It’s been 8 years since we moved into our place in downtown Vancouver, and looking back it’s the longest either of us have ever lived in one place. For people who are constantly experiencing change in the things we do and what we surround ourselves with, it’s been an interesting stagnation of physical space. I can’t help but feel that’s been having an impact on the mental space as well.

Now, I’m excited by the opportunity to give our physical space the same overhaul that we’ve been giving the rest of our lives in the past year. Lighter, healthier, happier, less stress-filled,  more in-the-moment, less cluttered…. all things we’ve been striving for in ourselves. In anticipation of matching those external pieces to the changes inside, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want my life to look like. With Jared taking on a new full-time management position for Fairmont Hotels, we’re really changing almost every pattern we have in our lives: new work, new home, new community and a whole world of new possibilities.

The possibilities truly are endless. And that’s a bit overwhelming.

So, if I’m a little bit quieter, a little more reflective, and a little more “in my head” than I have often been in the past – you’ll know why. I’m feeling a bit caterpillar-like at the moment, but I hope you’ll bear with me to see what colour of wings I may have when I emerge from the process this time ; )

The future, in all its brilliant colours, is waiting!

The workshop that I did at the Kamloops Young Authors Conference with 75+ keen creatives was all about building worlds this year. Whether your story world consists of a small town in rural BC in the present day, or a world you’ve created from scratch on a far distant planet in the far distant future – these questions can help you to flesh out that place and bring it alive to share with your readers.

You need to be the expert on the world of your story. You need to know more than your character does, so that you can have them react appropriately.

These are the things you should know about your world:

•Where is this world located?

•What is the geography like? Flat? Mountainous? Covered in water?

•What is the climate like? Warm? Cold?

•How does this impact the type of creatures that live there?

•Are there towns or cities here?

•What kind of cycle do the days have here? Is there night and day?

•Where does light come from? Heat?

•Is there gravity?

•What are the natural resources of this place?

•Why would people want to live here? Why wouldn?t they?

•Who or what lives in this place?

•Do they live in family groups? Alone? In peer groups?

•How do they survive?

•What kind of society are they? Peaceful? Technological?

•What kind of senses do they have?

•How do they get around in their world?

•What kind of houses or structures do they have?

•What kind of clothing or protective body parts do your people have?

•How do they communicate with each other?

•Do they eat? If so, what? If not, how do they get their energy?

Also ask yourself:

• What are the major settings that the scenes in your story take place in? List them, and write a brief description of each.
•  What are some ways you can give hints about your setting/environment by showing, not telling?

Now create maps of the following: 

• the world (if it’s different from ours, now)
• main character’s city/town
• any houses, buildings or rooms that are featured settings

The SCBWI conference is coming up on Saturday. Read THIS POST for full details. It’s not too late to join us!

To clarify – I never just “find” the time. That implies that an hour just pops up presenting itself and yelling, “I’m here, and I’m yours, and I’m waiting to be filled with writing!”. Ah, wouldn’t that be lovely?!?

It does happen from time to time that some “spare” minutes do pop up, but they are inevitably instantly filled with thoughts that involve a lot of shoulds.

• I should be exercising.
• I should be doing the dishes that are sitting on the counter.
• I should be working on x project for x client.
• I should be calling my grandmother.
• I should be helping x friend move.
• I should be writing that article for the blog I’m guest posting on next week.
• I should, I should, I should.

What does that translate to? Even if you ignore all the possibilities of what you “should” be filling that found time with and decide to focus on your writing, often the guilt takes over. How could you put yourself first and prioritize writing over all those other things? Ignoring the needs of your family, spouse, clients etc.? Clearly, you are a selfish person. Clearly you are making irresponsible choices. Clearly you “should” be focusing on something that really needs to be done. And then when you do, you feel the guilt of calling yourself a writer when you’re not actually writing!

Oh sure, consciously I am aware that I do deserve a bit of time each day to myself, and that if I choose to spend that time writing – that is my choice. My family is not neglected, my clients are always a high priority and my husband is not exactly hard done by. Guilt is not rational. But I am determined to win this battle with myself.

So, this month I have started a new phase of writing habits. Inspired by a chat I had with a fellow writer (thanks Kathy), and motivated by the system she has been using and generously shared with me, I am fired up and actually carving out some time to write each day. I’m not going to tell you all about it, until I’ve been using it for at least a month (and get permission to share from the people who thought it up). But let me tell you, it’s been great to actually be working on a piece of fiction again. And each day, when the world doesn’t end because I spend some time on something purely “selfish”, that guilt is pressed back just a little bit further – relegated to observer status instead of being such an active participant in my life. And each day, my determination to persevere is just that little bit stronger. The further in to the project I get, the more that feeling of guilt shifts. The trick is making it to that tipping point – to the stage when your brain acknowledge the truth of the following statement – It would be such a waste of all that time if I didn’t finish x story/project!

Do you deal with ‘writer guilt’? And if so, do you have any strategies for keeping it at bay that you can share?

1. I would be happier if I had more time to spend with friends and family. 
2. I would be happier if I was feeling better about my health/getting more exercise.
3. I would be happier if I had a different job. 

Let’s start by addressing option B – getting more exercise/feeling better about your health – since was the most common response I got through the various social media channels. This also happened to be the one that I’m focusing on right now as well.

What is one thing that is active, and that you like to do – but you haven’t been doing enough of lately? Walking? Cycling? Yoga? Sex? Trampoline? Paintball? The hokey pokey? Doesn’t matter what it is – pick one thing that moves your body around more than usual, that you are going to do once this week (before the end of Sunday).

What are you committing to do once this week? Use the comment form below or use the #CCSchallenge hashtag on twitter to share your intentions, and let us know when you complete your one thing!

You are saving your receipts, RIGHT?

In fact, many writers I know are not saving their expense receipts and are not treating their writing business like, well – like a business at all. But it is.

In Canada, if you expect to have any income from your writing efforts (this includes author visits, speaking engagements, teaching jobs etc.), then you are allowed to be (and should be) tracking expenses for things like:

• ink cartridges for your printer when you’re printing off manuscripts for editing or submission
• writing courses you take
• books you buy to teach you about writing or getting published
• any freelance editing or other writing/publishing related consulting you pay for
• any website hosting fees, website building fees
• graphic design costs for your promotional materials (web or print)
• office supplies used for your writing/submitting manuscripts
• any books or prizes that you buy yourself to give away for promos at events
• if you do any travel that is research for a specific project then that can also be a tax deductible expense
• a portion of your rent/mortgage/household expenses if your office is in your home

For more specific and detailed information, here’s a good article from SUITE 101 that gives you some guidelines.

We’ve found WAVE Accounting to be a great tool if you’re doing your own accounting. It’s free, relatively easy to use and will make your life a whole lot easier when tax time comes around again!

Now, back to the accounting for me!

We’ve done a lot of different things with our various websites and blogs, and along the way we’ve collected up an impressive list of tools, software and tricks to keep everything organized and looking professional. Here are some of our favourites.

Our toys (errr, I mean TOOLS!)

• MacBook Pro
• iPad
• iPhone
• compact microphone
• good quality digital camera (photos and video)
• tripod

For blogging & social media

• WordPress.com or WordPress.org (depending on your comfort level with technology)
• Tumblr (great if you’re into blogging shorter stuff – think of this like a middle ground between wordpress and twitter)
• Twitter (great for short updates, and links to things of interest to your followers)
• Google+ (Jared’s favourite)
• Facebook (ideal for keeping people you actually know up to date on what’s going on)
• LinkedIn (especially useful for business networking)
• Meetup (great for using social media to connect with groups of like-minded people in real life!)
• Hootsuite is our favourite social media dashboard (we use this to keep all our other social media accounts organized and updated without it taking over our entire lives. Good Vancouver company.)
• Google Analytics (we want to know what’s going on behind the scenes!)

Audio Editing & Production

• Garage Band is great for most kinds of audio editing we do. But – it does have a few gaps.
• Audacity is free, and fantastic for breaking up longer pieces into individual tracks, which Garage Band sadly does not let you do. Used together they work for pretty much everything.

Video Editing & Production

• Screenflow (great for creating screencasts and “how to” type tutorial segments – video, text and audio)
• Quicktime (great for screen capture, and then the files can be opened in iMovie for polishing and good for converting video clips into other formats)
• iMovie (this has fun themes, and is what we use to do editing and make most of our videos look as professional as possible)
• Youtube (best way to store your videos online and share them with your audience. Basic editing is possible after uploading too)
• Flickr (great for storing images online and keeping them organized)

Animation & Interactive Content

• Tumult HYPE (great for making animations in HTML 5 that can be viewed on any browser)
• iBooks Author (Great for making interactive books for viewing on the iPad – you can actually embed HYPE animations right into the iBooks)
• Comic Life (great comic-style images and animated comics which can be exported as HTML as well as images or documents)
• Crossword Forge (you can make crosswords of anything, and embed them in your site)

Staying Organized (all cloud based – so we can share between us, and on all our devices it’s always updated)

• OmniFocus (Task Management – takes care of individual tasks, and great for breaking larger projects into manageable chunks and then scheduling those into your life)
• iCal (Time Management – great for keeping track of specific appointments, reminders of those and locations & details for any appointments)
• Evernote (Information Management – this is all about tracking your ideas and notes and keeping them together in one place. Works with audio, video, photos, text and has text recognition for the content of photos! You can keep track of everything, and can actually collaborate with someone else using shared notebooks.)
• Dropbox (File Management – you can use this to easily share files instantly across devices and users and ensures everyone is always working from the same, most recent versions) – NOTE: If you sign up for Dropbox using this link I’ll get a little more storage added to my account.

Writing & Publishing, Photo-editing & Design

• MindNode (lets you visually brainstorm using mind-mapping concepts)
• OmniOutliner (great for outlining your ideas in more detail)
• Scrivener (if you’re needing to script out a video this is a great writing and formatting tool, also fantastic for organizing research notes and details and rearranging pieces of longer articles)
• Pages, Microsoft Word or Neo Office/Open Office (all useful for writing up articles. Keeping offline backups, always a good idea)
• iPhoto (useful for organizing photos)
• Adobe Photoshop (photo editing, resizing for web etc.)
• Adobe Illustrator (editing and creating illustrations, detailed editing etc.)
• Adobe Indesign (best for creating more involved page layouts like you would for print – magazines, newspapers etc.)

Whew. That’s a lot of stuff to know how to use. You don’t need to do all of it, and we would rarely use more than 4 or 5 of these tools on any one post – but the more you know, the better you are able to come up with something that will keep your viewers coming back for more!

Narrowing it down to the top 5, can’t-do-without tools – all of which have basic accounts for free!

1. WordPress (blogging platform)
2. Evernote (for managing all notes, drafts and checklists)
3. Flickr will work, but if possible Photoshop is worlds better
4. Youtube (everything video)
5. Hootsuite (managing your social media accounts)

For example, let’s talk about Richmond’s 365 Days of Dining campaign. One of the things we considered carefully before applying for the job was: “Are we going to be able to come up with lots of different and interesting ways to blog about food, culture and events throughout the year?” So we actually sat down and started brainstorming some fun things we could do to make sure we were blogging “outside the box” just like travel writer Lori Henry suggested and we shared in our last post.

We really, really hope we get a shot at actually putting all these ideas into action on Richmond’s behalf, but if we don’t – we sure hope that the person who does get chosen will use some of our ideas!

• monthly cartoon of funniest foodie moments
• t-shirt design contest to create our “uniforms”
• we’ll need a theme song for our video clips
• look who’s coming to Richmond for dinner (guest foodie bloggers from near and far)
• Richmond Night Market treasure hunt
• Foodie Flash Mob
• The Amazing Food Race (Jared vs. Crystal)
• The secret’s in the sauce (get inside a treasured recipe of a local chef – can you guess the secret ingredient?)
• Eat the Ocean challenge (who has a dish with the most kinds of seafood in it?)
• create an “adventures in food” game for people to play on the blog
• foodie crossword
• interactive food alley (pick a door, what food is behind it?)
• from the ocean to the table – follow that food!
• through a visitor’s eyes – spend time at a local hotel, and visit only places you can reach by foot from there
• are you gonna EAT that? (unusual food adventures). BTW – the answer is always YES!
• a day in the life of ______ (video log of local restaurant owner, chef, etc.)
• foodie fairy tales
• blind tastings
• Follow that Fish – how does the seafood get into the cans? Gulf of Georgia Cannery
• from flip-flops to fine dining – how to dress for dinner if your bags don’t make it to your destination (and where to get replacements!)
• Winter Market Secret Missions at the Steveston Winter Market
• how to make the perfect cup of tea at the Steveston Tea House
• cutlery classes (what kind of cutlery goes with each type of cuisine and how do you use it?)
• featured artisan/artist of the week: exploring different artists,musicians & performers –  what they create and the tasty food nearby after a visit to their studios/shops/venues
• beach party picnic at the indoor beach
• culture corner with a visit to a festival, gallery or community event, of course featuring the food we found there
• chew & ride – group cycling adventure and community picnic on the biking trails
• whale whereabouts – did we find them? What’s the perfect meal to pair with whale watching?
• eco-tours and eco-eats for the earth conscious traveler
• airport adventures – you have a 4 hour layover, 8 hour layover or a full day to spend in Richmond… what to see, do and eat and still make your flight on time!
• dinner and a show, repeat, repeat, repeat!
• lingo lessons – learning the language(s) of food
• wined and dined – local winery tours and the search for the perfect pairings
• edible souvenir search
• and about 330 more things we’ll be happy to share with you if we get the job!

As you can imagine, carrying out 365 ideas in multi-media, interactive fashion will require the Richmond 365 blogger to be able to use a variety of different tools to record their adventures and carefully craft their blog posts.

Stay tuned – tomorrow we’ll share our favourite tools, software and “toys” that we think are an asset to helping any blogger stay organized and create multi-media posts their readers will love.

So, if you’re curious about what “Blogging Outside the Box” might entail, and would like to see some of our ideas for how we would love to do just that, be sure to tune in tomorrow. You can also check out our Dining Out 101 blog to see some of those ideas in action. Monday will bring some recommendations of our favourite tools to use when creating multi-media blogging masterpieces…