The Motherhood Muse Blog Tour

Celebrate Good Times, Come On!

The Motherhood Muse literary magazine is going on its first ever blog tour to celebrate the brilliant, original writing of its authors on motherhood and nature! And of course we are also celebrating Earth Day as we embark on this tour during April.

If you are interested in hosting us on your blog or website during April please send an email to me, Kim, at editor {at} themotherhoodmuse {dot} com. Each blog who hosts us will receive a free subscription to the four 2010 issues of the magazine as well as one free subscription to the 2010 issues to give away on your own blog to a person who comments on the post. Each blog host will also receive credit in our Summer 2010 issue with a direct URL link to your blog.

Below is our blog tour schedule with already written posts to make it easier for you! But we are also open to being interviewed with your own questions if you prefer to do it that way.

So please check out the schedule and email us if you are interested in a particular day and topic!

April 1st - On Starting a Digital Magazine
April 2nd - Writing About Motherhood and Nature
April 5th - 101 Essentials for Mother Nature Muses
April 6th - A Natural Woman
April 7th - A Day in the Life of a Writer/Editor/SAHM
April 8th - The Ick and Awe of a Nature Journal
April 9th - Tapping into Motherhood and Nature via Poetry
April 12th - Nature & Child Reunion: Part 1
April 13th - Nature & Child Reunion: Part 2
April 14th - Nature & Child Reunion: Part 3
April 15th - Going Green: A Digital World of Literature
April 16th - Mother Nature's Library
April 19th - An Interview with Andrea Lani
April 20th - An Interview with Loren Christie
April 21st - An Interview with Catherine Lang
April 22nd - Earth Day: What's Your Footprint?
April 23rd - An Interview with Jodi Hiland
April 26th - An Interview with Andrea Halpin-White
April 27th - An Interview with Mary Jo Campbell
April 28th - Tweets and Stumbles in Mother Nature
April 29th - A Challenge to Change the World
April 30th - The Future of The Motherhood Muse

Please check back here by the first of April to see an updated list of where we will be stopping on our blog tour!

Blogsplash: Thaw by Fiona Robyn

Ruth's diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free. Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow at http://read-thaw.blogspot.com. * These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It's a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we're being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides. The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they're stuck to the outside of her hands. They're a colour that's difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world. I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I'm giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don't think I'm alone in wondering whether it's all worth it. I've seen the look in people's eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I've heard the weary grief in my dad's voice. So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I'm Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I'm sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there? Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat - books you have to take in both hands to lift. I've had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I've still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust. Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about - princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad's snoring was. I've always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I'll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say, 'It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for,' before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It'll all be here. I'm using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I'm striping the paper. I'm near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I'm allowed to make my decision. That's it for today. It's begun. Continue reading at http://read-thaw.blogspot.com. Fiona Robyn -------------- www.fionarobyn.com www.plantingwords.com