Spreading more link love

Thanks to everyone who stopped by yesterday to make Love & Laughter’s first guest blogger feel welcome. With 60-plus page views, I’d call Keri Ford’s  visit a success. (Keri, please don’t tell me you were the visitor 50 of those 60 times.)

I’ve been adding to the list of articles I find intriguing, motivational or all-around hilarious. It’s time to spread the link love, so here are a few of my recent favorites. Enjoy!

— If you’re in need of a little motivation to get BICHOK (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard), try these instant motivation tips from The Writer magazine. They’re drawn from recent research in neurology and psychology, so you know you’re getting some top-notch advice. My favorite part? I was already doing many of these things.

— Jody Hedlund’s posts are always chock-full of great information. Such is the case with her recent missive on why writers should be on Pinterest. I was one of those on the fence about having one more social media site to eat away at writing time … but I finally took the plunge a few months ago. (Find me here, under Arlene Hittle.) I don’t spend a whole lot of time there … yet. But I have a few boards up and running. It’s fun to look at all the pretty photos — and someday, hopefully soon, I’ll be able to add my own novel to my “books I want to read” board. Wait — I should probably file it under “books I’ve read and loved” instead.

— From Chuck Wendig of Terrible Minds: 25 reasons I hate your main character. Gulp. Sure hope my main characters don’t fit any of those molds. I mean, I like them all. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be telling their stories … but I fear some of them may whine a little, or react instead of act, or have muddy motivation. So many sins. Is it even possible to avoid every single one?

— Way back in March, Kristin Lamb wrote a fantastic post on failure. (Let’s not talk about how I failed to read it until now, shall we?) My favorite line: “If we aren’t failing, then we aren’t doing anything interesting.” She also argues that failure makes us stronger. Since I have a huge fear of failure, I’m not sure I like that … but I can still see her point. She’s not the only one who feels that way, either. One of the things Bob Mayer said at his Desert Dreams workshop was something along the lines of “we need to do the thing we fear most” to succeed.

— Ready for a good laugh? Christina Dodd shared a link to this blog post on a terrible used cookbook from the ’70s called “Be Bold with Bananas.” Yes, the pictures are as terrible as you might imagine. I just hope it didn’t come from my mother’s cookbook shelf!