Perseids & 2 Free Courses
(c) Mike Shaw
Sometimes, I’m not sure where to begin. Can you relate? I think the recent Perseid meteor shower sums up this feeling quite well. It featured nearly 200 meteors per hour at its peak. With so much sparkling and fading in an instant, how can a writer possibly choose one starting point over another?
But we must make choices, and this month one choice I made caused a bit of a stir. Proximity Magazine published my experimental essay, “MISSING,” about a young man from Michigan who disappeared in 2010. While the essay has been praised and widely shared–and is even taught in a graduate writing program–it was also taken down from the magazine’s website for a period of 5 days while the family, editors, and I communicated about creative license, identity, and trauma. In the end, the editors stood by their decision to publish my work, though I acquiesced to the family’s request to remove the man’s name from the essay itself.
I suppose the other thing on my mind these days has to do with upheaval, which also fits the theme of meteor showers. (Cue frantic voice: “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”)
I’ve always been a “do-er.'” I’ve also always known what it is I wanted to do: teach Montessori middle school, circumnavigate a volcano, publish a book, live the writing life. But sometimes “doing'” can lead to undoing, and as the heady heat of summer whirls toward fall (thank goodness), I’m struggling to keep up with myself. I suspect others reading this have felt the same way. We can dream big. We can worry a world’s worth of problems. But in the end, we’ve got to take care of ourselves.
In an effort to maintain my devotion to making the hard lessons of the writing life easier for others, I’ve created several new, free trials for e-courses on my website. To me, this is an effective way to keep “doing,” without feeling breathless in my day-to-day life. The idea here is to offer quality instruction that’s free or affordable, yet still quite genuine. I’ve worked hard to create these materials and I hope you find they’re as valuable as the time it took me to create them (years of learning, to be honest–packaged into nice little lessons and videos).
First, because readers like you suggested it, a 5-day e-course in flash form writing titled Flash in a Flash. There’s a free lesson, or you can leap now and get the goods, including prompts, for just $27. Please consider this investment!
Second, because go-get-’em writers like you asked for it, a free trial for my popular stewardship & marketing course, which I hope will entice you to take the complete course in the long run. This program has been described as ‘career-changing’ by a former poet laureate, a trade-published author, an unpublished writer, bloggers, and a first-time indie-published author on her first tour.
Third, because I hope our connection is mutual, I’m going to ask something of you in return: Will you please share this post or one of the above links to a writing friend? Consider it like giving someone a little gift. I stand behind the instructional materials I offer. Now, a handful of them are free. What’s not worth sharing about that? 🙂
Thank you for reading. For caring. For helping me ‘put it into practice.’ It’s often said that a writer isn’t a writer until she finds her readers. That means we’re in this together, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
