What contributes to conscious awareness...

Soccer moms, casting calls, and my ongoing hunt for a good title.

Here are eight great things that grabbed my attention this week:

1. The creators of Book Doctors announced a casting call for their new TV show: America’s Next Great Author. It’ll be like America’s Got Talent, except that the prize is only $2,500 (as compared to AGT’s $250K), with the promise of “substantial” additional prize money when the show is picked up. Call me skeptical.

2. On the blog this week I interviewed the fabulous Erin La Rosa, author of the forthcoming romance novel For Butter or Worse, and asked her the really important questions, like “do your cats have middle names?”

3. Also on the blog this week, I talked about how grammar and storytelling are two totally different skill sets. You don’t have to be good at punctuation to spin a good yarn (and you can always hire someone to fix your typos).

4. At the Angel City FC game last weekend, team investors Glennon Doyle (wife of soccer superstar Abby Wambach) and Jennifer Garner announced themselves as official team moms, orange slices and all. Filed under: writing and being a soccer mom are not mutually exclusive. (It’s was an exciting game, btw.)

5. Ear candy: Cliché by mxmtoon. The video’s not much to look at, but the song is super sweet. My girl’s been humming it to herself for weeks.

6. The United States has a new poet laureate. Her name is Ada Limón. I admire poets. It makes me happy to know that we, as a nation, take the time to recognize their work.

7. Scientists released new findings this week on how we unconsciously process images, deepening the debate around what contributes to conscious awareness. “Even when the images were presented for the briefest periods of time, and the participants failed to recognize their contents, their brain activity patterns contained enough information for the researchers to classify the images as animate versus inanimate objects.” Fascinating.  

8. I spent this week trying to come up with a title for my new book. It has eluded me for years now. For inspiration I’ve been binging poems, scanning iTunes for song names, and taking long walks. I think I might be getting close. Stay tuned…

Happy writing, my friends,

April

p.s. it’s not too late to sign up for my 6-Week Mindful Writers Challenge. We dive deep on the science of awareness and apply what we learn to our writing, all while building a daily writing practice. Click here for more info.