The Effective Author: The Power of Smartphone Notes

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author stress, Effective Author, Kebba Buckley Button, Smartphone notes, stress

 

© 2015  Kebba Buckley Button, MS, OM.  World Rights Reserved.

At lectures, some of you have already been taking notes on your iPad mini or your laptop.  But then how do you organize the notes so you can retrieve them?  At last, I have developed a system.  Smartphone users, rejoice!  It’s time to cultivate your smartphone “Notes” app!  First, open that app.  Then create some categories.  I have about 20.  Now open different folders of notes with a word in capitals that is the category name: QUOTES, LIST, COLUMNS, NOTES (these are notes that don’t have their own folders), MYTOPMENTOR, MY UPCOMINGBOOK.   These first words in each NOTES folder will show as titles of the different Notes folders, when you first open the app.

Of course, substitute the actual name of your top mentor, for notes from their TV show, teleseminars, and such. And substitute the actual name of your upcoming book.  Now, every time you need to make notes, you’ll add them to that folder in Notes on your smartphone. At the end of each lecture or inspiration, use the “send it out” function and email that category of Notes to yourself.  Then, when QUOTES or LIST arrives in your laptop email, you’ll select the text and drop it into a Word document.  You can also select just a section of your QUOTES notes, for example, and drop it into an email to yourself for insertion in a column you’re writing.

Here’s a great example of the power of your smartphone.  Recently, during a power outage, I was on deadline and had run down my laptop’s power.  I just hated to revert to paper and pen by flashlight, because then I would have to keyboard in the whole article when the power came up.  But my smartphone had plenty of juice and a backup power unit.  So, I selected and copied sections of my COLUMNS Notes, created a new folder of Notes, and labeled it with the name of the column.  Then I wrote an entire column within that folder, yes, still on the smartphone.  (Apparently there is no limit, or there is a generous limit, on the number of words you can have in one Notes folder.)  Then I copied the column text, pasted it into an email, and emailed the column to myself.  Soon the power came back on, and I was able to use Word to format and post the column online.

In just one example of the power of notes, my QUOTES collection has now grown to over 80 pages.  It’s a Word document filed under BOOKS.  I have it divided by topic, and each topic is highlighted in a box.  The topics are in alphabetical order, except GENERAL, at the top of the document, and UNSORTED, at the end.  When I want a quote for a column or book, I can easily find one in my own collection.  Or, I can do some research, find new cool quotes, and add to the collection.  I often add quotes from live events I’m attending.

So now, are your notes more organized?  Are you at least inspired?  If you still have a pile or some notes lost in your To Be Filed stacks, keep your spirits up!  The more you create notes in your smartphone or computer, the fewer pieces of paper you’ll have, and the easier it will be to pull a few, transcribe them, and file them in your computer.

Until next time, keep gathering your paper notes and practicing with your smartphone and laptop.  Those notes are still the lifeblood of your writing.  Next time we’ll talk about how to organize the notes in your computer, saving you hundreds of hours of frustration as you go along.  My goal is to show you how to reduce author stress and help you to become a completely Effective Author!  Questions?

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Energy – Peace – Meditation

 Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert and award-winning author.  She also is an ordained minister and has a natural healing practice.  Among her books are: Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br),and Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition (http://tinyurl.com/mqg3uvc ). Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine, available through her office.  Just email SacredMeditation@kebba.com.   Want an appointment? Or to ask Kebba to speak for your group?  Just email Calendar@kebba.com.

The Effective Author: In What Form to Write?

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author stress, Effective Author, In what form do I write, stress, The Effective Author, What do I write

© 2015 Kebba Buckley Button, MS,OM.  World Rights Reserved.

This is the fourth in a series of 35 articles I call “The Effective Author”.  Since I have found that my writing life is over 80% non-writing activities, I am offering this series to save other writers a lot of frustration. If you have just dropped in on this series, get out your notes and start processing along.

We have talked about finding your delight in writing: your passion topics, past/present/future, fiction/nonfiction/blends/both.  I’m recommending that everyone notice what excites and absorbs them, in reading or in their own writing.  These are the topics and formats that will pull you forward and energize you as you write.  Notice I say “these”.  You may have multiple areas and formats.  A number of authors do, and they actually write under different names for the different series or areas.

Some people love to have a marketing name and perhaps an avatar (cartoon-type image of themselves) to go with the marketing character.  Some like to write under their own name, no matter what they are writing; I’m one of those.  In the academic environment, sometimes faculty are expected to be very serious.  Sometimes, they are expected to publish only scholarly works.  In 1970, a professor of Greek and Latin literature, at Harvard University, learned a hard lesson in this area.  He wrote the blockbuster best-selling novel, A Love Story, and then he wrote the screenplay for the blockbuster movie.  Erich Segal might have had better politics with his academic community, had he written his popular works under a pseudonym. Segal wrote not only scholarly works, but a variety of screenplays (e.g. Yellow Submarine) and novels.

And this brings us back to the question of what formats will be best for your writing.  If current life interests you, blogging (300-800 word articles) or articles for news media may be for you.  Write a variety of articles on timely topics, and submit them to newspapers, the Huffington Post, The Observer, and any other online news outlets that your topics seem to fit.  Submit your articles in the style and length(s) you see in each publication.  Do you want to write about lifestyle, prominent people, fashion, skincare, or financial management? Do you write humor? These topics may fit best in magazines, trade publications, or in the Lifestyle sections of newspapers, online or in print.  Any of your short articles can be linked together to become books.  Let your imagination run wild at the countless combinations that are possible.

If you like characters, actions, and story development, either biography or fiction may be for you. Major biographers can make a lot of money.  And some people’s lives have been at least as exciting as fiction.

In fiction, first try writing microstories (around 300-500 words) such as One Minute Mysteries.  You can write short stories of, say, up to 20 pages, or novellas of perhaps 40-75 pages.  Full novels can run up to 600 pages, continuing in trilogies (e.g., Lord of the Rings) and even prequels. Novelist Jeffrey Archer also writes short stories, which he publishes in collections (e.g.,Twelve Red Herrings).  If you start with short stories, you may fall in love with some of your characters, and you may find them informing full-length novels.

Stephen King said,

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials,no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.  What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”

The Effective Author wants to create that perfect entertainment, in any number of lengths and forms.  Are you making notes on your passion areas and your possibilities?  Are you checking the Best Sellers lists?  I want you to become that Effective Author.  Questions welcome.

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Energy – Peace – Meditation

 

 

 

 

 

• Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert.  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister. She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition. Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine. Both that book and Peace Within are available through her office.  Just email books@kebba.com. 
• For an appointment or to ask Kebba to speak for your group: calendar@kebba.com.

The Effective Author: Why Write?

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Effective Author, Kebba Buckley Button, stress, why write

© 2015 Kebba Buckley Button, MS,OM.  World Rights Reserved.

This is the second in a series of 35 articles I call “The Effective Author”.  I mentioned in the first article (http://wp.me/pw4HM-pa) that I had discovered my professional writing life– of many years– is mainly about activities and considerations other than the writing itself.  So I am offering this series to encourage other writers, who may feel bogged down by the many aspects of our writing lives that encumber or enfold the actual writing process.

I began writing in great volume, in my holistic stress-and-pain management career, because I was getting tired of hearing myself explaining the same principles and medical discoveries to every one of my clients.  And while I gave talks to every professional group that invited me, those 30-45-minute talks were necessarily superficial.  So I wrote hundreds of articles and evolved a selection of them into my first book, Discover The Secret Energized You.  Yes, the “The” is capitalized in the title, because of another book that was wildly marketed at the time.  I’ll tell that story in another article.

So are you a person with a mission, who needs to write for that reason? Or are you simply craving to write?  Please, make notes on your thoughts.  One easy technique is to take a blank piece of paper, and begin sketching: your reasons for writing, what you have been writing, what you would like to write, what you would like to be known for.  Imagine your obituary: what will it say about you, your writing, and your life?  What would you like it to say?

William Wordsworth wrote this:

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

You need not limit yourself to being either a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer.  Some of the most wildly successful fiction authors started in science careers, and wrote technical books before they wrote fiction.  Consider Kathy Reichs, the creator of 19 mystery novels based on the adventures of Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist.  The television series, Bones, is now in its tenth year.  Consider Elizabeth Peters, actually a doctorate Egyptologist named Barbara Mertz, who is known for her Amelia Peabody series centered on Egyptian archaeology adventures.  With 19 novels in that series alone, Mertz also penned a non-fiction companion volume.

Write down or sketch out what you love to read and why.  Were there kinds of reading that delighted you in the past, but now perhaps you think you don’t have time for that/them?  For several years, when I was single, I greatly enjoyed the Second Chance At Love romance novels.  A friend gave me a box of them, and they were diverting, refreshing, and encouraging.  Now that I am extremely happily married, that wonderful group of novels don’t interest me at all.  But sometimes I still judge the novel categories for a literary contest or two.  That exposes me to all kinds of novels, and it refills my imagination.

Here is the biggest question:  Does your writing delight you?  If so, you’re writing in a good genre for you.  If you feel tired and strained when you are writing, are you in the wrong area or genre?  Or do you simply need some tools to make it easier?  Feel free to write me for help if you are stuck.  I want you to become a truly Effective Author.

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Energy – Peace – Meditation

 

 

 

 

 

• Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert.  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister. She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition. Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine. Both that book and Peace Within are available through her office.  Just email books@kebba.com. 
• For an appointment or to ask Kebba to speak for your group: calendar@kebba.com.

The Effective Author: First Thoughts

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Effective Author, how to write, Kebba Buckley Button, stress, The Effective Author

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2015 Kebba Buckley Button, MS,OM.  World Rights Reserved.

In my life journey as a writer, I remember early English class instruction in such exciting topics as sentence structure and paragraph construction.   Now I am the award-winning author of three books, several course curricula, hundreds of articles, and two meditation CDs.  I never set out to be a writer.  And I’ve found that the writer’s life is only about 10 percent about how to write or about actual writing.  To be an effective author, it is crucial to know a lot about the markets for writing and about skills authors need for time, energy, space, personal, and market management.  So, for this and the next 34 posts, I am offering pieces on what I now believe a person needs to truly be an effective author.  No need to stress about your success.  Just include the surrounding skill areas, and you’ll be on your way.

I had some advantages in getting to where I am.  My home environment was filled with books and thinkers’ magazines.  Literally.  The living room was lined with built-in bookshelves for novels, philosophy books, and encyclopedias. Magazines in English and German were everywhere.  Dad read Der Spiegel–like Germany’s answer to Time Magazine–in the evenings, to keep his knowledge of German fresh.  Sometimes, on trips, Dad bought Readers’ Digest in the airports. It was fun looking through all the topics and humor.  When we had reports to write for school, it was easy and—dare I say—fun, digging through the encyclopedias for bits about Abraham Lincoln or how apple trees grow.  We also went to the town and school libraries a lot.

Mom loved reading fiction, and she taught us to read before first grade.  She especially loved (and still does) mystery novels.  By High School, I took up reading mysteries, to try to bond with her, but she read them so fast (and still does), that that didn’t really work.  Meanwhile, I began to absorb the patterns of fiction.  I believe now that the best writers are those who fell in love with reading at some point.

Looking back, I do remember being told I was a natural writer.  What a shock.  That happened in High School, when we were twice asked to write a descriptive paragraph.  Somehow, I decided to write a microstory each time.  I had a quiet hour in the school library, and I used a thesaurus to make my sentences more colorful, as I told my tiny stories.  At that point, I had already seen the One Minute Mysteries, microstories in collections, where the reader is invited to guess the solution to a crime.  So I believed a story could be told in 300 words or less.

Later, I earned a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in sciences, for which I had to write countless papers.  In my engineering career, and when I changed over to holistic pain- and stress management, I was still avidly writing columns. Writing had become easy for me. I was driven by a passion to help people.  I still am.

I hope you’ll journey with me, over the next 5 weeks, and write out your own thoughts as I share mine.  Who knows?  You may be ripe to be a truly effective author.

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Energy – Peace – Meditation

 

 

 

• Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert.  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister. She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition. Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine. Both that book and Peace Within are available through her office.  Just email books@kebba.com. 
• For an appointment or to ask Kebba to speak for your group: calendar@kebba.com.