September Writing Updates for YOU

I've been pretty busy writing over the past month, and I've got some great stuff to share.

First up is The Smoking Jacket. Five Tips for Determining If Your Girlfriend Is A Spy is a great piece about finding out whether your girlfriend is really just good at learning languages, or whether she's actually got something to hide. Then there's Five Ways to Afford Beer On a Budget, which provides some excellent tips, including bartering any useful skills you might have for some refreshing brew.

Over at Trail's Edge Blog, there's a lot about flirting with your fellow outdoor enthusiasts. For example, you always want to be prepared for romance when you're roughing it (you never know when you'll run into your future mate!) That's why you should check out Guys: 5 Tips For Staying Sexy in the Wild and Girls: 5 Tips For Staying Sexy in the Wild. No less important is knowing the right gear to have on hand with you at all times. If you've read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you won't be surprised where I'm going with this: 5 Uses For the Towel.

And don't forget, Halloween is just around the corner. Which means I've been busy updating my awesome site about Viking cosutmes, discussing tasty Worms in Mud dessert recipes, and asking people what their favorite Halloween monsters are.

All in all, a very productive month!

Article Rundown: Combat, Camping, and Nerds

I've been pretty good about updating my list of published articles over on my humor blog, You Amuse Me, but I thought I'd do an update here as well for anyone who is interested.

First of all, I'm pleased to be writing for a new humor market called The Smoking Jacket. It's a subsidiary of The Playboy Network (gasp!) but it's been described as "surprisingly safe for work." I've recently published A Guide to Leveraging Your Nerd Cred into Dates there, in which I talk about how you don't have to be a generic "stud" to woo members of your preferred sex. I've also created a handy list of Five Occasions When Going to Hooters is a Bad Choice. Hint: you might want to consider ix-naying the popular chain during first dates and family vacations.

My writing for Trail's Edge Blog is still going strong. Check out this list of Things To Watch Out For When Beach Camping if you're going to be enjoying the beach overnight for the first time. And although the last thing I'd want to do would be to scare people off of camping, I still think you should read about 5 Makeshift Weapons For Defending Your Camp in case of emergency.

To round out the list, here's an article from my old standby site, Weird Worm. If you think that all action movies are the same, then you obviously haven't watched the movies that contain these 8 Ridiculous Close Combat Fight Scenes.

Hope you enjoy!

NaNoWriMo Gets a TED Shoutout!

Saw this interesting video today (thanks to Karl from the Startup Daily for sharing).

If you've never seen a TED talk before, you're in for a treat. The tagline is "ideas worth spreading," and I've found this to be true for all of the videos I've seen there so far. Whether you've got Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes into the audience or two scantily-clad dancers from the group Pilobolus performing an acrobatic, interpretive dance while bathed in blue light, you'll find your mind being blown in ways you never expected.

The premise of this video is great for what it is. I'm a huge believer in the idea that small changes are more likely to stick. And I'm interested in becoming more formal about 30-day challenges. But most of all, I love that Matt Cutts gives a shoutout to something near and dear to my heart - NaNoWriMo!

Never heard of NaNo before? Gasp! Well, in short, it's a challenge that charges writers with writing 50,000 words during the month of November. Click here to read more about last year's NaNo.

Looking for Guest Humor Bloggers on You Amuse Me

Interested in bringing more attention to your humor writing? Then you should definitely write a guest post for my humor blog, You Amuse Me!

What we're looking for: Anything funny and original. List-based humor tends to be pretty popular. Funny pictures are also welcome. We're always open to new format ideas.

What you get: Kudos, endless love and devotion, your work in front of a quickly growing audience, a link to your website/blog/Facebook Page/Twitter account/smoke signal generator.

How to apply: Send an email to emma (at) youamuseme (dot) com with a link to some of your humor blog, a humor writing article, and/or a short sample (at least 250 words) of your writing.

Thoughts on Setting Writing Goals and July 2011 Update

I was thinking earlier about the writing goals that I set for myself in June. I was frustrated that I hadn't done as well as I'd hoped, and I was trying to figure out why I was having trouble. Although I did manage to write all my Trail's Edge blog posts, and I blogged even more than I said I would over at You Amuse Me, I fell short with Weird Worm articles (seven instead of eighteen), didn't start my mystery blog, and didn't read The Happiness Project. Out of all of them, the Weird Worm goal bugged me the most.

Later in the day, I went for a swim (trust me, this is an important part of the story). My goal was to swim for at least fifteen minutes.I didn't have much more time than that to spend, because I had to get back to work. So why was it that I felt so frustrated after a fourteen minute swim? It was surely close enough to my goal to make the difference not matter. It bothered me that after all the work of getting ready to swim, going to the pool, and actually doing the deed, I still didn't feel like I'd done a good enough job.