We all need a little push to get the creative juices going and, you know, write.

Two years ago a friend of mine came up with a crazy idea to blog every single day. It was a way to get both of us writing on a consistent basis. And it worked so well that every November I commit to writing and publishing a blog post every single day.

That experiment worked so well for me that I talked about it at WordCamp Portland last month. And guess what? The video from my talk, How to Blog Every Day, is now available!

Video of my talk, How to Blog Every Day, at WordCamp Portland

The talk lasts about 36 minutes, and is packed with ideas to help get you writing—either every day or simply every week. I’m embedding the video and the slides for you below (feel free to download and share). Once you’re finished watching the video, be sure to check out the extensive list of resources that were published with the original slides.

There was some great un-mic-ed discussion at the end of my talk during the Q&A, so and I tried to repeat anything that was said off-screen, but I apologize if there’s something you miss!

Thank you to Blaze Streaming Media for recording the video!

Want to blog every day and need ideas?

Here are two ideas that will help get you writing:

The Daily Post – A project from WordPress.com filled with ideas, prompts, and even writing challenges with the soul purpose to keep bloggers blogging.

Join a daily blogging challenge – Every once in a while an organization will start a month-long writing series where they will release prompts daily and invite bloggers to write about it. It’s a great way to give you ideas of what to write. You can either search out a new writing series or check out prompts from the archives of past writing events. For example, check out the prompts from Trust30 and Reverb11 to get started (links go to the archives).

If you’re interested in blogging every day this November (or any month), leave a comment with a link to your blog! I’m collecting a small team of daily bloggers and want to follow you, too!

Next up, the video from my presentation at WordCamp Seattle, How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul.

Today is the last day of November which means that all of the men who grew ‘staches for Movember can finally shave, we all flip our calendars and freak out about the goals we have left to meet in 2011, and it is the end of National Blog Posting Month. This is my second year at posting one blog post every day for the month of November and – woah – what a month it’s been!

Goals and Milestones

On November 1st I made six goals for myself to keep this month. Here’s how I did:

1. Post at least one blog every single day

By the time I publish my recap, I’ll have published 27 blog posts in a month with 30 days. I skipped three days; one was because I was out with friends and forgot and two were because it was the first week of my new job and I was tired.

This weekend I read Om Malik’s list of lessons he learned from ten years of blogging and he shared something Doc Searls said: “Blog if you have something to say and respect your reader’s time. If you respect their time, they are going to give you some time of their day.” And while there are a few blog posts I wrote this month that I categorize as “throw away” posts (meaning that I could have gone without writing them because I was too exhausted from life, uninspired, was unwilling to write, or had plain and simple writer’s block), every single post that I wrote and published went live before midnight and that’s an awesome accomplishment.

2. Stick to the content calendar

Who was I kidding when I wrote this? My blog is the place where I can write about “life according to Laura,” and this life says that content calendars are great, but mostly irrelevant for whatever I’m feeling right here and right now.

Screw that.

Okay, okay, so I probably stuck with the content calendar 30% of the time, like today and this recap. I’ve had this recap blog post planned for an entire month

3. Be fearless

Yep, did that, but not without hesitation.

4. Increase traffic

I totally nailed this goal and my traffic for the month of November 2011 was up 56% from November 2010. I’m proud of achieving this goal.

5. No epic blog posts

I made sure not to write or publish any “epic” blog posts this year. Epic blog posts are essays or articles that could honestly be a senior-level college thesis. They include a very strong point of view and research to back that up. And they take a lot of thought to write and a lot of time to edit. Epic blog posts should not be cranked out in 2-4 hours, but days or weeks.

While I technically didn’t write any epic blog posts this year, there were three blog posts that were about timely subjects and I wrote them a day or two in advance. The problem, you see, is that NaBloPoMo isn’t about writing everyday, it’s about posting every day. So there were a few nights where I cranked out that day’s post, published it, and went straight to writing the next one. That was a little hard, but it sure was fun to relax and not write the next night.

Small victories

Oh, and the best part about not writing epic blog posts is I’ve been listening – to what you’re responding to in my posts, to what other bloggers are writing and asking about – and I’ve put all of those ideas in a queue and I’m very excited to dive deeply into those topics. So get ready.

6. Read one new blog every single day

I’ve been reading a lot this month, but I haven’t been commenting as much as I wanted to. Why? I quit my job and started another one. Oh, and I’ve been blogging. A lot. So suck it. It happens.

Milestones and big announcements

• I came out as a writer, a real writer (and my first writing professor responded to it)
• I quit my job
• I started a new job
• I started a new weekly-roundup series
• My husband became an artist
• My friend launched his daily art project
• I started a Facebook page for my blog (Toss a girl a like?)
• Yesterday, I published my 100th blog post on lamiki.com

Bragging rights

• 500 Words or Less – I wrote a blog post about something that a writer said at an event and he wrote a response back. That was pretty awesome.
• Hipster Generation of Entrepreneurs – I I wrote a response to the New York Times article about the Entrepreneurial Generation and I was quoted in an article on GeekWire in response to the same NYT article – big win in my world.

Blogs I had the most fun writing

• Happy Thanksgiving Eve – I had the most fun writing this post and telling you not to listen to every other blogger and Tweet during Thanksgiving (Okay, ‘fess up, who stayed online all weekend?)
• Picturing My True Identity – Because who doesn’t love sharing photos of themselves from high school?
• That Blog Post About my Cats – Even though cats may rule the Internet, being a cat lady is still does not. This was one of the most creative posts I wrote and, let’s be honest here, I have cats, two of them, and they’re pretty awesome.

So long, NaBloPoMo, we’ll meet again!

I had fun this month. And while I really think that the 2010 NaBloPoMo experiment was my breakout year, I kicked ass this year and I’m emerging from the 2011 NaBloPoMo season as a better writer who is pretty damn good at blogging. And as a result, I know you and myself a lot better. Thank you for being with me on this journey.

What’s next? Not a new blog post on Thursday, December 1st, but you will see a new post this weekend.

Stay tuned boys and girls. And thank you for being here with me.

Photo Credit: Lorena Cupcake

I’m psyched. Why? Because I just spent the last fifteen minutes consuming a website that just launched.

Wait – what? Yes, consuming.

It’s no secret that I have a love of words and language. And we all know that a picture says a thousand words. But what happens when the two marry and words create an image?

Meet TEKST Artist

TEKST is a 366-day experiment where each piece is a one-of-a-kind create made up completely of words.

Like this one he created for the band, Pepper, with the lyrics to their song, Wake Up; this video is the official music video for this song. And this one he created for Apple fans everywhere using the text from Steve Jobs’ opening keynote in 1983.

He creates each piece by doing what you and I do every day on our blogs, on Twitter, Facebook, and even the archaic action of ‘forwarding’ an email – by “remixing” ideas. In TEKST’s words:

This “remixing” of ideas can even be seen in each and every art piece. I use quotes, audio tracks, even imagery originally created by others. I have gone to great lengths to credit each source along the way. I believe that every facet of each piece has been created under what would be considered “fair use”. At no point was/is it my intention to outright steal content that doesn’t belong to me. I will happily add/adjust proper credit that is found to be incorrect or missing.

366 One-of-a-Kind Works of Art for Sale

Want to know the best part? He’s selling each TEKST art project for the price of the day of the calendar – that’s $1 on January 1, $2 on January 2, $3 on January 3, etc. with original text-inspired artwork that he’s already created for the first half of the year and artwork commissioned by you the second half of the year.

Why I dig TEKST

TEKST Artist is a dear friend of mine. When we met last March, this project was an idea and didn’t even have a name yet. I love how it’s evolved over the past year and I admire TEKST’s decision to launch this project and invest everything he has into it:

Leaving a steady job to “shoot for the moon” and pursue a career as an artist (especially after almost a decade away from the craft) is something else entirely.  I decided there was only 1 way to get up to speed- I’m going to make and sell art for 365 days straight in 2012, create a video for each one, and feature it right here on the homepage.

But as with most successful people, he didn’t do it alone. Art Alternatives sponsored every single one of his canvases and made the 366-TEKSTs possible. He also has an amazing wife, mentors, and friends. We’re all bought into this project when it was still an idea. And now that it’s launched, we’re all glad we did.

Time to get your TEKST on

Seriously, go check out the calendar. January 1 to June 15 are pieces of artwork that he already created. And starting June 16, you can commission TEKST to create your own piece for $168 – which is a pretty amazing price for a commissioned art piece!

Go, before the entire calendar has been purchased.

You can purchase the classic Macintosh piece that was created in the video linked above on June 15 or a modern “Fail Whale” ala Twitter on May 19.

I just chose and purchased my TEKSTs, have you?

There’s a cat on my desk and she’s growling at the cat on my floor that is sniffing around and has been worried about her all day. He, the cat on the floor, is about to be attacked by the cat on my desk.

I am in the middle of the battlefield trying to write my third-to-last blog post for National Blog Posting Month and I am dangerously close to turning this blog into a diary.

Damnit.

It’s funny. Again, I’m staring at my content calendar that has been telling me to write a post about the etymology of certain words and I really don’t want to write it. I don’t want to write it because I don’t have my point of view on that post fully thought out. I don’t want to write it because I have another blog post to write that has a more time sensitive publication date that I am (apparently) way more interested in than the deadline of this post that is midnight o’clock.

Isn’t it funny how the thing we want to do is never the thing that we want to be doing?

And Minnie, the cat on my desk, just chased Vito, the cat who is not on my desk. She has chased him because he is in her space – the space formerly known of as my office.

I guess I should be thrilled by this attack. Not because she attacked the Vito but because she’s sick. In case you were wondering, the worst way to start off a post-holiday week is in the veterinary’s office; the same office that put down the first cat that you and your husband and you owned together in your adult life nine months prior. And you’re there, alone, with your new kitty who just this last weekend you convinced your husband that you would like to keep.

No wonder I felt really wonky day today.

Minnie’s an Alpha. She came to us after being abandoned by her previous owners who moved out and literally left her in the house, telling no one. Her human grandma found her. And John found Minnie through a friend-of-a-friend’s Facebook. He saw per big blue eyes and her Siamese mix face and he fell in love.

We didn’t even ask if she got along with other cats before we made the appointment to meet her. That’s when I knew that as soon as we saw her, she’d be ours.

Old Man, may he rest in peace, passed away in April. We still haven’t opened his box of ashes that are sitting on my shelf, three feet from this computer.

Losing a pet opens a wound that never closes.

Old Man left behind a brother, Vito, named after the Godfather but has the personality closer to a teddy bear, likes to cuddle. He’s not an Alpha, though after bringing Minnie into the house, I keep hoping that he will be. As I said, he’s a teddy bear. Non-territorial, likes to show you his belly, and has the largest big green eyes of innocence that I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Minnie, who was five-and-a-half pounds of fury when we adopted her in June and I’m so Goddamned proud that she’s up to eight-and-a-half pounds today. Cats come to our house to get fattened up.

And Minnie is eating again while Vito watches her from a chair. Which means she has her appetite back. Which means we’ve made progress if she doesn’t get sick overnight.

Tomorrow the vet will call me with results from her blood work. If anything comes back positive, that means that something is really wrong. If it comes back negative than that means that we don’t know why she is sick, but just was.

As soon as Minnie decides she’s finished with her bland, wet food, Vito jumps in to lick her bowl clean, like every good brother should.

Why do we always need to search for the ‘why’?

I hope all of my American readers had an amazing Thanksgiving weekend offline and all of you are ready to take on the world and the rest of 2011 starting tomorrow. I know I am. So let’s keep it short and sweet, here are three best-of articles that I read last week and one video that you need to watch. Enjoy! (more…)