Post #32 – Women’s Memoirs, News – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
1. Women’s Memoir Contest Rule Change
It’s May first…and as Matilda and I read through your submissions to our April contest (we’ll announce a winner this week), we kick off our month-long Google Search Story contest.
We have two Search Story submissions that came in early. You can see them below. But first, I need to announce a RULE CHANGE:
Because Google owns YouTube and because our WritingAlchemy-YouTube account is tied to our WritingAlchemy-Gmail account, we couldn’t have a unique password for our YouTube account. But this left our email account exposed, and that’s not good.
So, now, you DON’T have to post your Google Search Story on our WritingAlchemy channel. Just post to YouTube (you’ll need your own free account, which is easy to set up). Then just give us the name of your Search Story video AND the URL so we can find it. We’ll then embed your video on Women’s Memoirs so everyone can enjoy your creativity. Click here to begin creating your own Search Story. It’s fun. So enter now and throughout the month of May.
Our Limited Edition Rosie the Riveter Bandana
Oh, the prize: We’re giving away our popular Rosie the Riveter Limited Edition Bandana.
Here are the first two entries:
Janet Riehl was the first to submit. She calls her Google Search Story “Yet Lost for Other Causes.” It’s about love found, lost, but never forgotten:
Barbara has submitted our second entry, “The Dream Year.” She writes: “Take A Year Off? Leave work and home and go traveling in small vehicles around the country. We did. A Dream Year.”
Now it’s your turn. Don your beret, slip on your jophers, grab your riding crop because you’re ready for your closeup. So come on all you amateur C.B. DeMilles and deluge us in your entries.
This contest tests your creative talent…but you don’t need to know anything about creating a video to do this. It’s easy.
2. Women’s Memoir Writing Website Adds Search Capability
We want to make it easy for you to find information on our website. Here’s been our approach:
–Our newest blog entry is always at the top of the page and the six most recent blogs appear below, each with a brief description.
–If you are especially interested in one of our categories: Writing Prompts, Book Raves, Interviews, ScrapMoirs (the best in scrapbooking and memoir vignettes), Book Business, Writing Alchemy (our newest category), you can just click on the appropriate paperclip on the right and you can get to all blog posts in that category.
–Our tag cloud contains the many keywords that we use and sometimes that will help you.
However, now that our website has grown so much and will continue to grow, we wanted to let you specify your search in a custom way that the more general approaches above don’t allow. Therefore, we have just launched our Women’s Memoir Custom Search.
You’ll find it on the right side of the home page. Any time you are looking for a post that you read and now want to get back to, just type in a word or phrase and you’ll get a list of all the posts containing that word or phrase. Or, perhaps you are struggling with an aspect of your memoir writing, reading, or publishing and wonder what we’ve written on that topic. Again, just enter your custom search term(s).
Right now, I’m working on a guest post on Story Circle Network’s Telling HerStories blog. I want to reference some of my posts about effective memoir openings. This new feature on our website has been launched just in time to help me with my writing. We hope it is useful to you as well. Let us know a search you did that got you to some relevant information — just post it in the Comments field below.
Happy searching.
