Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Conscious Responsibility



I just finished reading an article on leadership and responsibility, by Deepak Chopra. Here is the article, so you can read it too - The Conscious Lifestyle. Yes, indeed - this comes from Linked In! This is a social network that I joined years ago, but am only now starting to interact with in a consistent manner. I have joined a limited number of groups there, and follow a limited number of people in what they share through that site.

Although the article itself is on leadership, and the qualities it entails, I think that we can certainly place these thoughts in the world of writing. In general, I doubt that we consider ourselves leaders, but we have to remember that we do influence the people that read our words. We need to be aware of who we are, and what we are saying.

Chopra talks about responsibility as being the mark of a mature, conscious person. As writers, we have to be conscious of the people and things that influence us, and how they are shaping our perception of the world around us. Whatever genre we work in, and whether we are writing fiction or non-fiction, we need to speak from our own beliefs, from how we truly see the world. If in the middle of writing we start to feel uncomfortable, to have questions, we need to stop and see why we are having questions, and how we can resolve them. The work we present to our reading audience needs to be consistent, and to have a strong foundation. people may disagree with us, but they will follow us if we are authentic ... that is, if we are consistently who we are.

Chopra also talks about the responsible person as being willing to take educated risks, to  act on those intuitive leaps, and to think outside the box. (If you haven't seen the TED series of videos, you really need to check them out. Here is conscious responsibility to the max!) I like what Chopra has to say about being too cautious,too conservative. He says that these qualities can hold us back from taking those intuitive risks. I agree with him, because I have seen this in my own life. If I let my Cappie nature run away with me, I have a very boring life, and my work shows it!

I am going to stop here, and allow you my readers to read Mr. Chopra's article yourself. It is well worth the few minutes time sent!

As writer's, we have a responsibility to be all that we can be. Part of the process is recognizing that we do have an influence on our reading audience. May we all be consciously responsible!

(c) 2013 Bonnie Cehovet

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Long Nights

This has been another of those very long nights. Not complaining - I do my best work at night. But this has been a labor intensive, pay attention to detail marathon to put together the book that I am co-authoring with Brad Tesh. It is finally together, and we know what we need to add to it. Then it will need to be proofread a few times, edited a few times,and formatted for submission. Of course, submitting the book for distribution is the beginning of another process - promotion. This is a process that I don't like really well. 

I did the change-over from my Google Reader feed to a WordPress app - I m not very impressed with it. The exporting of info from the Google Reader went very well (thanks to a lady in the Google + Women community!), I just don't like the WordPress format. LOL I will continue to follow my Google Reader until they take it away from me on July 1st!

I am getting ready to start another e-book - this one on  the Art of Making Choices. Quite excited about this project!

Heads up on a very interesting lady - Mary Nale of Attune Magazine. Her near future plans include a series of writing broadcasts on Blog Talk Radio - you can access the schedule here. She is also accepting submissions in diverse categories for her quarterly, Attune Magazine.   

(c) 2000-2013 Bonnie Cehovet

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Google Closing RSS Feed Reader

 My RSS feed has been an important part of how I keep up with my friends, and with Internet life in general, for years now. I like Google products (I use Google chrome, g-mail, and am on Google Plus), and I also use the Google RSS Reader. I went into shock yesterday morning when I saw that as of July 1st, 2013,that reader will no longer be available! There was a note that I could download my info, so I did that. Still wasn't sure what I was going to do with it.

This am I found an article (on my RSS feed!) by MaAnna Stephenson of Blog Aid. I love her work - she does tutorials on Word Press and so much more! She takes the geek world down to the level that a non-techie like me can understand what is going on without being totally insulted. In this article she gives us the background on Google's decision to shut down their reader ... which in a way ticked me off (the decision to shut it down, not her article!). It seems to be going along with Facebook's changes in their news feed. 

An interesting side note - MaAnna is encouraging us to get our profiles up on Author Rank - something that I have already done. I got busy on that when it first came out, because I had a feeling that it was going to be important, even if I didn't see why. And I knew that it would take me a while to do,with my minimal techie skills. And it did. Well, not too long, but longer than it probably should have!  

The good news is ... MaAnna is going to be holding a free webinar on setting up MailChimp, the only free RSS to e-mail service available. I am going to set up MailChimp, and see how that works. (Crossing fingers.) Hey - I have until July 1st, when the Google Reader shuts down! 

There are valuable free reports on MaAnna's Blog Aid site on alternatives to Feedburner (the Google Reader Feed), and on using MailChimp. Blog Aid Resources

Off to try and make sense of all of this!

(c) March 2013 Bonnie Cehovet 




Monday, March 4, 2013

Creating A Facebook Event


I just created a Facebook event, Dream the Big Dream, and lived to tell about it! Facebook is really touchy ... they can do anything they want to do, and we have to put up with it. But we have to toe the line, or we get our accounts suspended! Luckily, the event template is a fill in the blank kind of thing,and the only thing that really could go wrong was the section for the event description. I went plain and simple ... don't want to get anybody's hackles up!

I am asking people to make the time on March 10th to visit my iLA site, and check out the application. Why choose one day, when the page is there 24/7? Because I ant people to commit to doing this, rather than saying "Okay, sounds good, I'll take a look at it when I can." They mean well, but how much follow-up can one expect? Not much. 

It was quite interesting going through my friends list and sending the invites. I had to make sure no one got invited multiple times (I have friends that are on my list in both personal and professional capacity), and that those I knew wouldn't be interested weren't bothered. We shall see how well I did or didn't do with this! ;-)

If  this works well, I will be creating future events for book launches and such. Once I get the hang of how this is done, I can be creative with the actual event. Watch out world!

(c) March 2013 Bonnie Cehovet  

Long Chapters Or Short Chapters - What Is Your Preference?

Does it make a difference to a reader whether the chapters in a book are long or short? It does to me. I like shorter chapters, as they feed...