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By: Nathan Bransford,
on 12/22/2015
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It's that time of year!
This is the seventh year in a row for this Heifer fundraiser, and it's one of my favorite holiday traditions.
Here's how this works. All you have to do is:
1) Leave a comment on this post AND/OR
2) Tweet a link to this post and include the hashtag #NBHeifer. Here's a tweet button for your pleasure:
3) Click over to other participating blogs at the bottom of this post and leave comments there too
4) Make your own per-comment or tweet pledge and I'll link to you/tweet you!
If you want in on the fun and make a per-comment or tweet pledge on your own just leave a comment with a link to your blog post or tweet announcing your pledge or
e-mail it to me and I'll feature it in this post. (I recommend
Rowfeeder for tracking your hashtag).
Heifer International is an organization that fights hunger by giving families around the world livestock, training, or other assistance that helps improve their livelihood. Heifer has been recognized for its work in
Fast Company and
Forbes, among other places.
If you have anything to spare this holiday season I hope you'll consider making a donation. And in order to encourage people to spread the word about this worthy cause, there are now THREE ways to help increase the love:
- For every comment someone makes in this post between now and 6PM Eastern time on December 27, I will donate $2.00.
- For every tweet that includes a) the hashtag #NBHeifer and b) a link back to this post (http://bit.ly/1MpYxaJ) I will donate another $2.00. (up to $2,000 between the two)
- If you'd like to donate to Heifer directly, please visit this page.
We can encourage everyone to stop by so we can multiply the giving! Over the past years we have raised over $10,000 together.
Thanks, everyone!
by Sally Matheny
 |
| Blessed by an Act of Christian Kindess |
Kindness breaks through barriers. One act of kindness can turn a person's day around. Just one thoughtful deed has the potential to open up a whole, new life for someone.
This week I'm reposting an article I wrote about this time last year. It prompted an overflowing of two-way blessings. I thought it would be beneficial to post it again. There are many stories about random acts of kindness. One account is of a family waiting until their neighbors went to work. Then, they secretly placed a festive welcome mat at their front door. The children especially liked giving in secret; much like that St. Nicholas fellow did long ago.
Not expecting anything in return, not even recognition, keeps the giver humble, and focused on the giving.
Kind deeds are a great way to help us concentrate on other people rather than ourselves. Children, who are constantly adding to their wish lists, are prime candidates for this type of family project.
You can find free downloads of cards and tags on the internet to print and leave for the recipients of your random acts of kindness.
However, for my family's secret giving, I wanted to create a different kind of tag. I desired to add a twist of faith—something that told about the ultimate act of kindness—that of Jesus Christ. The result is a card that begins: “You’re B.A.C.K.! (Blessed by an Act of Christian Kindness). The card ends by sharing about God's greatest act of kindness and how it isn't random at all, but intentional.
Read more »
Bestselling author Brenda Novak is hosting her 10th annual auction to support diabetes research, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it once again!
I'm offering an hour-long
Skype consultation that includes reading twenty pages and a query critique.
And there are many, many other great things up for bid, including
being named as a character in a David Baldacci novel, tons of
agent consultations, and much much more.
Please consider
bidding for a great cause!
If you've been following this blog for a while, you probably know how much I adore the incredible C.J. Redwine. She's both a friend and a mentor, and an uber-talented author to boot.
And you might also remember a few years back when I took part in a special fund raiser to help her raise enough money to bring her beautiful baby girl home from China.
Thanks to everyone's support, the fundraiser was a huge success, and the adorable Johanna is now happily settled with C.J. and her husband Clint. I've even had the chance to meet her, and she is one huggable, amazing kid.
And today, we need to make that magic happen again.
Meet Isabella Grace:
(DON'T YOU JUST WANT TO SNUGGLE HER?????)
C.J. and her husband are in the process of adopting this beautiful little girl from China. And because Isabella has multiple medical needs, the process has gone much quicker than they were anticipating. They're excited and overjoyed that they'll get to bring their daughter home that much sooner. But it's also left them scrambling to come up with the $15,000* they need to adopt her.
That's where Skipping a Starbucks comes in.
The basic idea? Give up one tiny indulgence today (like a $5.00 coffee) and use it to help bring this beautiful little girl home. It's AMAZING how huge of a difference those small donations can make.
And as an extra-huge thank you, many of her friends in publishing (including me!) are offering up a MULTITUDE of prizes that CJ is giving away on her blog--including signed books, a diamond-and-tanzanite necklace set, and a full manuscript critique from a literary agent.
Details on what's up for grabs, and how to donate (also a progress bar to show how close they're coming to meeting their goal) can all be found HERE.
* Any funds raised beyond the $15k will be given to
The Moses Basket, a non-profit organization that supports adoptive families through grants, resources, and support.
By: Alan Dapré,
on 1/3/2014
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So says Lumos. A UK based charity dedicated to getting children out of institutions. Further to my earlier blog about Lumos – the charity chaired by J.K. Rowling – I thought I’d share more about what it is trying to … Continue reading →
By: Alan Dapré,
on 12/7/2013
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This is my most personal blog to date – and the most important. I have an agenda here. I was in the Care system in the UK – and for 21 years found myself in a range of institutions and … Continue reading →
By: Nathan Bransford,
on 12/24/2012
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I
have it on good authority that Santa is currently making his way around the world, but you still have time to do some giving of your own!
It's easy: just stop by these eight generous blogs, leave comments, and spread the giving to a great cause!
Catherine Ryan HydeAnne MackinMy Karma Jumped Over My DogmaT.K.'s TalesMira's Corner100 First DraftsTales From the MotherlandDaily AdventuresAnd don't forget, you can leave comments on
my original post, or tweet #NBHeifer with this link: http://bit.ly/V78KCz and every one means $2 more for Heifer.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
By: Nathan Bransford,
on 12/22/2012
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Our
Heifer International fundraiser is in full swing! Here are the participating blogs so far, please stop by them, comment, and spread the word about a really great cause!
Catherine Ryan HydeAnne MackinMy Karma Jumped Over My DogmaT.K.'s TalesMira's Corner100 First DraftsDon't forget, every tweet with #NBHeifer and this link: http://bit.ly/V78KCz means $2 for Heifer! And you can
comment on the original post as well.
There's still time to join the giving with your own pledge, just add a comment with a link to your blog
in the main post.
Thanks so much to everyone for participating! Let's keep the giving going!
By: Nathan Bransford,
on 12/19/2012
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Woo hoo! Time for our annual Heifer International blog fundraising goodness where we spread the cheer for an incredibly worthy cause and try to multiple the giving.
All you have to do to enter is to leave a comment on this post OR tweet a link to this post (http://bit.ly/V78KCz) and include the hashtag #NBHeifer to help raise money for a great cause. Then click over to the other participating blogs at the bottom of this post and do the same thing.
And, better yet, to multiply the giving, if you want in on the fun you can do a per-comment pledge on your own blog! It can be any amount, from ten cents to a million dollars. Totally up to you. Just leave a comment with a link to your blog post or tweet announcing your pledge or
e-mail it to me and I'll feature it in this post. (Let me know if you need help tracking your hashtag).
You may have already heard of
Heifer International, an organization that works to fight hunger by giving needy families around the world and in the United States livestock, training, or other assistance that helps improve their livelihood. Heifer has been recognized for its work in
Fast Company and
Forbes, among other places.
If you have anything to spare this holiday season I hope you'll consider making a donation. And in order to encourage people to spread the word about this worthy cause, there are two ways to help increase the giving love (and feel free to do both):
- For every comment someone makes in this post between now and 6PM Pacific time on December 24, I will donate $2.00.
- For every tweet that includes a) the hashtag #NBHeifer and b) a link back to this post (http://bit.ly/V78KCz) I will donate another $2.00. (up to $2,000 between the two)
We can encourage everyone to stop by so we can multiply the giving! Over the past three years we raised over $5,000 together.
Please click over to these participating blogs:
Catherine Ryan Hyde
By: Nathan Bransford,
on 12/17/2012
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The holiday season is here and it's almost time for our 4th annual Heifer International Fundraiser.
If you're not familiar with this most fabulous event, participating blogs and individuals make per-comment or per-tweet pledges, I list them on the blog, and we encourage everyone to travel through the blogosphere leaving community goodness and spreading the word about
Heifer International.
You also end up discovering some great blogs.
Please participate!!
If you are interested in being one of the participating blogs/individuals, please let me know either in the comments section or
via e-mail. Let's spread the cheer for a very great cause.
I know, I don't usually post anything on Sunday except contest winners--but I wanted to let you guys know about this awesome contest The Bookshelf Muse is hosting.
(*whispers* One of the prizes MIGHT be from yours truly. Hinty hint.) :)
So here's the deal:
The Bookshelf Muse is celebrating over 2000 Followers and almost 1/2 million hits and they wants to know...CAN YOU CRACK THE CODE?
Let me break it down for you:
- 12 generous writers.
- A formidable steel vault packed with prizes.
- A time locked sensor.
- And you...with a code.
Will The Bookshelf Muse's
Prize Vault open for you?
Stop by and find out! Here's a HINT to help you win it: a ringing bell will empty this space.
And... the... finalists... are...
Yeah, still working on that. But!! I shall have them ready for you early next week. I think. There are a lot of them. Soon! Meanwhile, there was a Week in Books....
Before we get to the books, remember when I went to Peru on a volunteer vacation and it changed my life? Well! You have this opportunity too! Please visit Volunteer Journals at Travelocity, and all you have to do is enter a video for a chance to win a volunteer vacation. People, voluntourism is the greatest thing ever. Enter! Enter! Enter!!
And books:
Another domino in the path toward e-book-adoption has fallen. In their recent earnings report, Amazon reported the Kindle e-books now outsell paperbacks on Amazon. The e-books, they are selling like mad! (disclosure: link is to CNET, I work at CNET.)
Lots of people talking about Stanely Fish's book about how to write a sentence, and writer Adam Haslett took on Stanley Fish's book, and placed it in context with that tome extolling the terse sentence, Strunk & White. (via The Book Bench) Meanwhile, Slate took a look at Stanley Fish's Top 5 Sentences of all Time. Which are rather top.
And speaking of great sentences, there was a great feature this week over at the Quentessentially Questionable Query Experiment, where my friend Matt Rush interviewed my other friend Bryan Russell about his rather impressive query for his novel THE DREAM OF CROWS. Much insightfulness resulted.
In writing advice news, my former colleague agent Sarah LaPolla breaks down different pitch session attendee types, Eric from Pimp My Novel reminds us of a very important fact of life: this is a business, my dear friend the Rejectionist talks about Inappropriate Agent Behaviors and a Five Step Program for Exiting, my former client Jennifer Hubbard talks about the necessity of taking a break (she's right), and and agent Rachelle Gardner talks about the importance of having a core group of fans.
Oh, and Nabokov was right about the butterflies.
This week in the Forums, getting ready for the Super Bowl, talking about HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, sharing your first paragraph, and
30 Comments on This Week in Books 1/28/11, last added: 1/31/2011
There's an old cliche that says it takes a village to raise a child. And I'm not a mom, so I don't know if that's true--though it does seem to be that most moms could use more help than they have. At least a couple of extra eyes or arms, even though that might make them look like an alien...
*imagines a bunch of women running around with additional appendages*
Um...what was I trying to say?
Oh! Right. Sorry, my brain's a little loopy today--but I do have a point, I swear. And it's that I don't know if it takes a village to raise a child, but I do know that it DEFINITELY takes a village to write a book.
The whole 'reclusive writer' thing is wrong. I'm sure there's a FEW exceptions, but most of the time--even when I look at history--I see writers flocking around each other. Just look at neighborhoods like Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris. They had Les Duex Magots:
Now we have the Blogosphere. It's where I found all the awesome people I now lean on extensively--and I would be lost without my backup. LOST!!!!!
So I thought I'd take a minute to give them a shout out, and to show the world (or, well, the few thousand of you) just how much help this silly blonde girl needs to make a book happen.
One of 'The Sara(h)s'--my core CPs. Not only are our blog names thesorized versions of each other (and yes, thesorized is not a word--but Sara and I have decided it should be), but I can't even begin to tell you how many times we'll suggest the same thing within seconds of each other during a brainstorming chat. She's got a sharp eye, is AMAZING at cleaning up my clunky, wordy sentences, and I know she sees my projects the same way I do. So whenever I consider a major change, she's my go to girl. I can always count on her to help me figure out what's right for my book. Bonus: she never complains about reading things multiple times, which is good, because she's now read my drafts about as many times as I have.
The other Sara(h)--though certainly not lesser, by ANY stretch of the imagination. I'm not sure anyone puts more happy faces, lols, or compliments in a critique, and I swear she loves my characters more than I do (I've even turned her into a cougar, at 21-years-old, no less). She's also been known to ship special 'revision Twizzlers' all the way from Canada to keep me going. But that's not to say she goes easy on me. She's awesome at spotting mistakes, and it was with her guidance--and repeated reads (when she was in the middle of finals) that I FINALLY nailed the hardest scene in my book.
My
friends Ellen Yeomans and her husband Chris Arnold lost their
daughter Paige to leukemia in 1994, just before she was due to start third grade. Frankly, I don't know how they found the strength to go on after that. But they are amazing people. They did not simply find a way to live. They found a way to keep Paige's spirit alive and help other families who have a child struggling with cancer or a catastrophic illness.
Chris explains the whole story in a recent article.
Read it with Kleenex.
Every year they coordinate
Paige's Butterfly Run; a family-oriented 5K and Fun Fitness 3K Run/Walk. Last year they raised $140,000. This year's goal is $150,000. If they make that goal, they will have raised ONE MILLION DOLLARS for children's cancer since 1997.
Here's a recent news program about the run.
Isn't that amazing??
Am I going to be there? You bet! So will Queen Louise and various and sundry people we are related to.
If you live within 150 miles of Syracuse, you should join us. Heck, it's going to be a nice weekend - if you live within 300 miles of me, you should make the trek. If running is not your favorite thing, then walk the 3K course; that's only 1.8 miles. Or just show up to watch (and donate!) After the run you can enjoy the Taste of Syracuse; a downtown food festival 140 different vendors and restaurants, great wines from the State of New York, three stages of live music.
If you're in the mood to read than to run or walk, you can still help. The Syracuse-area Barnes & Noble stores (in Dewitt and Clay) will donate a portion of any books sold this weekend as long as you print out and use the voucher that you can download on the Butterfly Run's website.
But wait! There's more!! I am in a writer's group with Ellen and so is.... Bruce Coville.
To raise money for Paige's Butterfly Run, Bruce Coville will be signing books at the Barnes & Noble in Clay on Saturday June 5th from 4-6 PM.
I will be signing books at the at the Barnes & Noble in Clay
You may have read somewhere (oh, I don’t know…here?) that my first job in design was at a commercial sign company in Phoenix, AZ. I was working at an investment bank (trippy, right?) and didn’t have much real-world design experience.
One day the former bank president called me at the office and said he was starting a sign company and he needed to find a graphic designer as soon as possible. He knew I was “into art,” so maybe I knew someone?
“Yeah, I know me.”
I still don’t know what made me say that with S.C. Johnson’s safe paychecks keeping us fed and having no practical experience to speak of, but the next night we were discussing the opportunity over dinner.
Two weeks later, I was a Graphic Designer. The, uh, Senior and only Graphic Designer. I was in way over my head, but I picked up a lot of the nuts and bolts of handling digital files, ad agency practices, and creative client interaction over the next two years.
Wing and a prayer, baby.
That experience led to an opportunity at MTV in New York, so it was bye-bye Phoenix.
In some ways, my loss. I never became entrenched in the incredible creative community that PHX has to offer. When I was researching venues for my upcoming workshop, I heard about Phoenix Design Week and I started poking around. It looks really exciting, totally affordable, and contributes to Phoenix’s creative culture on a big scale.
So I decided to give something back to the community that got me started. I got in touch with Russ Perry of Keane Creative and he helped me shape my wobbly e-mail offer into something really cool.
I’m giving away a number of seats in my November workshop to lucky PHXDW attendees with a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory “Golden Ticket”-style pass, inserted randomly into swag bags. Exciting, fun, and right in line with the way I like to help creative people.
So thanks, Phoenix. And see you soon. We’ll have coffee.
I am in awe of Justina Chen Headley. Not only is she a talented author of books of some of my favorite YA books -- (Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies) and Girl Overboard) -- she believes in giving back with every one of her books. Check out her interview for details.
Justina's new book
North of Beautiful will
be released in just a couple weeks.
From behind, you’d think Terra Cooper had it all: she’s tall but not too tall, has a figure to kill for, and boasts naturally blonde hair. But the palm-sized birthmark on her face might as well be her fate map. Everyone in her small, touristy town knows what’s hidden beneath the heavy makeup she’s worn since birth. Sick of being the town oddity and even sicker of her caustic mapmaker of a father, Terra yearns to escape the suffocating grid of her life. And then she nearly runs over an Asian Goth boy, her age…and encounters True Beauty in him…and herself.
Load a 90-second video on YouTube:
NORTH OF BEAUTIFUL: FIND BEAUTY CHALLENGE, telling the world what's truly beautiful to you, and you might win yourself an
iPod Touch!
For every video about beauty that fans upload to this channel, award-winning author Justina Chen Headley will donate $10--up to $1,000--to Global Surgical Outreach to help children in third-world countries born with cleft lips and palates.
Time to make a video!
By:
Sondra Santos LaBrie,
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A few weeks ago, my son's preschool sent out a notice about a humanitarian mission that one of the parents was participating in as part of his role with the US Navy.
My son chose over a dozen stuffed animals from his collection to donate and Kane/Miller provided Spanish language books from our Libros del Mundo series.
Photograph from
Dougal the Garbage Dump Bear
by Matt Dray
Just this week, emails have been circulating with stories about the mission and the ways in which these books (and hundreds of stuffed animals) are reaching children in South America. This note was sent from Navy Dad, Jeremy, to his wife, who then shared it with the staff and family members from school:
You remember those donated books? Well 1 set was dropped off in Dental this afternoon and that is the PERRRFECT place to drop them off. Here's why:
They don't bring very young children on board for surgeries but a couple pre-teens do come on. I went there for a cleaning and noticed an 8 or 9-year-old girl sitting with one of our translators. I turned to the Dental Officer who is a buddy of mine and said, "Isn't she a little young to be here for surgery or dental work?" He said, "Yes, but when any adult comes in for surgery they have to bring an escort to help them home after the surgery. A few of them bring their older children as escorts. So while they are waiting in the Dental area for their friends/family’s surgeries to be done I always see if any of them need any teeth pulled or anything."
The girl was looking sort of bored so I remembered the donated Spanish kids books from Kane/Miller...I ran up to my stateroom and grabbed 1 of the 2 sets. I gave them to the enlisted translator and said, "Ask her if she likes to read and if she does tell her she can look through these books and take one or two." The translator asked her and she said, “Yes, she likes to read.”
While I was waiting I noticed the young girl going through them and she started reading one. When I came out afterwards I noticed she was gone and so was the book.
Kane/Miller loves being able to give back to the community when we can and we so enjoy hearing stories about how our books are used, and knowing that children around the world are now reading our editions - and translations - of some pretty wonderful books.
How has your school or family given back?
Justina Chen Headley is celebrating the release of her new book, Girl Overboard, in a big way. For those of you familiar with readergirlz, you know this vivacious readergirlz diva is big into encouragement, empowerment, and giving back. This generous lady not only talks the talk...she walks the walk.
Justina donated half of her advance from The Patch, her first picture book, to InfantSEE, a
Nice blog
Parfum pas cher
Nathan, in the 1980s the children's offering from our church's summer Vacation Bible School was sent to what we at that time called the Heifer Project.