Today I’m looking at finding the friendship in acquaintance and the acquaintance in friendship. I journaled a lot about how friendship is in acquaintance and acquaintance in friendship and it all came down to time. One has to be willing to put the time in to listen, to ask questions; one has to want to spend time with a person, concept, or idea.
Today’s prompt is “(blank) Story,” and it’s Quadrille Monday at dVerse Poets Pub where the word “wing” needs to be included in a poem of exactly 44 words.
Hour Story
Let’s pretend time broke a wing and can’t fly so your warmth next to me as we look out at the lake while the sun gets low in the sky and sparkles in our eyes won’t roam and you won’t look at your phone.
Friendship in Acquaintance and Acquaintance in Friendship by Maria L. Berg 2022
Today, I’m celebrating because I “won” NaNoWriMo yesterday by writing 50,000 words on my new novel draft. However, I want to complete my whole first draft since it’s going so well,so I reset my goal on the NaNoWriMo website for another 40,000 words. This ups the daily goal to over 2,353. It seems daunting, but my new “wake up and write on the novel” practice is working. I already have 1400 words on the day, and I haven’t really gotten into today’s planned writing. The only thing that’s bothering me about resetting my goal is I had to get rid of my original goal because they can’t overlap. Thus, my pretty win on the site is gone. I guess that’s a good motivator to meet my new goal. Still a bit of a bummer.
I want to say THANK YOU for this prompt for dVerse Monday Haibun. It is so easy to feel like I shouldn’t forgive because no one else shows compassion, or responds in kind, but that’s the wrong way to look.
A friend of mine helped me see that even when I want to give up on a human, there are so many reasons why people are what I see as mean to me and don’t understand me. It has nothing to do with me. My compassion is needed elsewhere.
Not By Choice
I did not come here by choice. I lost everything by staying and everything else by complying. But somehow I am now for use, the modern day Cinderella. That is how you are obtuse: You don’t remember. You didn’t see it; It is timing; I could not make it my fault: again.
Swimming in the lake
We came here every Summer
You are equal; too.
You can see why I put this under the revision topic, I’m revising my post of Gator McBumpypants’ first movie. Why didn’t I think of this yesterday? So, how did I do it? It was much easier than I thought.
When I clicked on Add Media above my draft’s text box, like I usually do to add pictures, I looked around and in the column on the left I clicked on Insert from URL. In a new tab, I went to the Youtube page for Gator’s video and copied the URL. When I pasted it into the box, TADA!, the video is now playable on my blog. So fun.
Now that Gator McBumpypants and his friend Herman have a youtube page, they wanted to find some fun videos to share. First they subscribed to other children’s books about alligators. Hear are a couple fun book videos:
I tried to change the video sizes so they were about half as big in this post, but assigning height and width in the html didn’t work (I turned off mobile in theme settings as per instructions) Any one know how to change the video size?
This morning I had an idea for other content to add to Gator and Herman’s YouTube page: Alligator crafts! First I thought of origami, but to Herman’s happy surprise, the Pterodactyl origami video was WAY cooler.
The best video for alligator crafts (Gator forgives the artist for saying he drew a crocodile) so far was this one:
One thing I have yet to figure out is how to get the videos I’m following to come up in the right hand column of my video. Does anyone have any advice? I’ve made a favorite videos playlist, I’ve picked out kids book channels to follow, but none of these things are showing up when I play my video. If you’d like to see Gator McBumpypants and friends favorite videos playlist, it is a tab on their YouTube channel here. I’ll keep working on this and update when I figure it out.
While I was searching for fun Pterodactyl kids books, I happened upon this great video and learned something I think I don’t want to know– Pterodactyls Aren’t Dinosaurs!
Of course, I had to immediately do some research and if you wanna listen to Science then hears a link
However, if you wanna keep believin’ hears some info here
I’m not facing facts yet, and I’m not ready to share this with Gator and Herman, so sadly the great video did not get in their favorites, yet.
Another thought on revision– Learn from my mistake. Make sure to pay attention to current events before launching your marketing campaign. Planning my big push the same week as the Ferguson decision, could have been avoided if I was paying attention to current events. I had no idea this could be a factor, but it is what people are talking about and paying attention to (as they should). The story of a cute bumpy stuffed alligator is a bit out of place in that discussion, except for the theme of not being afraid of people different from you. Perhaps that could be part of the discussion with children. That said, when planning a marketing campaign, give yourself enough time to see what else is happening during your time frame that could eclipse your efforts (again, as it should in my case).
Anyone have other video suggestions for Gator and Herman to add to their YouTube Favorites?
Gator McBumpypants and Herman’s First Movie is on Gator McBumpypants’ Youtube.com channel.
Since my writing life is completely consumed with promoting Gator McBumpypants Hears a Scary Noise this week, I’m jumping off schedule and continuing to talk about promoting your book. I announced my kindle free days everywhere I could think of yesterday, so how do I keep the internet’s attention today?
I stepped away from writing today and explored a couple other art forms. I took some pictures that didn’t get used in the books (book 2 coming soon!) and made a little youtube movie. One of the fun things that you can do with google+ is create a youtube channel. I made one for myself and a separate one called Gator McBumpypants and Friends.
Making the movie in Windows Live Movie Maker was pretty straight forward once I figured out that I could speed up the picture rate by using fractions in the duration box. The hardest part was picking some music since the program didn’t include music editing and just started the music choice from the beginning. Luckily, I have a large library of music I wrote, so I don’t have to infringe on anyone’s copyright.
This first film is just a quick, fun promo. I plan to do more with pages from the book and perhaps reading the first few pages. I’ve seen some really nice book promo videos online. I think video is a great way to get people excited about your book. Check out Michelle R. Eastman’s promo video for The Legend of Dust Bunnies, a Fairy’s Tale. Andy Mulberry did a really nice interview with Michelle R. Eastman on her blog andymulberry.com/blog
I also went over to RedBubble,com and made some Gator McBumpypants merchandise.
What about a fun T-shirt?
or a lovely tote bag?
or enjoy your hot beverages with Gator McBumpypants and his friend Herman the baby pterodactyl.
RedBubble is a great site where I’ve set up a portfolio of my photography. They will put my photos on a variety of merchandise including t-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, cards, pillow covers and the adorable items shown here. All would make great gifts! It is also, yet another social media site with a nice journal entry space where I’ve been letting people know about my kindle free days.
So, to sum up, book promotion doesn’t have to be hitting people over the head with your book and free kindle days announcements, it can be fun promotional art projects that then give you an excuse to go post about them on all your social media sites.
Anyone else found promotional ideas that are a bit outside the box?
As the happy holiday season is now upon us and many writers are wrapped up in NaNoWriMo, time is sucked away in more ways than usual and I’m guessing many blogs will be quite neglected over the next couple months. This made me think about guest posts. Not only looking to do some myself – gifts of time to my fellow bloggers, if you will- but also to invite bloggers to guest post here.
If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know I’ve set up a five day schedule with specific topics for each day and if you are new, here’s what I’m doing:
Thursday- Reading, book reviews, book lists, reading sites
Friday- Exploring, writing prompts, adventures, filling the creative well
Want to write on any of these topics? To be a guest writer on this blog, please let me know in the comments or send your post idea to mariaberg@mbercreations.com. Please, original (not previously posted on your blog) posts only. If I get enough interest maybe I’ll add Guest Post Saturday! I’m excited to get your outlook on these topics. Offering a guest post would be a lovely gift to me, to ease my fear and anxiety of running out of time to post while I make gifts, work on publishing the sequel to Gator McBumpypants Hears a Scary Noise, get over this stupid cold and try to revise my novel.
I look forward to hosting your fabulous writing and anyone whose interested in trading guest posts, or book reviews, I’d enjoy that as well. ‘Tis the Season for giving and I will do my best to give as much (or more) than I get.
Experience Writing 