Gingerbread House Day - What do you read?

We all know that love makes a house a home.

What about gingerbread houses?

In honor of Gingerbread House Day - a holiday, I'm afraid I'd never heard of until this year, it may be the day to go shopping for your sweet gingerbread house decorations. 

Our family usually doesn't use the real thing, preferring the graham cracker method (above) to buying or making the gingerbread, but the results are fairly similar. Candy doors and windows, a lane of icing or snow, trees made out of colorful gumdrops.

Have you ever read a book that appeared to have all of the right elements - a plot, characters, setting, and dialogue, but the book was lacking something?

This 'lacking' may have been the takeaway value. It may have been the warmth that you somehow missed while reading the story. You may have been confused by the plot, or perhaps there were too many characters to keep track of, and you were continually skimming back through the book to find out who "Sue" was.

Books are kind of like gingerbread houses. They may have all of the right elements. But what makes a gingerbread house a gingerbread home, is how you feel when you read it.

The most eloquent words won't do that, but the placement of the words. And great authors know how to place them for optimum feeling - whether that feeling is the darkness called fear, the warmth of love, or even - sweet peace.

Juggling Writing and Marketing

It's been a fun ride the last couple of weeks, and it's time to put my feet up and do some writing. Marketing is fun in its own right but writing, shall we say, is a bit more like therapy. And I need some therapy today.

If you are finding that you're continually marketing your newest work and have no time to write the next, then it's time to do some juggling.

Photo by Manchester Library, courtesy of Flickr

If you've ever watched a juggler at work, you'll notice that all of the balls are continually in a rotating motion. Nothing is at a standstill unless a mistake is made and all of the balls come tumbling to the floor. The same is true of writing and marketing. When you're marketing, writing should take place and when you're writing, a bit of marketing should still be in movement.

The reason for this is simple; you'll continually have your work moving forward, and, at the same time, keep your own emotions in check. There will be less time for burnout because the options for moving forward are continually in motion.

When I find that I really don't want to market, or I really don't want to write, it's usually because I've forgotten about connecting both writing and marketing in my life. I've been forgetting one or the other in favor of struggle.

I don't know why it is that we think that we have to struggle, work painfully hard, and continue to do it day after day to make a success of our writing career. What we need to do is to listen to our heart, shift when we need to shift, and balance all of those things that bring joy to us.

In the end that's all we've got.