A Mama's Rant

A breast cancer journey : The Sky Begins at Your Feet by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

As I wrote at my other blog, This Mama Cooks!, cancer affects everyone. In honor of breast cancer month, I’m hosting Caryn Mirriam-Goldburg’s blog tour of her wonderful book The Sky Begins at Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body over at This Mama Cooks!

Check out the interview here.

Southern mother culture on the rocks: You can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning

Welcome to Celia Riverbark’s WOW blog tour* for her latest book, You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning.

How to turn your desire to be a smart ass into a writing career

After a couple of years of college, Celia went to work for her hometown paper then to the Wilmington, NC Morning Star. After a stint as a copy editor, Celia started writing a weekly humor column.

Then having met and married a cute guy in sports, Celia found herself happily knocked up at age 40, and quit newspapering to stay home with her baby girl. Soon after, she started using Sophie's two-hour naps to write a humor column from the mommy front lines for the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, SC.

In 2000, Coastal Carolina Press published a collection of Celia's columns called Bless Your Heart, Tramp: And Other Southern Endearments . Her second book, We're Just Like You, Only Prettier: Confessions of a Tarnished Southern Belle was the winner of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Nonfiction Book of the Year and was a finalist for the James Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Her third book, Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: A Slightly Tarnished Southern Belle's Words of Wisdom was named best title of 2006 by Entertainment Weekly magazine and landed her a gig on Good Morning America. Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits , published in 2006, was a Thurber Prize semi-finalist for humor, and one of three finalists for the SIBA Nonfiction Book of the Year.

On the way to becoming the Susan Lucci of humor book writers, hopefully her latest work, You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning, which includes riotously funny essays and a bunch of Southern-style recipes that are slap-yo-mama-fine, will get her a few more of those coveted awards. Assuming that David Sedaris, Rick Bragg and Jon Stewart didn’t publish anything this year that is.

Welcome to the Circus: Juggling Family and Writing

This post has been moved to The Write Spot, LLC.

Wash My Laundry or Write My Book: How does a stay-at-home writer do it? A guest post by author Danette Haworth

This post has been moved to The Write Spot, LLC.

10-10-10 by Suzy Welch

Have you ever made a decision that you later regretted and wished you could take back? Tell me about it! But what if you had had a tool to help you think through your choices and determine how the decision would impact your life immediately, in the short term, and over a long period of time?

Wow, someone finally invented a magic wand! No, instead there’s a book you should check out by best-selling author Suzy Welch, a mother of four and a columnist for BusinessWeek and O, The Oprah Magazine called 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea.

It provides you with a decision-making practice that is as simple as it is profound, a way to remove the emotion and uncertainty from decision-making and dramatically change how you make choices in your life.

On Travel and Writing Vacations: a guest post from Author Sybil Baker

This post has been moved to The Write Spot, LLC.

The Writer Mama Two-Year Anniversary Blog Tour Giveaway! Leave a comment, get a free book

I’m participating in Christina Katz’s Writer Mama Two-Year Anniversary blog tour and giveaway. I’ve been a big admirer of Christina and enjoyed both of her books, Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids and Get Known Before The Book Deal: Use Your Personal Strengths To Grow An Author Platform. If you’re a mom starting out on your freelance writing journey or want to get a book deal, her books are must reads.

Today's Book Drawing at The Writer Mama

To enter to win a signed, numbered copy of Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids, answer the following question in the comments below:

On a scale of one to 10, with one being not afraid of editors at all and 10 being very afraid of editors, how does your editor-phobia rank? If you've recovered from editor-phobia, please share your experience.

Only US residents, or folks with a US mailing address can participate in the drawing. Please only enter once per day.

Now, a guest post from Christina about editor phobia

Before I tell you how my first book proposal went for me, I want to touch briefly on the topic of editor-phobia. A lot of writers have editor-phobia, not just writer mamas. And this is a topic we go into in my writing classes because the phenomenon is so common.

What’s editor-phobia? It’s an excessive fear of having your writing judged and edited by publishing industry gatekeepers (aka editors). What I’ve noticed in my classes is that writers’ attitudes towards editors are usually on a spectrum. They go all the way from a fairly detached, professional attitude to a fairly emotional, fearful perception of editors as enemies.

Ruth Hartman Guest blogs about OCD

Today I’m honored to have Ruth Hartman as my guest blogger as part of her WOW Women on Writing blog tour. Ruth is the author of My Life in Mental Chains, a book she wrote about her struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). For a chance to win a signed copy of her book, stop by The Muffin, the WOW Women on Writing blog.

I asked Ruth to write about how you can recognize OCD in yourself or others and how you can seek help.

What’s Wrong With Me?

By Ruth J. Hartman

I was 27 the first time I knew I had OCD. It hit me like a lightening bolt. I was cleaning my treatment room after seeing one of my patients; I’m a dental hygienist. Suddenly, I couldn’t seem to stop cleaning the equipment. Over and over. Why couldn’t I stop?

At the same time, I had a loop of terrifying thoughts circling my brain: What if I didn’t get the room clean enough? What if my next patient got some disease from the previous patient? And…what if I got some disease from one of my patients?

Never before had I experienced those fears. I’d been a dental hygienist for six years. Where had those crazy thoughts come from? Because of my science and psychology classes in college, I had a pretty good idea what was going on. No one had to tell me.

Books for holiday curmudgeons and lovers of worse case scenarios

If you’re looking for that perfect book for the Mr. or Mrs. Scrooge in your life, pick up a copy of Christmas Sucks: What to Do When Fruitcake, Family, and Finding the Perfect Gift Make You Miserable

Yes, it’s official: Christmas Sucks - a humorous look at America’s commercialization of the Christmas holiday season and the terrible travel, inordinate amount of preparation, and family strife that accompanies it. You can commiserate with the fact that everyone drives themselves into debt buying gifts, no one enjoys seeing long-lost relatives, and everyone is creeped out by the department store Santa.

Eco-Brain: books for the green mom's soul

I joke that if I bought all the books I lusted after, I’d have to get another house just to store them in. There’s the library, of course, but they don’t carry all the books I want to read. I could get a Kindle, Amazon's Wireless Reading Device or a Sony Reader Digital Book, but at $300-400, do I really need another digital toy?

Save money and save the environment

One option is EcoBrain, an online ebook store that offers thousands of titles from top publishers about sustainable, green living, home and garden, cooking and more.

Research shows that ebooks are a great way to go green. Paper manufacturing pollutes. Also, many of the books you buy are printed overseas, shipped to the US and other countries by boat, trucked to distribution centers and then trucked to your bookstore – or to your home via the postal service or shipping companies like UPS or FedEx.

According to The Carbon Footprint of Digital Print, a typical book costs 4.5 kWh or 3 kg of carbon dioxide. Since ebooks bypass manufacturing, printing, and shipping, many can be sold at 30% below retail. So with EcoBrain,not only are you getting books for less, you’re helping lower your carbon footprint.