Workshop – Part Writing, Part Marketing
I’ll be teaching a workshop in July at Edmonds Community College…here’s the 911 – or is it the 411? I’m SO not hip. Either way, here’s the info;
| Vision Boards to Enhance Your Writing AND Social Media Presence Hey, writers, vision boards can transform your storytelling and spin your writing research into marketing gold. Learn how objects and images help tell your story, then convert that story world into social media fodder, and launch or enhance your online presence long before the book deal. This part-storytelling and part-social media hands on workshop is for writers of all levels. Lots of handouts and worksheets. July 15th 9:30- 12:30 $39.00 |
Egyptian Belief in Ghosts Inspired my Story
The most enduring Egyptian understanding of death was that it was a continuation of life on earth but lacking any displeasure, loss, or distress, in other words, paradise. And unlike what most say these days, “you can’t take it with you”, most bygone Egyptians believed the opposite, “you keep it forever.” This insight into the afterlife ebbed and flowed throughout history. Along with this belief was an understanding of otherworldly spirits – ghosts – which, more so than the view of the afterlife, remained unaffected from the earliest indication through the end of ancient Egyptian history: ghosts were as much of a reality as any other part of life.
The essential value of Egyptian culture was ma’at (harmony, balance) which the Egyptians observed in every part of their lives; among the most vital of these was the appropriate burial of the dead. A human being was considered a traveler on a narrow road from birth, through death, and on to the afterlife. We know this from tomb paintings, inscriptions, and statuaries for the soul intended to guide their return and harmless visitations on earth, but the spirit was anticipated to depart to its own realm fairly hastily. The appearance of a ghost, and especially its interaction with the living, was a certain sign that the natural order had been disturbed and the most common cause of this distress was a spirit’s displeasure with its body’s burial, the condition of the tomb, or a lack of reverential commemoration.
And this is where I begin my story, my WIP, Garden of Lies. My main protagonist, Esmée is a holocaust survivor, a clairvoyant who sees and hears the great departed. Having grown up the child of two archeologist she spent much of her childhood in Egypt in the 1930s. As a child Esmée absorbed her mother’s teachings about ancient Egyptian goddesses, and their foreign surroundings which ignited her imagination. Flash forward to after the war, after Gross Rosen Concentration camp, and we find Esmée troubled and preoccupied with not knowing the location of her parent’s bodies which did not receive proper burial, how (exactly) the Nazis murdered them, and how she can respectfully honor them.
Though Esmée is Jewish, her ma’at (harmony, balance) has been disturbed. She sinks into her adopted Egyptian rituals. This brass amulet is intended to keep evil spirits away. However, in Esmée’s case it hasn’t worked.
In doing my research I have grown even more fascinated by ancient Egyptian beliefs, practices, and lives.
More to come….
Social Media Sin – Saying good-bye to my other blog at Literary Liaisons
A HUGE Social Media Sin – So Sorry
(repost from Literary Liaisons)
I’ve committed a horrible sin. Well, a social media sin anyway. I’m not actually willing to talk about other sins I may or may not have committed, just the SM ones. Anyway, I took 6 months off from blogging. Yep, unforgivable, I know. This happened for two reasons: first, I needed to focus on my health. Which I did and I’m going to be fine (thanks for asking). Second, after nearly 9 years of blogging about writing, the writer’s life, and storytelling I felt I had said all I had to say and that others were carrying that torch far better than I.
The break has given me a little perspective.
When I originally started blogging my greatest desire was to be a published author, which I am, and to understand writing (ongoing), storytelling (an evergreen topic) and how to improve my craft – and as I’ve said many times over the years, writing is a life-long apprenticeship. When we stop remembering that, we stop learning, when we stop learning the stories we want to tell become stagnant.
Me with Stewart.
I was stagnant. Maybe it was the stress of dealing with chronic cancer, maybe it was that I’d lost interest in what I was writing, maybe I’d stopped learning, either way, I was stagnant and stagnant is not a good seat for creativity.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to know and to write with Hollywood royalty, the amazing Stewart Stern. Stewart once told me he had stopped writing at one point in his life because he’d lost the spark. “When you lose the spark, kid,” he said, “step away until it comes back.”
So, I stepped away until it came back.
The time off gave me an opportunity to get reenergized and plugged into what I was/am passionate about in storytelling. So instead of writing about the things I’ve written about in the past (how-to stuff) I will write more about my story-telling passions. Like currently for my next novel I am studying and writing about Egyptian Burial Rituals, among other Egyptian rites, for my protagonist, Esmée who grew up going on dig sites with her parents prior to WWII. Right now in my story creation phase these things fascinate me and deepen my story world exponentially.
I also was torn between continuing to blog here on Literary Liaisons or just blogging directly from my web site www.MindyHalleck.com. During my time off I realized that maintaining two blogs is just too much. SO, I will leave Literary Liaisons up as a resource for writers, but will blog from MindyHalleck.com from now on.
I appreciate and value your continued subscription to Lit-Liais, and sincerely hope you follow me over to www.Mindy Halleck.com and sign up to receive my ongoing posts and thrice yearly newsletter, and of course I hope you continue to use Literary Liaisons as the writer’s resource it was always intended to be. Either way, keep putting words on paper. Happy writing, Cheers, Mindy
P.S. If you have a writerly how-to post you would like to share on Literary Liaisons as a guest writer, Please send me your quick pitch (2-3 lines about topic and resources) and I’ll consider it as a guest post on Literary Liaisons. If I like the idea I’ll send you a message about how to submit your article for consideration.
Meanwhile please follow me on social media
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Pinterest (where I have a great writing tips board)
Instagram (which tends to be more about my adorable labradoodle than writing)
Authors & Social Media – My Number One Tip
Over the last three weeks I have had numerous conversations about authors and social media. At the University of Washington I had the opportunity to speak to a senior fiction writing class of aspiring writers, and they were surprised when I said to start building their platform NOW, before they are published.
Why? Author platform is what agents and publishers are looking for. As Jane Friedman explains “Author platform is one of the most difficult concepts to explain, partly because everyone defines it a little differently. But by far the easiest explanation is: an ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach.”
I like to share simple ways that I’ve learned about how to start building and or enhancing your author platform through Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and more. Anyway, it’s always great (for an instructor) when you see the light bulbs go on in the faces of your audience, as I did at the U of W a couple of weeks ago. Author platform does not have to mean Kardashian like followers, but at least a presence on social media via whatever outlets (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) you feel comfortable with. And myNUMBER ONE TIP for social media success is; pick the one that you can envision yourself doing, possibly even enjoying, because if you don’t enjoy it you will fail. If you enjoy it you have a much greater chance of social media success.
I also spoke with Edmonds Community College this week about doing a summer workshop on this evergreen yet always changing, topic. I’ll post that date once it is confirmed.
If you’d like to hear a bit about my thoughts on writing and marketing you can listen to this interview I did yesterday with radio talk show hosts, Stone Payton and Lee Kantor on Business Writers Radio. And I must say, after doing several radio talk shows these gentlemen are standout pros – GREAT hosts. I enjoyed chatting with them and hope to again. 
Why We Write the Stories We Write
It’s commonly accepted that Nazi Germany’s concentration camps were/are the epicenter of human sorrow and suffering as a result of human against human brutality. These places stand as tributes to the human race’s capability when fear leads to either blind faith in religion or government, or when vile rhetoric becomes our prime cheerleader. They are living tombstones honoring, not just the victims, but also the sins of those who shot innocent people with wild glee, locked gas chamber doors against the screams of their victims, or, perhaps more inexcusably, closed their eyes to grievous inhumanity. Or worse yet, today in 2017, those who deny the holocaust ever happened. The politics of today have everything to do with why I’m writing my next novel, Garden of Lies, not that it’s about politics specifically, but because it puts a face on a victim of the last time people endorsed fear 
and anger as their guide and allowed them to justify releasing the largest gathering of sociopaths ever – in Nazi uniforms – on an entire population. That’s my two-bits, now back to storytelling…
Using imagery in storytelling means constantly looking for images, old photos that will help me make the world I am creating (WWII concentration camps, 1960 Portland Oregon, and 1930’s Egypt) come to life in my head and ultimately in a reader’s mind. I collect images and information for my research and save it on my Pinterest board. For example, this image helps me envision what my main protagonist, Esmée sees in her dreams – memories of Auschwitz – and the ghosts who haunt her. Visit my Pinterest board to see the world I’m creating. Please follow my board if interested. Though I could not find (via Google image search) the source of this photo, I have linked it to the info I did find. http://www.mindyhalleck.com
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Mindy Meyers-Halleck 