BlogMash: Strong Daughters, Reading & NaNoWriMo

Colliding Rivers (North Umpqua & Little River) near my mother’s home. Photo by “Little Mountain 5” via Wikimedia Commons

While I’m off traveling once more (to Oregon for a visit with my mother, this time), I’ve collected some cool stuff for you to read until I manage the next installment of our Irish adventure:

*** We can teach our kids to be strong and stand up for themselves, but what about when they’re facing an authority figure?  Here’s Carissa Rogers on raising strong daughters.

*** Myndi Shafer shares a heartbreaking post about the repercussions of calling someone fat.  And we should all shut up and quit asking women when their is due unless they’ve announced it publicly.

*** Jenny Lussier sheds some insight on where she would be without books and reading.  What would your life look like?

*** For a follow-on, Pragmatic Mom (aka Mia Wenjen) has some great tips for encouraging kids to read.

*** If you’re a writer considering plotting vs. flying by the seat of your pants, here’s Kait Nolan on the myths of being a plotter.  It’s not as restricting as you think!

*** Kristen Lamb has tips to fuel up for NaNo, complete with a voodoo veve (and you know you have to click over to see what that is, don’t you?).  For our non-writing Readers, you can peek inside a writer’s brain and see how it functions during non-writing time!

*** And finally, Writers and Readers both should check out Mash Stories, a competition in which three random words are chosen as the writing prompt and you have to create a compelling flash fiction story using all of them. It’s quarterly, free to enter, with a shortlist and a winner’s prize. The shortlisted stories are great short reads, and they produce podcasts of the winning stories!

And me?  I’m fueling for NaNo by researching railroad speculation and creating my villain for Jim and Hannah’s next Shimmer of Time adventure.  Fun stuff!