Blog Tour Schedule

Several outstanding, original blogs have offered to host us during the month of April, so The Motherhood Muse is going on tour!

Each weekday of April we will be blogging on a different topic on various blogs. Please see our blog tour schedule below to follow us! Simply click on the day and topic to visit the blog who hosts us!

Each blog hostess will choose one person at random who comments on the blog post to receive a free subscription to the 2010 issues of our magazine, so comment away! And we still have days available if you would like to host us on your blog! Please email editor{at}themotherhoodmuse{dot}com if interested!

April 1st - On Starting a Digital Magazine
April 2nd - Writing About Motherhood and Nature at EarthMama
April 5th - 101 Essentials for Mother Nature Muses at Writing the Waves of Motherhood
April 6th - A Natural Woman at The Divine Gift of Motherhood
April 7th - A Day in the Life of a Writer/Editor/SAHM
April 8th - The Ick and Awe of a Nature Journal at Writers Inspired
April 9th - Tapping into Motherhood and Nature via Poetry at The Mother Daughter Book Club

April 12th - Nature & Child Reunion: Part 1 at The Beautification Project

April 13th - Nature & Child Reunion: Part 2 at Dirt Don't Hurt

April 14th - Nature & Child Reunion: Part 3 at The Writing Mother
April 15th - Going Green: A Digital World of Literature at Reality Mom
April 16th - Mother Nature's Library at Remains of the Day
April 19th - An Interview with Andrea Lani at Blogging Mama
April 20th - An Interview with Loren Christie at Chocolate Reality
April 21st - An Interview with Catherine Lang at Zook Book Nook
April 22nd - Earth Day: What's Your Footprint? at The International Mom's Blog
April 23rd - An Interview with Jodi Hiland at Dude, Where Am I?
April 26th - An Interview with Andrea Halpin-White at Write the Journey
April 27th - An Interview with Mary Jo Campbell at Life On Its Own Terms
April 28th - Tweets and Stumbles in Mother Nature at Motherlogue
April 29th - A Challenge to Change the World at Scribbly Katia
April 30th - The Future of The Motherhood Muse

The Motherhood Muse Blog Tour

The Motherhood Muse literary magazine is celebrating the publication of its second issue by going on a blog tour during the month of April. Bloggers who host The Motherhood Muse will receive a free subscription to the 2010 issues as well as one free subscription to give away to one random winner who comments on their blog the day of The Motherhood Muse post. We hope everyone will enjoy both the post and magazine! The Motherhood Muse blog tour schedule can be found at www.themotherhoodmuse.com and themotherhoodmuse.blogspot.com . Please visit Earth Mama for tomorrow's post on Writing about Motherhood and Nature!

On Starting a Digital Magazine

Blogging is fantastic way to share stories online. After blogging for over a year at Zook Book Nook, I realized my biggest thrill as a blogger was reading blogs written by others who truly moved me with their voice, ideas, interpretations of the world around them and more. When my second daughter was only six weeks old, I found myself wanting to read what other mothers had to say about nature, because I spent most of my days indoors with a 22 month old and a newborn despite it being the month of June. Thus, I decided to create an online compilation of writings by women (and men) in the form of a digital magazine, called The Motherhood Muse!

Starting a magazine has been easier than I thought it would be. So easy, that I write this post for those interested in creating a digital magazine of their own! Here are the steps I have taken to get my magazine off the ground and running:

1. Find a niche. This is the most important step, because your magazine needs to do two things: fit your passion, knowledge, and experience as well as fill a hole in the literary world. I asked myself: What do I have the most expertise in and what is missing in today’s market of magazine? The answer to my question was creative writing on motherhood and nature.

2. Know the competition. Before I created The Motherhood Muse I already read and subscribed to a few magazines that publish creative writing on motherhood or nature. I studied these magazines for their layout designs, content, marketing tactics, readership, and more. So when I began to create the first issue of my magazine I wasn’t reinventing the wheel, yet I also strived to create something original.

3. Decide on a name. Before developing a website, blog, and magazine, it is crucial to choose the right name for it all. A name that summarizes exactly what your “stuff” is all about. For me, motherhood relates to Mother Nature and mothers and muse is all about writing and inspiration. But before you take the name you come up with and run with it, make sure it isn’t already in use!

4. Create a website. Before the magazine and blog, I first created the website using the host Fat Cow and a background design by The Cutest Blog on the Block. The design runs on Joomla, which I had to teach myself how to use. I am a novice in web design, but the Joomla tutorials have made it easy to learn the basics of setting up a website that includes a shop and more.

5. Next came the blog. Even if the blog is basic, it is best to get it established in the beginning, so readers can begin to follow it. I am still in the early stages of developing The Motherhood Muse blog as I don’t put much time into it yet, but it is there to give the community of reader s and writers a source of more information.

6. Scheduling the release of the first issue. I gave myself six months to create the first issue of the magazine. This gave me enough time to find column writers and begin the advertising/marketing side of things.

7. Finding writers. Fortunately I found writers online who I knew from blogging. I was familiar with their style of writing, and asked a variety of writers to write for The Motherhood Muse that matches their blog style. I also began seeking contributors by posting information in various places online: SCBWI, Verla Kay, Editor Unleashed, Writer’s Digest, Poets & Writers, etc.

8. Advertising and Marketing. I designed a logo using Photoshop, created postcards with Overnight Prints and Vista Print, and created an advertising button to post on blogs and websites. The postcards were sent to women, authors, mothers, writing centers, nature centers, etc across the world in the hope that I’d gain subscribers and contributors.

9. Creating the first issue. Finally I was ready to begin designing the first issue of the magazine! The fun began with choosing a theme for the first issue that would resonate with many people (metamorphosis), designing the layout, asking different authors permission to reprint their essays in the first issue, and creating the artwork to accompany the writing. I found many images on iStockphoto and used Adobe Photoshop to alter and/or create images. I created the issue in Word and then converted it into a PDF.

10. Becoming digital. Once I had the final PDF file I submitted it to ePaperflip. This group then converted it into a digital magazine and gave me the URL link to view the digital magazine online. It’s amazing to have a magazine online where the pages actually flip, each page can be magnified to the highest degree, any text or images I choose can be clicked on to link the reader to another website, and it’s all green! No paper is wasted. No ink is utilized. And it never gets lost as it can be bookmarked on your computer.

The Motherhood Muse literary magazine is one of several new digital magazines, but it is the only digital magazine featuring creative essays, short stories, poetry, columns, artwork and more on the theme of motherhood and nature. But there are many more literary niches that need to be filled, especially digitally, so I hope you’ll consider giving it a shot and creating a magazine of your own one day. If you have any personal questions about the details of starting a digital magazine, please feel free to email me at editor(at)themotherhoodmuse(dot)com. Thank you! I look forward to reading your comments!

Thank you for reading this post today. Please leave a comment here and we will choose one person to receive a free subscription to the 2010 issues! Stop by www.themotherhoodmuse.com for more information!

Please visit http://earthmama101.blogspot.com/ tomorrow for the next step in our blog tour!

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

Get Unreal

Get Unreal: A Writing Exercise

By Hal Zina Bennett

Legend has it that Picasso once got into a discussion with a neighbor who looked at his paintings and told the artist that while his colors were nice and the picture was very pleasant, he should try making them a bit more realistic. Otherwise, he advised, nobody would know what Picasso’s paintings were supposed to be about. The artist, exercising a rare amount of patience, nodded thoughtfully and asked his neighbor if he had an example of what he meant by realistic.

“Ah, yes, I do!” The neighbor quickly reached into his pocket, brought out his wallet, and handed over a photo of his wife for Picasso to see. “Now that’s what I call realistic,” he proclaimed.

Picasso took the photo in his hand, turned it this way and that, studied it from every angle, then handed it back to its owner. “She’s awfully small and flat,” he said.

In writing as with painting, there’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s real. Is the author’s description of the house realistic? Is the communication between characters true to life? Is the story credible — could it happen in real life? Is the motivation of a character psychologically plausible? Is this or that action physically possible?

Sooner or later writers come to the full realization that the reality depicted on the page or on the canvas of the painter has its own reality and is not a copy of life. The ultimate question we need to ask ourselves is, Does it work as a story and on its own terms?

Consider Franz Kafka’s short story The Metamorphosis, about a man who turns into a bug. It couldn’t happen in real life but within the framework of the story it is convincing. Nor does that author try to convince us that it’s possible for humans to turn into bugs. However, he creates a reality on the page that causes us to identify with the poor victim, so much so that our skin crawls. We suffer with Kafka’s character, with his bewilderment, and then with his abject horror at what’s happening to him.

How does Kafka draw us into this reality? As readers we must, of course, be willing to go along with what the author creates. It’s that willing suspension of disbelief thing all over again. In this particular story, Kafka accomplishes this with the first sentence: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The author never attempts to explain how this happened or to justify its feasibility. Instead, he focuses our attention on what Gregor is experiencing. He describes, well, nothing more or less than what any normal person would experience if he woke up one morning to find he had become a giant insect!

At first Gregor’s reactions are very human: he notes the size and number of his insect legs, then a framed photo on his wall, then the alarm clock that reminds him, with horror, that he’s late for work. Many of his responses are downright mundane, which oddly enough makes us believe the story even more. For example, he looks out the window and sees that the sky is overcast and it “made him quite melancholy.” He also struggles to make the horrible reality of his metamorphosis go away, “shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs.”

As time goes on and Gregor becomes increasingly bug-like, he discovers that his feet have a kind of stickiness that gives him traction with the floor, that his efforts to speak only produce strange, undecipherable sounds, and that his appearance horrifies his parents and his beloved sister. Through trial and error, and her own loving kindness, his sister discovers that in his present manifestation as a bug he likes rotting foods and notes that he seems repelled by fresher foods. In fact, he drags the decomposing food away from the fresh so that he can better savor his consumption of them.

The ludicrousness of this story is made believable through the author’s ability to describe the very human reactions of his protagonist. While we might not believe it possible for Homo sapiens to turn into bugs, we can imagine the experience of being rendered helpless, imprisoned by our own bodies, and alienated from our loved ones. In the end, that’s the message we go away with, made possible by creating a reality that could exist only in fiction but that is nevertheless meaningful and purposeful, reminding us of the limits of our own mortality.

Using literary devices such as Kafka does in Metamorphosis, write a few paragraphs, or even a short story, about what it might be like to wake up one morning to find that you are living in a world and perhaps a body very different from your own. Create a reality that could exist only on paper, yet that is credible in whatever terms you set up. This could be anything from being an animal in the wild to being an inanimate object. Maybe it’s a reality existing on a different planet, or in a parallel universe, or in an imagined world that nobody has ever heard of. The experience of the characters you create could be horrifying or wonderful, pleasing and filled with discovery and insight, or as limiting and dreadful as turning into a bug. But the bottom line is that this is a reality completely of your own making — and certainly not “small and flat” like the photo of Picasso’s neighbor.

Author and editor Hal Zina Bennett has published more than thirty books, including Write from the Heart, Zuni Fetishes, Follow Your Bliss, and Spirit Guides. A workshop leader, writing coach, and book doctor, he has helped over two hundred authors and publishers develop successful books, including several bestsellers. He lives in Northern California and his website is www.halzinabennett.com.

From the book Write Starts. Copyright Ó 2010 by Hal Zina Bennett Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800/972-6657 ext. 52.