An Excerpt from The Life Organizer by Jennifer Louden You observe the world in your own way, a way formed by your biology, life experiences, education, culture, spiritual beliefs, and many other influences. That’s a common enough idea — you observe the world through a lens fashioned from all these facets of you. Yet consider: to observe is to interpret. You literally cannot experience reality as it is, just like you can never see yourself without a mirror. You live in a world first filtered through your brain’s system of sorting, editing, and ordering information and then shaped by your observations. It is a narrative system — information comes in, and your brain sorts it into a story, which is a good thing, since 400 billion bits of information are received by your brain every second. Without this narrative-making brain, you would soon be insane. Creating narratives is how you make sense of things. Everything you experience is the product of this storytelling process; withou...

Or not. Where do you stand on the topic of literary sex scenes? Some readers avoid it like a dread disease while others run towards it with wild abandon. Most readers are somewhere in the great in-between, a pinch of spice at the appropriate time makes for a well-rounded story, but it’s not the whole story. I engaged in a very long internal debate about adding sex scenes to my novel, The Last Prospector . There were some strict mandates I needed to follow, self-imposed mandates all. But I set out to write a story that would satisfy me as a reader, so one of those mandates was every word, every scene had to propel the story. For the most part, sex in books is just scenery, it rarely moves the story forward and this was a problem. Erotic fiction is everywhere lately, courtesy of Fifty Shades of Grey .  (I haven’t read 50SOG and don’t intend to. It’s not a judgment of sex or kinky sex, I’m just plain old not interested). Since publishing isn’t afraid to ride a trend t...

Awards come and go, and it pays to be cautious especially in these days of increased book publishing opportunities. Here is a new award I can personally vouch for having been a member of the Story Circle Network for years. ~ Dani Greer ~~~~~ May Sarton under her portrait By Paula Stallings Yost The winner of Story Circle Network's first annual Sarton Memoir Award will be announced at  Stories from the Heart , the biannual SCN National Memoir Conference, at the Wyndham Hotel in Austin, Texas, April 13-15, 2012.  The award is named in honor of May Sarton (1912-1995), the distinguished American poet, novelist, and author of twelve memoirs and journals. Readers have found Sarton 's work to be inspiring, moving, and thought-provoking. While widely acclaimed for her fiction and poetry, Sarton ’s best and most enduring work may lie in her journals. In these honest, probing accounts of her solitary life, she deals with such issues as aging, isolation, solitude, friendship, ...