Seth Godin's December 16th blog is so awesome that I had to re-post it for this week. I thought it so appropriate going into the New Year!

Seth's Words of Wisdom:

Vampires, of course, feed on something that we desperately need but also can't imagine being a source of food. You have metaphorical vampires in your life. These are people that feed on negativity, on shooting down ideas and most of all, on extinguishing your desire to make things better.

Why would someone do that? Why would they rush to respond to a heartfelt and generous blog post with a snide comment about a typo in the third line? Why would they go out of their way to fold their arms, make a grimace and destroy any hope you had for changing the status quo?

Vampires cannot be cured. They cannot be taught, they cannot learn the error of their ways. Most of all, vampires will never understand how much damage they're doing to you and your work. Pity the vampires, they are doomed to this life.

Your garlic is simple: shun them. Delete their email, turn off comments, don't read your one-star reviews. Don't attend meetings where they show up. Don't buy into the false expectation that in an organizational democracy, every voice matters. Every voice doesn't matter--only the voices that move your idea forward, that make it better, that make you better, that make it more likely you will ship work that benefits your tribe.

It's so tempting to evangelize to the vampires, to prove them wrong, to help them see how destructive they are. This is food for them, merely encouragement.

Shun the ones who feed on your failures.

To learn more about the wonderful Seth, click here.

We're taking a holiday! So see you next year!
Carol

Maybe this will interest you; maybe not. However, my daughter Stephanie posted this on her blog on December 3, 2013, and I thought it so interesting that I wanted to share it.

You might not need this tool right now, but at some point, you might. So here's her post. Hope you will find it useful!

Tuesday Tools: Word2Kindle
-By Stephanie McKibben
Upfront honesty...I have purchased ($27) this tool, but I have yet to use it.

I just thought I might pass along the info in case this is something you might be interested in.  What it is: a formatter for kindle.

Now, understand, I'm a word aficionado. Inputting my authors' Word document into Kindle doesn't scare me. I am the rare case of Word user that understands the messy language of .doc files. I have zero problem navigating my author's manuscripts and turning them into Kindle-ready files.

My technique is with ease of cutting roses. Yes, there are some thorns, and I get caught in them sometimes, but mostly, I enjoy the intricate pedals of Microsoft Word.

You? Maybe not so much.

Which is why I'm directing you to Kinstant Formatter for this Tuesday's Tools. 

Here is the lowdown directly from their site:

Here’s what you get with Kinstant Formatter: Get your books uploaded in just a few moments…

1. No software to download or understand…. this is a web-based tool that works on PCs AND Macs…

2. Future-proof all of your books… do the work ONCE and only ONLY… because KinstantFormatter is using the ONLY tool Amazon has promised will work indefinitely…

3. Publish your books in any language (We have happy users publishing in Spanish, French, and Greek so far…)

4. Upload many file types – we support doc, docx and odt.

5. Make this VERY easy for your readers. This eliminates page breaking on black and white Kindles, makes bullets look GOOD, adds links in the Kindle’s “Go to…” menu for the cover, table of contents and NCX (location map), respects left indentations in your source documents, and respects and exists bookmarks “toc” & “start” from previous attempts to use KDP.

6. Upload images with no problem. Books with a few illustrative images – that are not overlapped – look GREAT… (Though fair warning: Image-based or fixed layout books are NOT our specialty).

Images are automatically resized, optimized and compressed to ensure the lowest file size possible. (This is important as your file size can have a huge impact on royalties.)

We also add a white background to transparent images so that they look as great as possible.

7. Your readers’ first impression, the Table Of Contents, is created in a breeze…. (with up to THREE levels per T.O.C.!)

8. Create placeholder covers which can be updated at any time…

9. Receive premium support -KinstantFormatter is well known for a high level of customer service that you simply cannot get from the open source stuff out there…

10.  Keep your books a secret. As soon as you upload your file, it’s deleted by the server. We’ll never see what you create.

You might be asking me Steph...if you're a word wiz, why'd you buy it? And, I'd have to answer: Because correcting some formatting issues can be very time- consuming, and in the future I may not be the one formatting my author's books. My VA might be doing it. Good to have the tool now and learn how to use it.

Again, if $27 is too much and you want to fight the good fight with Word, no worries! It's just an option. 

ACTION ITEM: If it sounds good, go on over to http://kinstantformatter.com/ and check it out!

That's a good tip for all of us writers out there! Thanks, Stephanie!

Til next time!
Carol

I sat in the hushed auditorium in Houston, Texas, with several thousand others and watched the robust face and sparkling, bespectacled eyes of Ray Bradbury as he surveyed the room. I felt an immense amount of pride that I had been able to snare him for the annual conference that I directed and managed. Everyone around me was enraptured. How could they not be?

A graveled voice rang out from the podium as Bradbury posed the question. “How do I find my inspiration? Look around you. All of you inspire me.” Audience members leaned forward in anticipation.

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

“It's lack that gives us inspiration," he said. "It's not fullness. Not ever having driven a car, I can write better about automobiles than the people who drive them. Space travel is another good example. I'm never going to go to Mars but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars. So it's always a lack that causes you to write that type of story."

Again he swiveled his head and surveyed the audience. “Inspiration and creativity come from every day things,” he said. He admitted that his famous Fahrenheit 451 was inspired during the McCarthy era when everyone was paranoid. He was stopped on the street in Los Angeles by a policeman for no reason and asked why he was there. That incident and the advent of television and his concern about censorship moved him to write a novel about books being outlawed and burned in the future.

In fact, most, if not all, of his stories were inspired by past occurrences in his life. Some more obvious, others more subtle.  But, the bottom line for inspiration for anything that you do, he encouraged, is simply this: “Love what you do, and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. Imagination should be the center of your life.”

Til next time!
Carol