Writing

You are currently browsing the archive for the Writing category.

After living high on the hog for over a week in my jungle palace, I’m heading down the hill into town where there are less frogs, more restaurants and I’ll have to share a pool.

I celebrated a successful morning of writing seeing just how waterproof my non-waterproof camera is.

YouTube Preview Image

Tags: , , , ,

So, after the extremely satisfying task of express mailing my signed contract for Book #3 off to my agent in NY…

I'm in the mountains of Bali and this will be on my agent's desk in NYC in 3 days?! Humans really can be so impressive sometimes.

…I’m on my way back from the supermarket, winding my way down a cute little shoppy street and accidentally hobble right into The Monkey Forest (didn’t realize where I was) with a bagful of bananas.

Doh!
A blurry minute of shredded plastic and flying bananas later, I’m whisked off to my hotel on the back of a motorcycle taxi.

I would now like to officially thank The Universe for its continued support in the writing of my soon-to-be Bestselling book in the following ways:

1.) Providing me with Blimpy, The Ankle.

2.) Unleashing torrential downpours every time I’m writing and attempt to get up and procrastinate.  Every time. Seriously, I even think of going out to get a bowl of something called something like bebek betutu when I’m not really even that hungry or take a swim or go see if I can’t round up some more of them sweet smelling flowers and the skies open up.  It’s honestly a little creepy.

3.) Sicking a gang of monkeys on me when I attempt to turn a quick trip into town to mail off my contract into a massive shopping bender even though my ankle feels like lots of tiny teeth are chewing on it.  And it has, of course, suddenly started to rain.

4.) Shutting down the entire island of Bali today for Nyebi (Hindu New Years), making it basically illegal for me to do anything other than write.

I’m scared if I take a whole day off I’ll go blind.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I almost didn’t come to Bali.

In my opinion, Bali is for amateurs.  Everyone who has a yoga mat and a passport and a mid life crisis has been to Bali.

Plus, if I hear one more person utter the words Eat, Pray, or Love in reference to my life I’m going to start screaming and never stop.

I’m so much more original than all that.
So much more adventurous.
Way cooler, thank you very much.

Luckily, I realized that these are really stupid reasons to not visit what I have quickly come to recognize as paradise (please see my Huffington Post article on the ill effects of pride and general egomaniacal fatheadedness), and am so in love with this place I spent all day yesterday looking for houses to rent.

 

Hi! I'm an idiot!

 

Alam Indah Hotel, Ubud

3 Brothers Inn, Legian

Pita Maha Resort, Ubud

Bali is all about the things I love like beaches and monkey jungles and temples and nice people and outdoor showers and sweet smelling flowers and never getting cold and not in the way L.A. pretends to never get cold but REALLY never getting cold and coral reefs and great food and I’m so inspired to write my book here I could weep.

Jungle Office #33: Alam Indah Hotel, Ubud Bali

Plus, Eat, Pray, Love wasn’t soooo bad.

AND, speaking of my book, and my impending Balinese residency that has me wanting to do nothing but explore every last monkey crack and crevice of this place – The Universe has generously stepped in and provided me with the perfect ankle injury to make sure I actually sit my ass down to write the damn thing instead.

An injury that reportedly won’t fully heal for several months, which is how long it takes to write a book.

An injury that even revered Balinese healers can’t heal (because he got the memo from The Universe perhaps?  Or from my agent?)

This seemingly mystical exchange was so fucking painful it's a miracle I didn't kick him in the beard.

An injury that has also provided the perfect material for the intro of my book, which is all about how we have already been given exactly what we need to live the lives we love, if only we’d change how we look at things.

It’s also why every shot on this page is of the many hotels I’ve stayed at.  Me and Club Foot Jones don’t get out much, but I really don’t care because I live here now and can see it later.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Me feeling extremely self-satisfied about my situation, only to be soaked to the bone and nearly swept off to sea moments later.

Less than a week ago (really??!) I landed in the home of my dear pal, Nancy Irvine, in Auckland, New Zealand.  Nancy and I worked together at CBS Records/Sony Music in NYC back in the days when we could stay awake past 11pm and order enough sushi on the corporate credit card to sink a record company.

Nancy, her boys, their pigs

We took a little road trip to a beach house in a place called Whangapoua (pronounced Fongapoouh), where we spent a blissful couple of days surrounded by rolling hills, sheep, blue green sea and jungle on one of the best decks I’ve ever cocktail houred on.

I’ve never been to New Zealand before and had no idea how insanely beautiful it is.  Everywhere you turn.  It’s like, really New Zealand?  ANOTHER perfect beach?  Don’t you have anything better to do?

Whangapoua Beach

On our way to New Chums Beach

We walked down our perfect beach, through an extremely muddy jungle over to New Chums Beach, which is touted as one of the Top 20 Beaches in the World – a title that seems rather unnecessarily celebratory in a country where the coastline that runs along the freeway could bring a person to tears.

 

I’m in New Zealand on a world-wide quest in search of the perfect place to write my new book, and have already started taking notes for my follow-up book which will apparently be all about my search for the perfect place to write my new book.  And all the books to follow.

A search that I’ll be on for a lifetime if all goes according to plan.

Hokey Pokey ice cream in Kaituna. I don't know what any of that means.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

In 2002 I published my very first book:

Today I’m inspired to talk about my dear old book because this week, in 2012, it appears in Oprah Magazine.  Page 131 to be exact.

Look closely and you can see my mother holding it up.
I’m the blur on the bottom left.

As I mentioned in my recent TEDx Talk, one fear I had around deciding to cut the cord and live the home-free lifestyle was what the hell is gonna happen to my mail?

Because I have the sweetest mother (who is still talking to me even after posting a picture of her in bed in her robe w/o make-up on in the aforementioned TEDx talk), she has now become my postmistress.

And she is constantly forced to get in front of her computer, fire up Skype, and hold up photos of my friends on the Christmas cards that were forwarded to her house, read aloud to me from the DMV about my upcoming car registration and yesterday, hold up O Magazine so I could get a screen shot because I refuse to buy it and lug it all over the globe with me.

A bit higher.  Great, now move to the right.

Here?

A little farther.  Perfect!  Wait, it’s blurry.  Let me try again.  You moved!

Sorry.

Back to the left.  Good.

My arms hurt.  I’m putting this down.

It took us a good ten minutes and much blood loss in my mother’s arms to get a rather crappy picture of it, but the important thing is IT EXISTS!  My little book that could keeps on keeping on!

And now it’s not only being talked about on page 131 by Malin Akerman in Oprah Magazine, but they’re taking an excerpt from it for an APP they’re making for the new iPad – doot doo doo!

So for all of you out there who are too lazy or scared to get off your asses and write your books or start a band or paint a picture or quit your job and start your own business…

Do it.

 

Because opportunity is out there whether you decide to show up or not.

And if you don’t show up, it’ll just go to someone else.

And one day a very lovely and very Swedish actress may be blabbing about you in a very O magazine.

Tags: , , , , , ,

It’s official, ma new little baby has a home!

My next book, You Are a Badass, Now Start Acting Like One:  How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Live Large and In Charge was scooped up by Jennifer Kasius at Running Press and will be coming out in hardcover sometime next year.

Woo!  Hooooooo!

I’m rill excited to work with my new editor because we share the same name, she’s great pals with another beloved editor of mine, Amanda Patton, who worked on The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, and she said she likes the dress I wore in my promo video.

One of the reasons I love being an author is that you work very closely with your editor.  Just.  Your. Editor.  Unlike screenwriting or TV writing where you must answer to countless studio executives and development people and producers, many of whom are great people, but there are just so freakin many of them – how the hell are any of your words and ideas ever supposed to make it onto the page when they have to go through such a giant spanking machine of opinions?  Answer = they often don’t.

So it’s very important that you like this editor of yours who you will be working side by side with. Which, thankfully, I already do.

I’m also rill excited because these are the people who brought us the NY Times Bestselling dieting book, Skinny Bitch: A No-Nonsense, Tough-Love Guide for Savvy Girls Who Want to Stop Eating Crap and Start Looking Fabulous! Even though I’m not a dieter, I am a fan of cursing and sentences such as, “The first thing you need to do is give up your gross vices.  Don’t act surprised!  You cannot keep eating the same shit and expect to get skinny.”

And lastly, now that I have a deal, I have an excuse to buy a plane ticket to somewhere I’ve always wanted to go and write it!  Life, she am good.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve spent the past week (?) I have no idea anymore, at my dear pal Katharine Dever’s place in Bristol, UK.

Last time I saw Katharine we drove to San Francisco from LA for the night, attended an event she was part of, raised a wee bit of hell, discovered our mutual adoration of Dolly Parton and made the long trip back home.

This time we watched “9-5″ and narrowly avoided being trounced by cows in a field near her house.

Climbing a barbed wire fence = uninvited

They don't look scary but they kind of really were

I don’t know if it was because we were trespassing on their turf or if they sensed that we’d dined on beef stroganoff the night before, but they, all 20 of them, ran at us at once.

The evil stroag

I started writing a novel a couple years ago and the problem with it is that I’ve got these great characters who I love and really enjoy writing, but I’ve got no plot.  They’re all just sitting there, staring at me, growing into real people, spitting out witty one liners, while they wait for me to give them something to DO.

It reminds me a bit of this post.

Because nothing actually happened after the cows ran up and scared the crap out of us.  They just started sniffing around and then we took a bunch of pictures with them and then we went for a walk.

Doop de doo.

But I have loved loved loved my stay here.  Katharine is one of my favorite people and England is just so…English – stone houses, regal gardens, blustery winds, proper manners, hilarious verbiage:

Ah it’s crap, it’s pants

Let me just get my bits and pieces together

You want some crisps then?

I showed up for a few days and ended up not really leaving.  But tomorrow I finally go to  London to see another friend, then California for some meetings and then………………it remains to be seen.

Plots.  Who needs them?

Tags: , , , , , , ,

I went to a college where we took one class at a time. We basically learned a sememster’s worth of work in 3 1/2 weeks and at the end of each “block” we’d get a break for 5 days. My beloved alma mater, The Colorado College, taught me:

1.) One must take a serious vacation every month
2.) How to drink beer out of a funnel
3.) How to get a crapload of stuff done in a very short amount of time.

It really proved that old saying which I’m not even really sure is old and I’m not really sure exactly how it went but it’s something like:
If you have something to do, it will take you as long as you have to complete it.

So, if you have, oh, let’s just say hypothetically, a week to finish your book proposal, it will take you a week. If you have 6 months, it’ll take you six months. It’s like when we eat when we’re not hungry – whatever you give us, we’ll keep putting in our mouths.

As you may have picked up on, I just finished my first Book Proposal in a Week Bootcamp and even I, The Queen of Cram, was blown away by how successful so many people in the group were. And I’m going to share with you some of the reasons why.

Not only is there real power in DECIDING that you’re going to finish something by a certain goal date, no matter what, but we really tapped into some great tricks on how to get a lot done in a small amount of time. Here are some tools you can start using right now to get whatever it is that you’ve been putting off done NOW:

1. Find Your Prime Time
My sister is not a morning person. I remember when we were growing up, watching her try and crawl out of bed for school as if she’d just been beaten with a club. Meanwhile, every morning I’d wake up, my eyes would pop open, I’d spring out of bed, ready to go, chatty chatterson while Jill would fumble around like the walking dead.

Hence, I believe we are born a certain way and we all shine at certain times of the day. Figure out which is your prime time and make sure you do everything you can to get the bulk of whatever you have to do done at that time.

2. Chunk Out Your Time
If you say, “I’m gonna spend the entire day writing,” you will most likely spend the entire day:
Sitting down to write
Checking your emails
Cleaning your bathroom
Calling your mom
Writing
Making a lasagna
Taking a walk
Re-organizing your closet
Writing
Going to bed

We waste so much time when we set goals that are too big. It’s like lifting weights – if you lift something way too heavy, you won’t budge it. And if you lift something too lite, you won’t grow. Find a chunk of time that pushes you but isn’t too far out of your reality and hold yourself to it.

3. Set a Timer
When you find your golden hour and you create chunks of time to do your work, I highly recommend setting a timer, dorky as this may sound. Because here’s the thing – when looking for a distraction, we get very creative. And desparate. Constantly checking the time to see if your time is up becomes a distraction, so setting a timer allows you to focus that much more. Plus, if you get a timer that ticks, it can cheer you on and make you feel like you’re racing the clock.

IMPORTANT TIMER USAGE NOTE: Once that timer is set, you are unauthorized to get up for any reason – check your emails, answer the phone, pee, stretch, do anything that isn’t directly related to the task at hand.

4. Get Into Reality
Oh the drama we create for ourselves! I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve worked with who are completely freaked out by how much they have to do and there is no time and if only they didn’t have to blah they could blah and blah blah blah…..this is when it’s time for a reality check. Really sitting down and looking at what you have in front of you is an incredibly calming practice. Take a serious look at how long each thing on your list will take you. Then figure out what you can toss. Then figure out what you can delegate. Then put them in order of priority. Then do them. I promise you, you’ll be very pleasantly surprised. And finished before you know it.

Tags: , , , ,

I was going to make today’s post a little sneak preview of the call I’m doing later this afternoon where I will divulge the secrets of 3 of my favorite and insanely successful bloggers and nonfiction authors (which you can sign up for HERE).

I started by writing about one of the heaviest hitters of them all, Seth Godin, and got so sucked into his story of how he became a bestselling author many times over that now there’s no room for the others because I would like to leave the house at some point today and I’m still in my robe as I write this.

:-/

But his ideas are so interesting and different that I had to share them all with you. As you read them, you’re unauthorized to think, well, he knows about computers and he has a big list and he’s already an established writer – all of his ideas can apply to you no matter where you’re at if you get creative.

This afternoon on the call, I’ll go into some other methods that other people used, but right now, it’s Sethapalooza.

This post is taken from a video I watched of Seth’s presentation from O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, New York City, NY, February 11, 2008 called 10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books

TIP #1: GIVE 1/3 OF YOUR BOOK AWAY FOR FREE

After talking his publisher into letting him give 1/3 of this book away for free, Seth spent $400 building a semi-crappy website for it and told people to send him an email and he’d email them the first 1/3 of the book for free. He did this in one really long email that, in several places, said click here if you’re tired of reading this and you’d rather just buy the whole book. That’s all he did to market it and ¼ of a million people took him up on the free sample, then enough people bought it to make it a bestseller. (If you’re already freaking out that you could never reach that many people, check out my post on driving traffic to your blog HERE) In hindsight, he wished he’d said “I’ll send you something every week the rest of your life until you die,” and continued selling things to these same people, but alas, he didn’t.

TIP #2: GIVE YOUR ENTIRE BOOK AWAY FOR FREE


Because this book is all about the concept that ideas that spread that win, he decided to focus on the spreading and give it away for free. He went out and spent anoather $400 on another semi-crappy website and told people they could download the whole book for free on a PDF file. Millions of people went ahead and downloaded it for free, and loved it, but hated reading it in that format. So he printed up a hardcover copy that he sold for $40 on Amazon and in limited distribution at a few other places and it became an Amazon bestseller because everyone already knew about it. He talks about how the book was a souvenir – if people like an experience, they want a souvenir to keep. This is how he thinks you should look at books.

TIP #3: MAKE IT SUPER CHEAP AND DO IT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DOES


This book was an ebook about website design that he sold only at Amazon for a couple of bucks. Because it was one of the first ebooks on this topic and was cheaper than anything else out there, people were willing to try it out and because it was awesome, the word spread and more and more people bought it. He talks about how volume has to be one of your goals. The more a book sells, the easier and easier it becomes to sell more because of word of mouth.

TIP #4: DON’T DO IT THE TRADITIONAL WAY
I just realized I forgot to make note of which book this was and instead of sift through the video again for who knows how long until I find it, I’m just gonna go ahead and leave it out. All you need to know is that he decided to go the traditional route with this one, dropped a wad building a fancy website, put ads on it, put up billboards in San Francisco, basically played by book publishing rules and it didn’t do that great because, as he says, he didn’t focus enough on using some of these other tools that had brought him such huge success before.

TIP #5: USE PACKAGING THAT SCREAMS “LOOK AT ME!”


This time around he decided to self-publish and get crazy with his packaging. He started by publishing an excerpt of the book in Fast Company Magazine , a magazine he was a columnist for that had 1/2 million readers, and offered everyone a copy for free if they sent in 5 bucks for shipping and handling. He stated that there were only a limited amount of copies and mailed the book out in a purple milk carton. Not in a box, just in the milk carton itself, so that when people got it, it became a conversation piece. If it was sitting on their desk at the office or their table at home, people had to ask “what the hell is that?” He mailed out 5 thousand, all of which had the URL to his website on the carton itself next to some copy explaining that if you wanted your own copy for free, you could only get them in bulk 12 at a time. So you had to send in 5 bucks for shipping and handling each, but the book itself was free. This way, people would get their copy and give the other 11 away, thereby spreading the word and starting a conversation about his ideas.

TIP #6: MAKE THE BOOK THE FOUNDATION FOR YOUR BLOG


This one was all about his blog. He built a blog talking about marketing, elaborating on the ideas that were in the book so that anyone following his blog eventually wanted to buy the book to get his original ideas. He based this on the method the Freakanomics guys were using. Today they blog about stuff that’s not even in the book, but if you get into their blog you’ll want to learn about the foundation of what they’re talking about and buy the book.

TIP #7: FIGURE OUT HOW TO BE MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL


Books sell much better when other people write about them than when the author writes about them. So if you write content that will hugely benefit people, they’ll write about it because it’ll make them look good (sort of like what I’m doing right now). With this book he decided to do this in person and go on a book tour. He posted on his blog and said he’d come to your city and give a talk if you organized it and guaranteed to get 500 people in the room. The people who set up the talks made no money but increased their status in the community by organizing the them. Everyone of them has written Seth and told him how those connections helped them immensely. With this method he helped his fans, spread the word and sold thousand of books.

TIP #8: JOINT VENTURE WITH OTHER PEOPLE AND GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE


This is one of the best ways to increase your exposure – piggyback on other people’s lists. For this book Seth hired someone to contact bloggers who wanted to host a podcast to join him for an hour long conversation. He asked them to invite all their readers, thereby getting Seth new exposure, giving valuable content to the blogger’s readers, making the bloggers look like superstars and then created another cheapo website to send everybody to where the podcasts were given away for free.

Here’s a short recap of all these ideas:
• Books are souvenirs – there’s nothing in a book that you can’t get online for free anyway so if you make the content good enough, people will want to own a copy.
• Permission is the only asset – deliver messages to people who want to get them. If they don’t hear from you and they complain, that’s permission. You want to appeal to your perfect audience and provide them with valuable content, not inflict yourself on people who aren’t your target market.
• Conversations are marketing. If you can make people talk about what you’re doing because you’re writing brilliant stuff, then you win.
• Words for readers, not readers for words. You’re not in the business of finding readers for your words. You need to find words for your readers. Once you build the permission base, ask yourself what do my readers want next? When you have a dedicated list, go out and find things they want to read about and the word will spread.
• Blogs work. It’s the nature of dripping ideas into a place where they can spread. Ideas online will spread. If you’re an author who doesn’t have an idea that will spread, you shouldn’t write the book.
• It’s not about selling books. Focus on putting out great ideas, then focus on creating interest and excitement around those ideas and the books will sell themselves.

Authors are idea merchants. Ideas that spread win. Free ideas spread faster. The way you monetize is buy selling souvenirs. This, she is the Seth Godin credo.

And now I’m going to get dressed.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

sixty mile, nine day Chinese traffic jam

This photo is of a traffic jam in China that spanned over 60 miles and lasted 9 days.

SIXTY MILES AND NINE DAYS!

Ow. Ch.

As someone who is only mildly interested in technology, when I first started researching all the ins and outs of blogging and driving traffic and SEO and analytics and pingbacks and Technorati postings, it elicited the same response that imagining myself stuck in a Chinese traffic jam did.

So, let me begin by saying that there are officially 8 bazillion ways to drive traffic to your blog, but I am only going to give you some that I find most useful.

Some are easy to understand, and some are much more technically oriented than others and will have you, if you’re anything like me, glazed over and playing with your lip in lieu of actually incorporating them into your blog yourself, but you need to know about them so I’m including them.

Here goes nothin!

How To Create Your Own Chinese Traffic Jam:

At the very tippy top of the list is the most important of all traffic drivers. You have no business blogging, at all, if you don’t make sure to follow this seemingly simple and obvious rule:

PROVIDE AWESOME CONTENT!

It seems like a no-brainer but if you’ve ever nosed around the blogsphere, you understand why I’m putting it in all caps.

Here are some tips on how to write good content:
- Write stuff that’s topical, that people are searching for right now
- Break news if possible, if you hear about something insane and newsworthy, get on it before anyone else does
- Also write stuff that’s got a long shelf life, that people can refer to years after it’s written (and send their friends to read long after it’s written)
- Make your posts easy and fun to read, break up paragraphs, use bullet points, put in pictures and video
- Do interviews with well known, searchable people who will hopefully link to your post from their own, highly-visited blog
- Do something ongoing, give people a reason to keep coming back. For example, if you have a mommy blog and declare September “how to get more sleep month” people will keep returning for your tips.
- Entice them at the end of each post – leave a hanging question or suggest that you’ll go deeper with your next post, share more tips, show a naked picture of grandpa, etc.
- WRITE THINGS THAT ARE USEFUL TO YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

• Be active in forums in your area of expertise and link back to your blog

• Exchange links with other bloggers

• Submit your blog to blog directories (or have your assistant do it). This will provide the ever-hallowed links back to your blog as well as get you exposure. Here’s a great article on 20 good ones to submit to.

• Use Isnare to get your articles circulated in article directories as well as sites that offer up content for newsletter publishers.

• Make sure your blog URL is in the signature of every email you send and on all your business cards and brochures.

• Write short ebooks and allow other bloggers to give them away for free – make sure to put your blog url throughout the information and make sure to make the information GOOD.

• Be a guest writer on other blogs.

• Get an account at Technorati (an internet search engine for searching blogs) and make use of their tags in your posts.

• Submit your RSS feed to feed directories. Again, get that assistant on this. Here are some good ones.

• Bookmark your blog posts at socialposter. This will instantly submit them to multiple social driven sites at once such as digg, reddit, del.ico.us, stumbleupon, etc. so you don’t have to do each one separately.

• How you doing – you still with me? WAKE UP!

When you post a photo, make sure to write a clear description of it in the “alternate text” option (a box for this will appear when you go to insert a picture on your blog). For example, the alt text for the photo in this post should be “China’s nine day, sixty mile traffic jam” rather than “holy crap, kill me now!” It will not only let people who’s browsers are slow know what’s they should be looking at, but it will make your post more searchable.

• Encourage your readers to put your posts on all the social bookmarking sites like digg, technorati, del.ico.us, reddit, etc.

• Invite other people to chime in on a topic and post it on Craigslist, FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, everywhere you can think of. For example, invite mommys to email you with their best tip for getting sleep. Then compile the best ones, post them on your blog and ALERT the mommys whose tips you’re using that you’re using them and ask them to spread the word about the post they’re in.

• Create some sort of hilarious or shocking or otherwise noteworthy video, post it on your blog and Facebook and everywhere you can and try to get it to go viral. Make sure the URL to your blog appears in the video.

• Get the hell out of the house and network – go to seminars and meetings where your target market will be, charm them with your winning personality, talk about your blog and hand them your card.

• Come up with tasty tidbits from each post and put them on FB, Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Use keywords – figure out exactly what your target market is doing google searches for and use those words in your posts as often as possible.

• Try to come up with a good URL that includes a keyword or two. Also, buy the misspellings of your URL and forward them to your blog so if people type in the wrong thing, they can still find you.

• Make the title of your posts obvious and easily searchable rather than merely cute and witty. If you can do all three, you win, but always err on the side of searchable.

• Answer questions at Yahoo Answers to get exposure and leave people totally impressed by how smart you are.

• Get a VA (virtual assistant) and hand off as much of this to them as you can!

Tags: , , , , , , ,

« Older entries