Jean Oram (.com)

One Month Challenge

No, I’m not going to make you eat bran for a specified period of time. (Hey, did you know William Shatner is 80! Hard to believe. He’s so youthful. Come to think of it, maybe we should be eating bran…)

Ruth Cardello (Hi, Ruth!) is doing a little one month promotional challenge over on AgentQuery Connect this month. She’s the author of Maid for the Billionaire and For Love or Legacy which she self-published in ebook format. Her books are doing so well that when the publishers come calling, she ends up turning them away because they CAN’T DO BETTER THAN SHE IS when it comes to showing her the money. Wow, eh?

Anyway, Ruth is a hard-working gal who spends an hour a day doing some publicity work for her books. And because her success is no longer a huge secret, she has writers begging her to share her secrets. It’s no secret, she wrote a great book followed by another one and then has been working hard to her titles on everyone’s lips and into their ereaders. But because Ruth doesn’t have a ton of time, she is ‘hosting’ the challenge as a way for writers/authors to step up, be motivated, keep themselves accountable, and to collaborate.

And because I’ve been rejected once again by a publisher for my platform not being big enough, I am joining her in the challenge. That’s right. I’m going to make some lemonade with these lemons and I’m going to give it a shot of vodka while I’m at it.

Honestly, why have this lovely platform building plan in my marketing plan for a book that is never going to sell because I haven’t built a platform? Hello? This is Tokyo. Yes, Jean? You aren’t big here either.

So what do you say? Are you with me? (Us?) And if you have any great platform building, promotional tips shoot them at me! I’ve got my catcher’s mitt on.

Writer Wednesday: The Generous Heart of T.K. Richardson

Often writers can be generous sorts, using their words to back causes and to raise money for charities. (They are a very cool, often socially aware group. Love it!) T.K. Richardson is no exception. In fact, I think this doll could be a poster girl for generosity.

You may recall T.K. from a previous interview some time ago while she was searching for an agent for her fantastic young adult book “Return the Heart.” Since then, she has been very busy writing and selling her books on her own. Not only that, she’s been putting her heart into a few worthy causes.

~

Without further ado, here’s T.K.:

You’ve been incredibly busy since the last time you were a guest. You have self-published your YA novel, “Return the Heart” and have book two (“Shield the Heart”) in that series coming out later this year as well as a novelette, “Courtship and the Kremlin.” You have also published a cookbook for teens (“Simmer: Recipes for the Teen Palate”), an anthology of poems (“Imagine: Poems and Short Stories”), created a Writers Resource Directory and a nonprofit organization called Partners In Print. As well, you will be appearing in an anthology of short stories called “Love, Me” which is due out this week.

“Love, Me” is an anthology of short stories of young love. Were you romantic as a teen?

Oh, I don’t know… I think all teens are to some degree. But Love, Me is really a special project. The profits will go to CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) for their work with kids in the foster care system. It goes along quite nicely with my nonprofit Partners in Print, a book donation program for foster children. Love, Me features some fantastic YA authors, too: Sarah Tregay, Shana Norris, Ela Lond, Amy Kinzer, Emily Ann Ward and me. I’m excited to see it come out this week. It’s an anthology of short romance stories for teens and it’s just in time for Valentine’s Day.

How does a teen cookbook differ from a ‘regular’ cookbook? What were some challenges in making this book for teens? (And I’m sure people want to know: Are there any secret family recipes/family favourites inside?)

I think what makes Simmer unique from a regular cookbook is that the recipes are set up differently. They’re the same recipes that I use, only I have the directions set up in step-by-step easy to follow ways. Where an adult would know what to do from one step to the next, beginning cooks don’t. And I think that’s what sets Simmer apart. And yes, there are some secret family recipes in the cookbook! The Peanut Butter Pies recipe is from my mother in law. It’s a family favorite at all holiday gatherings and I highly recommend it.

“Return the Heart” and “Shield the Heart” have a touch of Russian history. You are interested in some Russian authors as well. How did you become interested in Russian history?

When I first started reading Russian lit I was hooked. I spent more than 10 years reading nothing but Russian authors and literature to understand the finer points and the ‘hidden’ meanings to many of the stories I had to study their history to find out. After so many years, it was just a part of me, and I think this just naturally came out in my writing. But using Russian lit and history in a series for young adults was a surprising turn of events. I hope the stories I write will draw my readers to look deeper into the books that have inspired me.

Tell us a bit about Partners in Print.

Partners In Print is a grass roots book donation program that began in March of 2010 with an initial book drive that produced 422 books. Since that time we donated over 2,000 books to kids in foster care and we’ve recently opened our very own little book cottage where children in the foster care system can come and “shop” for free books. It’s truly a labor of love that keeps me connected to this silent community.

How can readers get involved with Partners In Print?

Our main goal is to encourage everyone to donate in their own communities. Most places have agencies that help children in the system and Partners in Print would like to reach all children. But we can only do that with the help of people in every community. It’s so easy to gather a few books together and donate, too. It promotes local communities and helps some of the most forgotten children. But for those who are unable to do that, we gladly take book donations and give them away on your behalf. Our mailing address is Partners In Print PO Box 82432 Bakersfield CA USA 93380

Foster children seem to have a special place in your heart with Partners in Print donating books to children in foster care, as well as donating the proceeds from the short story anthology (“Love, Me”) going to those who advocate for foster children in the courts. How did your passion for foster children come about?

My husband and I were foster parents for many years and during that time we cared for more than 100 abused and neglected children. Since we no longer foster, Partners In Print is our way of continuing to help children in out of home placement. It’s our way of still caring for them. Whether it’s donating books, or lending my writing to a book where the proceeds help their cause – it’s all with one goal in mind: give children hope, give them a voice, and give them a strong foundation to grow from. Books are a wonderful tool in the process.

What is on your bedside table right now?

My Bible, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevky, and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol.

As a lover of play and fresh air, I ask, what is your thing to do out of doors?

Oh, I’d have to say taking long walks outdoors. I just love soaking in the views.

~

Thanks, T.K.!

I have to say, T.K. is one of the busiest writers I know. You can find out more about her books and ordering them right here. You can also visit her gorgeous website and blog. Partners In Print as well as her Writer’s Resource Directory (you might even find a blog post written by yours truly!).

P.S. Love the cover designs!

Quick and Dirty Social Media for Writers: Pinterest

It’s Social Media Monday again. Funny how that happens every 7 days.

Today I share the fairly newish site, Pinterest. Here, you can pin images that capture your interest.

What is Pinterest? How Does it Work?

Basically, it is a virtual bulletin board. But it is also a social media site. Essentially, you find pictures you like on the internet and you ‘pin’ them to your own little bulletin board within the Pinterest site. Within your ‘site’ or ‘main board’ you can organize your pins into categories or sub-boards.

As for the ‘social’ aspect, on Pinterest you can follow other users and comment on images. You can also ‘repin’ other’s images so they appear on your board. You can also ‘like’ images. (You can ‘like’ images you thought were cool so they appear in a list. You can pin images and/or like them. Your likes and pins are kept separate.)

What Do You Use it For?

Pinterest can be used for fun images you find online like jokes or silly photos, for collecting hairstyle ideas, party/wedding ideas, crafts, redecorating ideas, beautiful photos, or for us writer types… hunks. Er. I mean, we can create boards to collect the visuals for our manuscripts. Some of us writers are visual types and like to keep photos on hand of people that look like our characters, buildings that are featured in our stories, or other images that inspire and help us create. With Pinterest we can do it all in one place and access it from anywhere. Ain’t the internet grand?

My repinned bunny over on Pinterest.
I have to admit, he is pretty darn cute.

Personally, I’ve been using Pinterest for my It’s All Kid’s Play project. And interestingly enough… when I joined Pinterest I had discovered that some of my crafts from the It’s All Kid’s Play blog were already being repinned around the site! Ever cool! (Yes, I feel pretty special.)

How Do You Join?

You can contact Pinterest for an invitation to join or have another member send you an invitation (if you want, you can drop me a line in the comment section and I’ll ‘refer’ you). You can also cruise around the Pinterest site without joining.

Already a Member?

Drop your Pinterest URL in the comment section and I’ll follow you. I’m always curious to see what others find interesting. And, of course, you can follow me too! I’m here: http://pinterest.com/jeanoram/

Enjoy!

Do you use Pinterest or something similar? What do you use it for?

When The Going Gets Tough… Write!

Things have not been going the way I would like them to this past week. (Argh, Universe! <shakes fist>) You know… you end up stuffing one’s face with Oreos. For the life of you, you can’t seem to recall passwords you use daily. The majority of the food in the fridge has somehow whizzed by its expiry date and nobody noticed or did anything about it.

Yep, one of those.

You need a little ‘getaway.’

In the midst of this month, I keep thinking “I really need to be writing something. I really do.”

Add 1 cup guilt, a large bag of ‘Should’, a box of ‘Desire’ and mix. Read a few inspiring posts (Matt Sinclair) or messages from other writer friends (Cat Woods). Fold in one long nap by baby and a lack of motivation to do laundry, toss in the oven for two hours at 450F. Pull it out of the oven and it turns out that little recipe was for getting some writing done.

Or at least it seems to be taking a few minutes to look over what you’ve got and planning your next move, and letting inspiration sort you out, smooth your feathers, and make you feel whole again. Either way, it’s more than you’ve done in over a month.

Nice, eh?

So, the next time the going gets tough, sit down. Write. It’ll make you feel good.

To quote the Comedy Network: It’s time well wasted.

Does writing soothe your soul?

Quick and Dirty Social Media For Writers: Social Bookmarking

For Social Media Monday… bookmarking on the web just got better.

Okay, okay. It got better years ago. I’m just getting around to exploring its potential.

You know when you find something great online and you don’t want to lose it? You bookmark that site/URL in your browser, right? And that’s great, right?

Well, um. It could be better. A lot better. It could be social bookmarking.

Reasons Browser Bookmarking Is For the Dogs

• You use more than one computer or internet device (i.e. computer, tablet, smart phone) at home
• You want to access your home bookmarks at work or vice versa
• You frequently kill computers and therefore lose browser bookmarks
• You don’t know how to back up bookmarks or reinstate them after you change to a new computer/device
• It never occurs to you to actually look for your bookmarks in your browser
• Sharing bookmarks when saved in your browser is time consuming and difficult

Tell Me More About This Social Bookmarking Thing

Social bookmarking is website bookmarking tool that taps into the wisdom of crowds. That is, if you want it to.

At it’s most basic, sites like Delicious (used to be Del.icio.us and is still a free service), can be a place on the web to privately tack a few URLs you don’t want to lose.

At it’s most sophisticated, it can be a place where you tack URLs along with pictures, a synopsis, tags, titles, and notes, all organized into a topic ‘stack’ that you can ‘publish’ (which means share with other people on the web).

A Quick Rundown on The ‘Social’ Aspect

• You can see how many times that same URL has been saved by other users
• You can share your links with others who are interested
• You can peek into other stacks and find more links to things you are interested in
• You can use tags to search for your interests
• And, say you have a new writing protege, you could email your links to him/her.

That’s the quick and dirty lowdown on social bookmarking. Do you use it? What do you use? Do you like it?

NOTE: I was contacted by Grazely.com after writing this post and they have built a lovely social bookmarking site similar to what I have described here along with some fabulous encryption additions. So, if you are shopping for a new bookmarking dealy, be sure to stop by their fab site: www.grazely.com

Friday Fun: Bristle Bots

Got your geek on? (If not, see note at the end of the post.)

This is a fun little something sure to delight kids (and adults) and I just had to share it. All you need is a toothbrush, battery, and pager motor (the vibrating part–get that out of a dead cell phone) and a few other odds and ends. Put those together and what do you have? A bristle bot! It moves. It really, really moves! Check it out:

This is the one made by Evil Mad Scientist Labratories. You can see the how-to video (and see how it moves–around 2:30 min into the video) and read the full instructions here, as well as read the tweaks and tips in the comment section. I soooo want to try this!

NOTE: If you don’t have your geek on, you can buy kits through Klutz. I bought this for my nephew for Christmas and my niece was wondering why she didn’t get one. Sorry, girl!

Have you seen any great geek crafts lately?

Quick & Dirty Social Media For Writers: RSS & RSS Readers

RSS. Need I say more? Yes?

Okay. Let’s get started. I am not a tech god of any sort, so this is going to be quick and dirty. If you have suggestions, ideas, favourites, links, or corrections, feel free to jump on that in the comments section.

Why you might need an RSS Reader

If you are like me, you have a pile of tabs open on your browser (currently only 26! Woot, woot!). Some are sites you go to frequently (for me: weather, AQC, Twitter), some are ones you want to keep on top of (those lovely folks who had me over on their blogs last week, agent or publisher blogs, news), others are ones you really should read (articles, links sent by others to check out) and some may be links you don’t want to lose (I’ll talk about how to keep on top of those later in the week).

However, sometimes you may find you have so many tabs open your browser bogs down or you just can’t find things anymore. What to do?

In comes RSS and RSS readers.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. You may have seen the chicklet on blogs and websites. Basically, RSS is the magic of the geekiest part of the internet working behind the scenes to notify you that new content has been uploaded to the sites you stalk, or wish you could stalk if only you were more organized.

RSS Chicklet and its buddies
(If, for example, you were using a RSS reader by Newsgator, you would click on the newsgator button to add the RSS feed to your reader.)

So, say you want to read all of the latest posts for JeanOram.com, but darn that Jean, her blog posts are posted so randomly! (You will notice 3 chicklets on my blog–top corner is blog, the others by the Twitter feeds are so you can RSS my Twitter feeds. Handy, eh?) How on earth do you know when to go and check to see if there is something new? This is part of the magic of RSS. The other part are…

RSS Readers (also called Aggregators and Feed Readers)

Before you start clicking on RSS chicklets, you need an aggregator. An aggregator gathers all those blogs feeds (RSS for those sites you want to stalk/follow) and puts them in one nice little organized spot for you.

Essentially you have three options. You can use a web-based reader (handy if you want to use more than one computer to check feeds), software you download onto your computer, or a mobile device based do hickey.

Keeping this quick and dirty, let’s stick to the most basic and common–the web-based RSS reader. (You can Google the others if you are interested or tell us a bit about them in the comment section if you so desire.)

The top two to hit my radar are Google Reader which I used to use, and Yahoo! Reader which I have now switched to. Why? Because Yahoo is pretty and it is simple. It does not overwhelm me. I found the ‘new’ layout of Google Reader a bit like a laundry list (that looks a lot like my inbox) of things I had to read. Frankly, it was overwhelming having all those blog post titles lined up, bolded because I hadn’t read them, and shouting at me. It felt like too much to read. The old Google layout, and the one I’m using for Yahoo! Reader are a bunch of lovely boxes–one for each RSS feed–and contain the latest three feeds (you can tweak that), as well as ‘candy feeds’ like my horoscope. You can also click and drag all your RSS feed bits around. For example, the blogs I really don’t want to miss out on are pinned at the top of my Yahoo! Reader webpage.

My Yahoo! Reader Page

The use of both of these readers are free as long as you have an account–also free. (Free because there are ads, of course.)

There are a TON of other readers out there. Do a little snooping and see what meets your needs and strikes your fancy.

Have Reader, Now What?: Putting it All Together

You’ve got your RSS reader set up and ready to go. Find those sites you want to follow and look on their page for the RSS chicklet shown above. (It may be tiny or different coloured. It can also be completely different. But usually, it is that chicklet in some form.) Click on the chicklet. It will give you an URL (usually ending with ‘feed’) to copy. Copy it. Pop over to your reader. There should be a button that says something like, “Add content.” Paste the link in the box that shows up when you click on it. Voila. It is THAT easy!

You should now start getting feed from that site. Now, each time there is a new post on that site, it will show up as a link in your reader. (Some readers download all the content (whole post) so you don’t have to leave the reader. On the other hand, some sites don’t allow the whole article to be sent via RSS so you do have to visit the site. However, you now know when to go over there and often have enough info in your reader to decide whether it is something that interests you and is worth popping over to read.)

I Want To Use RSS for My Blog! How Do I Do It?

This depends on your site. If you are using Blogger, it is a lovely little gadget right in Blogger. Same with most other blogging applications such as WordPress. A couple of clicks and you have a chicklet on your blog for people to click on.

Enjoy!

Questions? Comments? Tips to share? Go for it… over to you.

(Join me next Social Media Monday for information on Social Bookmarking!)

Know Yourself + Writing = Efficiency?

I’ve had an article by Rachel Aaron open in my browser for almost a month now. Why? Well, I’ve been meaning to talk about it. Here’s why. She went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Yeah, I like to think of this article as: How to Write As If You Are Insanely Caffeinated. Or: How to Write Like You Are On Fire and Only Writing Like the Dickens Will Save Your Tushie.)

No, she didn’t just stay at her computer for longer hours and beat herself into submission. She took a good long look at how she was writing. She figured out when her most productive time of the day was, figured out beforehand where she wanted the scene to go and got herself enthusiastic about what she was about to write. As she said, “If I had scenes that were boring enough that I didn’t want to write them, then there was no way in hell anyone would want to read them. This was my novel, after all. If I didn’t love it, no one would.”

Is that smart or what?

How about you? Do you know when you are most productive? What do you do to jazz yourself up about what you are about to write?