ideas. Is there anything that you’d like to know about the people who make Nano and Script Frenzy happen? Leave them in the comments or email to chrisken zero at gmail dot com. If I use any of your questions, I’ll send you a digital cookie, and my heartfelt thanks.

And now, some more great stuff about the Stringing Words community! I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to get to twelve days of Stringing Words in December, but I may give it a try!

Today, I’ll focus on the monthly project threads. It’s a simple idea, but I’ve found it a powerful way to motivate myself. At the start of the month, you list some goals that you want to reach, and then, through the month, you cross off whatever you’ve finished, mark incremental progress for something that you’ve done halfway, make changes if your priorities have altered, and chat with other people in the thread, talking about what’s been easy, what’s proving tougher than you thought, and cheer each other on. Overall, it’s a lot of fun, and I’ve probably got a lot done over the past few years just because I put it on my monthly to-do list.

So – is there anything on your December to-do list? Or are you just relaxing and recovering from November?

Stringing Words recruiting drive

I’m happy to announce that I’m starting a recruiting drive for Stringing Words, the writer’s forum and community that I started to admin two months ago. SW is never going to be a big place or a well-known destination, but I wanted to get the word out about what a cool site it can be and possibly attract a few new regulars, and right now, in the middle of the third Platform-building campaign, sounded like a great time to do this.

Stringing Words was originally started by three incredible writers who met each other in the on-line writing events that sprouted up as ‘spin-offs’ from National Novel Writing Month: like JanNoWriMo, NaNoEdMo, and April Fools Novelling. Along with a few other regulars, they decided to set up a year-round community to stay in touch.

One of those founding admins was Gale, a friend of mine from the Hamilton NaNoWriMo group, and now one of the Hamilton ML’s. She’s the one who got me to sign up at Stringing Words – I don’t remember exactly when, because the original version of the community got hacked and lost, before it was on its own domain.

SW has meant a lot to me over the past three years or so, and helped me to push past my old limits, both as a writer and as a person. One by one each of the founders have moved on to focus on new opportunities, most recently Misa, who
announced the publication of her novel ‘Ironhaven’ this summer. That was when I decided to take on more of a leadership role myself.

There are many things that I love about Stringing Words. It’s a community of supportive writers, it’s a great place for declaring goals that you want to accomplish and having other people hold you accountable to them, and if you need it to be, it can be a good place to commiserate about how hard it can be sometimes to write, or to procrastinate.

So, if you think that you might be a good fit, or just want to come see what the fuss is all about, I’ll give you that link again: Stringing Words.

We now return you to your regular blog programming. Six Sentence Sunday should be up in – I dunno, twelve hours or something.

It’s Blog Awards time again!

Notes from Innisfree passed me the Versatile Blogger award – thanks so much! Turns out that I last accepted this award one year ago yesterday. So I figure that it’s a new awards year now, and anyway, I couldn’t resist the chance to take another chain award and pass it on to some of the cool Campaigner blogs that I’ve discovered recently, so here goes.

The rules for accepting the award:

1. Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post.

2. Share 7 things about yourself.

3. Pass this Award along to 15 recently discovered blogs and let them know about it.
And of course, if you don’t want to pass it along to anybody else, or even to accept it, I don’t mind. But I think it’s fun, at least once in a while, so here goes:

1. I only just finished reading the third Harry Potter book last month.
2. I’m very tall, around 6’3″ though I haven’t measured myself recently enough to remember precisely.
3. I look very ‘academic’, though I only have a Bachelor’s degree and never held a real teaching job.
4. I love to cook spaghetti and meat sauce.
5. If I pick up a penny on the street, I often throw it back over my shoulder for fun.
6. I mix fiber powder and sugarfree drink powder into my water every day at work.
7. I take plastic bags back to the grocery store to save the local five-cent bag fee.

And it pleases me very much to pass the Versatile blogger award along to:

Social Media versus the Zombies – follow me to victory!

Some of you have heard this story before, but I have an update on recent developments. To others, especially participants in the third Campaign, it may well be news.

About a month and a half ago, I posted about a challenge from a writer I met at the CSSF short fiction workshop this summer, Chuck. Chuck got a little zombie story published up at the ‘Tales of the Zombie War’ site, and said that he’d never been convinced about the idea of using social media to get readers, but that he’d give those of us with blogs or twitter accounts a chance to prove their worth – if we got 40 people to post comments to his story by next summer, he’d wear a t-shirt admitting defeat to the next Campbell Science Fiction Conference in Lawrence, Kansas.

I eagerly took up the challenge, and did what I could over July and August to spread the news about Chuck’s story and urge others to leave their comments. I sent an email to the 2nd crusader’s Yahoo group telling them about it. And the comment count on the story rose one at a time, or a few at once… up to 36.

We’re so close, and having risked all of my blogger cred on this little challenge, I am not about to give up before hitting 40. So please, my new Campaigner friends, I beg of you if you haven’t already done it – go read the story and reply with your thoughts, whether they’re good or bad.

We can’t let the zombies think that they’re better than bloggers after all – can we?