Gingi Edmonds featured my wordplay and play on words, along with the recipe inside it — a fun take on Japanese/Hawaiian poke bowls.
Read on at Domestic Geek Girl for the full recipe.
I was featured not so long ago on Rudi’s Gluten Free Recipe Page with this fusion-food mash-up: The Thai Quesadilla.
As a quick and easy to assemble lunch or dinner–also delicious–this recipe has no equal. I recently made these thai-style quesadillas for friends, and everyone to the last and least gluten-free of the bunch devoured them and asked for more. It’s a cheap meal, satisfying, and although not peanut-free, it can be nearly everything-else-free.Fusion-food has gotten a leg-up recently, and this a perfect example of it at its best.
Continue on to Rudi’s Gluten Free page for the full recipe…
I’ve just explored the challenges, and opportunities, of living with celiac disease. Do we have a cure? Maybe we do — look at it this way.
Check out the full article at Gluten Free and More Magazine online here.
“Think of your brain as an endurance athlete — but a performer of feats of invention rather than physical prowess. It needs fuel. And you probably need practice approaching food with a new attitude. “
Check out my latest at The Freelancer’s Union! You can nix the attitudes to nourishment that hold you back with these 5 new food attitudes.
When Media Drain, How To Turn It Back Around
Do you notice you have the most scintillating copy and content to write for your clients on twitter and Facebook?
Do you notice, after a day braining the blazes out of it, you feel drained and dull? Personally, there are days I can’t remember what I wrote or the strategies I used to connect and engage my audience.
Social Media drain. The constant buzz. The need to have something to say, and voracious need to beat the buzz with something better — if you write for a living or if you freelance with any form of content that has to fly out into the twitter-sphere, you’re set for one equation: all out, none in. The only answer to that math is a sum of empty.
Do these three things, and use the same tools you use for work to nourish your creativity,; you’ll flourish, and ultimately, your productivity will too. But remember, it’s not about the product, it’s about the process.
1. “Our best and brightest need to stop viewing social media as a quick avenue to fame and fortune“(1)
View it as an avenue into conversation, an avenue for connection, an avenue and outlet for creativity. But fame and fortune will drain you every time. You’re the best and brightest; you’re not a cog or a battery.
2. Take the quips, wisdoms, wise-cracks, and little gems of insight, and give them to yourself.
What? Yes. Carry a little notepad. Make it solid and physical. When you think up a spark, write it to yourself first. Promote yourself first. Give yourself your own quotes, in your voice.
Your voice, which leads us to…
3. Allocate time to listen to your own values, your voice, your head.
Turn off everything. Take a 30 minute or hour walk if you can. Do something pointless, but enjoyably creative. Don’t be driven by brand-ese. Marketing is its own foghorn. But your voice needs to be louder, and stronger, or you’ll lose the lungs to use that foghorn in work.
4. Look at the ratio of time spent speaking in client “brand” or “voice” to the time spent just writing or speaking with your own voice.
If it’s 80/20 in favor of the brand, or the ad, turn it around. I tried slam-poetry for a while; when I couldn’t go slam some poetry, I took walks and sang. Weird? Irrelevant. It made room for me in my life and authenticity and gave me back some perspective on my work as well.
You need meaning in your life to engage and create meaning. But the bottom-line is: You need a life. When media buzz become omnipresent, we lose all sense of connection. By using the 4 strategies above, I turned my worst drain around, and funneled my resource back in to where the drain became an opportunity to re-fuel.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”—Aristotle
The same can be said of sanity.
Check out these tips my latest at The Freelancers Union! You can bee on the ropes — and stay sane with these daily reminders:
The 5 Things Successful Freelancers Do To Keep Their Sanity.
What’s the first stage of burn-out? A sense of purposelessness — that deadly inside voice so dull drumming out the beat of it’s not enough, it’s never enough. This is the last thing you need as a freelancer, and one of the first hurtles that most self-employed hit, and break themselves on.
So how can epic fiction get you up and over the fence?
Get Out of Yourself
Any time you focus on one task for too long, you wear out the brain paths for that particular work. Studies show the human attention span works ideally in 20 minute increments. After 20 minutes? Your think box needs a change of channel and some fresh air. So what happens when you’re self-focused, project-focused, and under deadline for hours on end?
Exactly. Burn, baby, burn.
Epic fiction gives you a total and complete break with the minutiae of the left-brain analytical. Better yet, fiction’s interior struggles and epic fiction’s cosmic challenges throw the fried freelancer into an oft-forgotten-truth: There’s a lot more out there than just me and this bleeding project deadline and my mad-scientist client. Or, you know, something along those lines.
I spent two whole days agonizing over non-stop content writing for a client at one point last year. I finally threw it all in a metaphorical bin, went for a run, and crashed on the floor with Valente’s Fairyland books. I forgot myself entirely for a few hours. When I surfaced, I didn’t know where I was. But I did know I had words again in my fingers, and I knew how to string them together to write a badass blog for this client, and then some.
Get out of yourself — you were meant to live in the epic world, not try to fit it all into your little head.
Have Some Fun
Stories re-connect us to our creativity. How are you supposed to freelance — whether it be graphic design, writing, web design — if you’re disconnected from that? All right. Axe that. Stories re-connect us with out ability to play.
Play has no deadlines. Play is always perfect. Play is where we learn and enjoy the things that make us who we are — and who we are is the only place from which we can work effectively, healthily, and happily.
Play is good. Play teaches, without relegating us to cogs or demoting us to the lowly serf of utilitarian productivity. Play is part of fiction, and fiction connects us to our ability to empathize, learn, and relate to ourselves and others.
Have some fun. Read some epic fiction.
And finally…
…some epic fiction is really bad.
Have a Laugh, Take a Break
Second most deadly deal for you freelancing freedom-fighters: Seriousness. Perfectionism. PARALYSIS. I run into this bloke on a regular turn-table basis. Getting stuck in my head, and in a whirl around a project or client without a break, turns me into a compulsive freak for perfection — and it is all based on the deadly serious.
No laughs, guys. No laughs.
Well, epic fiction: You can be horrid to high heaven. You can make no sense. You can sometimes include wizards in speedos, heinous plot-twists, and long-lost-impossible-brothers-with-…is it a secret weapon to save the world again? YES! Sometimes.
When I was growing up, my dad had rather a thing for picking family movies. He had a thing, which was also a talent for picking the very worst film you had ever set eyes on. One such shiner included dialogue written by what must have an illiterate wookiee from his marooned bark in the North Pole. It was so bad, we laughed for days.
It’s good to be bad sometimes. In less paradoxical prose, it’s good to laugh and not worry about making sense. It’s good to laugh at yourself.
Working for yourself often looks like freedom at first. It isn’t if you don’t give yourself a break, disengage, and get epic. If you’re the sort that really just can’t find a tooth to sink into epic fiction, try a story anyhow.
Our sense of well-being and ability to work is directly proportional to our sense of purpose.
We freelancers are free-folk, if we give ourselves the break, the laugh…and the epic fiction. Purpose doesn’t come from being productive. Purpose comes from having a sense of something great, receiving the cool beans of the universe, and doing what we love.
Next time you’re 8 hours in and feeling like a mole-in-a-mountain, why not try taking a time-out for the epic?
Some epic fiction recommendations if you’re at a loss:
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (always thought this was a snorter)
Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia McKillip
Dalemark Quartet by Diana Wynne Jones
The Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The Girl Who…Fairyland Trio by Catheryne Valente
The Runelords by David Farland
Disclaimer: Not all titles recommended for stellar literary merit. Some, as noted, snorters. But that’s the point.
C.J. Williams 