One of the prompts I’ve been enjoying each month has been the joy dares from Ann Voskamp, author of the book “One Thousand Gifts”.  I’ve shared in different posts how I’ve found joy in the small things of my life.  It’s hard sometimes to do the prompts, but I’ve been successful more than I expected.

Check it out for yourself!  Even if you don’t believe in God, gratitude is still a good practice in one’s daily life.

Here’s the links to this month plus earlier months this year:

May Joy Dare

April Joy Dare

March Joy Dare

February Joy Dare

I wrote about the January Joy Dare here.

Over 1600 people have signed up to participate!  It’s a great way to make new friends, get in the habit of writing daily, and stretching your creativity.

I wrote a guest post back in January for Arlee Bird, the coordinator.  There were some great comments from readers too.

After doing my own random word challenge last year, I recommend this highly as a way to improve your blogging content and skills.

[In the spirit of full disclosure, I am not planning to participate in 2012.  I have been writing a short book and need to get it finished to show to a publisher in May.  My time these days is in keeping up my blog content and getting my book drafted.]

Ollin posts about creativity, writing technique and inspirational topics.  If you haven’t seen his blog, I recommend it highly.

Here’s from Ollin:

11 Ways To Get Over Feeling Guilty About Following Your Passion

The purpose of the Joy Dares is to find three gifts a day from God in everyday, ordinary life.  The challenge may be to notice nature, the home, relationships, colors, or be aware of gifts on the hours.

I love the variety and enjoy looking for God’s gifts in my daily life.  And if you don’t believe in God, practicing mindfulness is a good habit to develop.

These ideas are good for anytime, not just the particular date listed.  I see this as something to use over and over again.  Because these are in a .pdf format, I can download them onto my computer.  Thanks Ann!

The March Joy Dare is here.

And here is February.

So far in March, I blogged about gifts in wind, water, and white.

In February, I blogged about gifts on the hours, joy in the outside, and something old, new & a re-do.

Here’s the link to the January Joy Dare.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your mindfulness and gratitude, try it out.

Here’s what Paige is inviting you to participate in doing:

Celebrating Women

My plan today was to put up a post highlighting accomplishments achieved in February and new “stretches” coming my way for March. In my quest for a piece of clip art I learned that it is Women’s History Month with a specific emphasis on education and empowerment in 2012. This of course has my juices flowing. My passion and purpose in life is to empower women. For me this is exhibited through my work as a nurse helping women with cancer and most recently my involvement with the organization Dress for Success.

The purpose of Women’s History Month is to increase consciousness and knowledge of women’s history: to take one month of the year to remember the contributions of notable and ordinary women, in hopes that the day will soon come when it’s impossible to teach or learn history without remembering these contributions.

Anyway I thought it would be fun to invite my readers to participate in a month long celebration of women’s history.

If you would like to participate you could simply once a week or more often if you choose write a post on a women of history.

Some ideas to get YOUR juices flowing…

Maybe she is one you know a lot about already or perhaps one you would like to dig into a little deeper. My friend over at Stopping the Wind recently used a quote by Helen Keller to get her out of her slump.

Or you could head over to Women’s History Month and check out the daily celebration and write accordingly.

Perhaps my photo blog followers have pictures and stories of women they would like to share…

How about my poetry followers sharing a little on their favorite woman poet…

Or maybe my fellow healthcare/conscience bloggers would like to give health facts important to improving women’s lives…

This may require you to stretch beyond you comfort zone, so be it…

I hope you will join in the Celebration. I will try to have a widget to use soon(no promises here though as it is beyond my current skills).

[From Nancy - Paige would love to know if you post about a notable woman / women.  Leave her a link at The Authentic Me to let her know what you did.]

I also did a daily challenge putting together a family history book, coordinating and organizing 100 years of family photos and stories.  I had numerous false starts doing it.  It wasn’t totally finished before giving it as a Christmas gift to my sister, but I was satisfied that I’d done a good job in the 90 days that I worked on it.  I was proud of the end result, imperfect as it was.

So why do a daily challenge? Life is so busy as it is, let alone taking on a daily commitment to something especially when it’s for our personal life.

One of the ironies of a daily challenge is that the more you do something, the more creative you become. You don’t run out of ideas, in fact ideas often flow faster and easier. Daily practice makes accomplishment easier, not harder.

I’d first noticed this years ago when my husband was in art school. He was in school for 8 hours every day and had hours of homework each night. The school was clear that he would be creative on demand and if he couldn’t, he would wash out. There was no la-di-da waiting on the muse to show up. There was also a minimum of alcohol and drugs at the school, as fuzzy brains tended to flunk out under the pressure and workload.

Before I started keeping my journals, I wrote daily letters to my sister. Surprisingly, it was easier writing short letters each day than doing it weekly or monthly. I had more to say daily than I expected.

A challenge will at some point be hard. There’s the time commitment, the frustration of the learning curve, and the many failures that lurk everywhere when doing something frequently.

Whether you’re contemplating a challenge or are doing one already, it’s useful to write down your intentions and refer to them when you wonder just what you’re doing with a challenge. Some ideas are:

• For enjoyment and relaxation
•  As a creative outlet
•  Improvement of skill and technique
•  Development of a body of work
•  Acquiring a new hobby
•  Trying something different
•  Exploring a potential future change in life

Whatever your initial intentions, it is likely they will change as you settle into the challenge. Trying a new recipe each week for the school year is a great way to introduce variety into your family meals. But what if you decide you want to try cuisines from around the world, go to cooking school for better kitchen skills, or buy some additional tools? The challenge has now morphed into a more complex and satisfying goal and your written intentions should reflect that.

I did my needlepoint challenge as I explored whether I’d want to own my own needlepoint shop. I tried new techniques, signed up for a master teaching program, attended a conference, and networked with women who were in the needlepoint business. After a year of trying it, I realized:

• The level of perfection required was beyond what I wanted to do.
• To stand out, I’d have to do some incredibly complex projects that required hours bent over my frame, using magnifying goggles to see. I wasn’t interested in that either.
• Virtually no one in the business made money at it; most were supported by a spouse and did not have to work a job of their own. Since I was sole support of my family, that was not an option for me.
• The materials and finishing of my work required a considerable amount of cash. As a casual hobby, I could afford it here and there. As a master teacher, I couldn’t justify the extensive budget needs from our household.

At that point, I called a halt to the challenge. I dropped out of the master teacher program, and returned to a casual hobbyist. I have a lot of pretty little pieces from that time and quite a stash of threads and canvases. I was happy I tried it, but it was not for me.

Write out for yourself why you are doing a challenge.  You can change it as you go and discover other or better reasons for it.  But writing it out will help you focus and prioritize, and remind you why you started this when the going gets tough.  If you decide that this isn’t what you wanted, having written it out will help you identify whether it is truly time to quit or whether the reasons are still valid.

A later post will explore how to keep yourself encouraged when you want to quit.

Val has an archive of tips she’s provided to newbie bloggers at Blogging Help For Newbies.  The below post was a response she gave a reader who had recently lost a post she’d spent considerable time drafting.  Val graciously rewrote it to share here:

Saving Your Draft in WordPress

When you’re typing a post for your WordPress.com blog the last thing you want is for something to suddenly undo all your good work, such as your internet connection going down, a sudden power cut or even pressing the wrong key on your keyboard by mistake! Thankfully there are a few things you can do to prevent that happening.

First, WordPress has an auto-save function that starts working after you have saved your draft manually for the first time.  To get it to start working, type just a word or even one character (Often, I just type an ‘x’) – which you can delete afterwards if you want – and then click the ‘save draft’ button. Wait for the draft to save (the screen should refresh itself completely: if it doesn’t then it hasn’t saved) then continue typing your post as usual. Click ‘save draft’ regularly and often and don’t rely on the auto-save as that, too, can occasionally malfunction and not work!

Another thing you can do – though this won’t save your work should you get a power cut – is to use the ‘copy and paste’ function of your browser/computer. In the same way that you would copy a word or words (put your cursor at the start of a word or sentence, click and drag it to the end of the word or sentence, release mouse button and then click ‘copy’) to paste into the same or another document file in a program such as Word or Notepad, you can do this on the content of your blog post and then should you lose your internet connection the copy will be stored on your computer’s own clipboard ready to paste into the post editor again. However, to make sure that the post editor formats your content properly, you should only copy from and paste to the HTML editor. To do that, look above and to the right of  where you’re typing your post in the post editor. You’ll see two tabs there, marked ‘Visual’ and ‘HTML’. The ‘HTML’ tab is the one you want to click to see the code.

So, from time to time, after typing some of your post (don’t ever wait til you’ve typed it all), click the ‘HTML’ tab and copy all of what you have there – from beginning to end (or – another tip – it’s often more helpful copying from the end to the beginning in case you miss a bit of code) to your computer’s clipboard. Keep doing that along the way (I’d suggest after every paragraph if they’re short, or at least after every ten or twenty lines if they aren’t). Providing all works click the HTML tab and copy into it the whole of what you’d copied. (Click and drag over all the text that’s there and then when you paste it will replace it all with what you have copied).

The reason for using the HTML editor is so that if you’ve put images in, or have bolded or italicized text, you won’t have to redo any of it, it’ll all still be there.  If you normally use the Visual editor, just click that tab to continue using it.

Another thing you can do is to compose the content of your post in an offline editor, such as Windows Live Writer. WordPress.com support has info about it here:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/xml-rpc/windows-live-writer/

Or do your whole post in Word or Notepad and copy and paste it in to your post editor in your blog when you’ve finished. However, you need to know a couple of things about using those. One is that you can’t copy the content of Word documents directly into the WordPress post editor (either from scratch or as an edit) and have it look the the same as it did in Word. A friend of mine – Timethief – explains this better than I can, so have a look at her post ‘WORD and WordPress’:

http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2011/09/12/word-and-wordpress/

The other thing is that if you’re using Notepad, before pasting from that into your post editor in WordPress, you should click ‘Format’ that’s at the top of the Notepad window and make sure WordWrap is unchecked. Then click on ‘Edit’ (still in Notepad) and click on ‘Select All’. That will select all the text that’s there. Then  copy and paste that into your WordPress editor.

By the way, there is one other reason why it is better to work on your posts in ‘Draft’ rather than clicking the ‘Publish’ button: whenever you click the ‘Publish’ button, it republishes your post, and anyone who uses a feed reader will see each version – including the parts you don’t want anyone to see, in their feed.

Don’t know what a feed is, or a feed reader? This video explains it simply. Have your speakers on as there are verbal explanations too:

There are several things I like so far:

• The ability to work on individual documents that I can compile later into a single document.  In Word, I’d have to either do individual documents and combine manually or else I’d have to work on a single massive document.
• If I create a long document and then want to break it into individual pieces, that’s easy to do.
• Ideas can be laid out in an outline, in a notebook structure, or on a corkboard with index cards.
• Research can be maintained within the notebook structure, yet kept separate from the writing itself.
• Documents can be moved around, order rearranged, or folders created as groupings change.
• Several types of themes are provided, from fiction to non-fiction to a blank.  Each one has some defaults to help start the creative process but are easily changed for my particular needs.
• Outlines can be in a variety of ways or not at all.

I downloaded a free 30 day trial.  Scrivener strongly suggested I do the tutorial first and I was glad I did.  The tutorial was lengthy and didn’t even cover everything!  By the time I started using the software, I’d forgotten most of what I saw.  Because I knew what was in the tutorial, I simply left it open and referred to it extensively the first few days.

Some things were not intuitive about Scrivener, such as changing the default font (really, who uses Courier New?).  With only a few minutes of searching the forum, I found my answer.  I also found another template being shared by a member, based on the Christopher Vogler book, “The Hero Within”.  It gave me a lot of ideas for using Scriver even more productively.

I can put Scrivener on as many computers as I want.  I can’t cross platforms with my purchase, so I will have to buy a copy for each Windows and Mac if I want to use both computers.

The forum community discusses how to use Dropbox.net to store your files in the cloud for both backup and for access on other computers.  Dropbox.net is free, although if anyone is interested in getting an account, please use this link:  http://db.tt/M5fbXVIX.  Both you and I will get additional free storage for the referral.

Additional space can be purchased on Dropbox if you want to backup your hard drive off-site.  I use Carbonite for my back-up.  Carbonite is a back-up only and not for rummaging around or going in and out of.  Dropbox is made for uploading and downloading and can be used as additional storage space for your computer.

Regardless of what you use, please do regular back-ups of your hard drive.  A fellow blogger recently lost years of photos when her hard drive died.

I felt the $40 spent on this was well worth the money for helping me get my arms around my material, lay it out, rearrange it, write it, and keep my work flowing.

• It only works because it’s acting as a mirror to what is already within you
• You should be writing what moves you at the moment
• Open yourself up and look for the answers you already know
• Using a prompt can confuse you because it’s artificial and can lead you down a wrong path
• It makes you seek validation from the outside

I think Ollin is correct.  If you are relying solely on prompts and writing mechanically from it, it’s a dangerous crutch.  If all you’re doing is answering some questions, you might want to consider skipping a post for that day.

However, I personally find prompts useful mostly because it gives me ideas of things to try.  I see it as a best practices for thoughts and actions.  After I read two different blogs using a walk as their theme, I knew I had to try it.  I liked it so well, it’s become a semi-regular feature in my blogs.

I’ve enjoyed using the Daybook entries.  There is a structure to them, but it’s up to me to make them interesting.  If I did a simple recitation of my answers, Ollin is right that it would be artificial.  I don’t want to do them too frequently, but when it sings its little songs to me, the posts have been wonderful and my readers have very  much enjoyed the slice of my life.

Some of the prompts don’t appeal to me.  I post them in A Daily Life because we all have different tastes.  For someone else, they may very well appeal.

But I don’t use the prompts as a crutch.  I like looking at them and using them to generate ideas for me.  I might skim a page or two of prompts and one will jump out at me, from which I can write an interesting post that others will read and comment upon.  I do that with quotes sometimes too, especially when I did the random word challenge last year.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using a prompt as an occasional crutch.  Sometimes we’re just dry on ideas and need to flex the writing muscle even if it’s forced.  And yeah, not every post is a winner.  Oops.  But the goal is to show up and write and hope that most of it is in fact good.

I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on putting the prompts out here.  I’ve noticed a number of my readers out there trying them out and making some new friends.  So, I’m interested in your feedback – do you think prompts are good?  Not good?  Why?  I’d like to know what you think about using prompts as an aid.

It turns out that WordPress didn’t change over my blog subscriptions, they duplicated them.  There truly were two sets of subscriptions out there.  One was password protected and that was my actual WordPress account.  The other one was not password protected and was merely a subscription manager that WordPress uses for a subscriber who is not part of WordPress.

When I changed my E-mail from Yahoo to Gmail, the Yahoo subscriptions were treated as a non-member subscriber.  By clicking on the bottom of one of those E-mails, the subscription screen came up and I was unable to “unfollow”.

When I clicked on the bottom of the Gmail E-mail, it also came up with a subscription screen that had the same subscriptions.  That I left alone as that was where I wanted my mail from.

It appears that responses to comments mostly switched over to Gmail.  A few seem to be on my Yahoo account, but that is nearly run out.  Those seem to mostly be older comments.  I’m thinking I might not have been logged into WordPress when I made them and they are not part of my password protected WordPress account.

What a mess!  I did put in a help ticket with WordPress, but they are backlogged right now and did not get around to it before I figured it out.  It’s actually not difficult to correct but figuring out what was wrong took some persistence and detective work.