Grit helps you access your creativity even when its hibernating in the crevices of your right brain. Grit isn't a born trait. It's a raw characteristic that you have control over cultivating.

Grit is what keeps your butt stuck in the chair, fingers glued to the keyboard or clutching a pen scrawling away on paper.

Grit keeps you writing daily even on those days when your cranial computer is creeping along or conks out and needs a restart.

Grit is what propels you to write one more sentence and expand it into one more paragraph so you'll be one more page closer to your daily goal.

Grit pulls you from the depths of, how am I ever going to complete this book, into being scrappy enough to sort through the scramble of ideas, notes, character profiles, plot points, setting descriptions, and dialogue, so you can develop it all into a sizzling saga or motivational non-fiction manuscript.

Grit keeps you surging forward forging new trails and repaving old or worn ones.

Grit helps keep your mind focused, your manuscripts fresh, your plots intriguing, and your characters compelling.

Grit means you're pulling on the gloves and fighting through rounds of brainstorming, crafting the tale, edits, rewrites, cover design, publishing, and marketing. And then getting excited enough to dive in and do it all again and again!

Famous used to mean red carpet elite Hollywood, dazzling lights, and popular out of reach stars viewed at a distance on the big screen. Now, any type of person from any size area can reach out to anywhere from a 5-inch smart phone screen and become famous:

Because of timing more than talent

By being authentic rather than acting

Based on ingenuity more than income

We surf in a world where an amateur video of a silly dance, a biting baby, or a prancing pony on a cliff gets tossed around Facebook, tweeted, and talked about on blogs. One person’s influential is another’s insignificant. Both have a place.

For writers, it’s platform savvy that makes you famous and attracts an audience before you reach publishing success. Pen enough titles, and algorithms rather than advertising can appoint you celebrity status on the web.

Be yourself is the fundamental foundation for all artistic creations. Organic advice that when broken down simply means:

*  express your opinion through multiple mediums

*  write what you feel

*  hang out with people you choose to connect with at social sites you enjoy

   market in ways that resonate with your personality

*  upload cute clips of children and pets

*  work the numbers, stream enough into cyber space, and something will stick.

Of course it's vital to plan, strategize, and set goals, but that's not what this post is about.

If you can master even a few of the above tasks consistently, you’ll be walking down the virtual red carpet, waving at your spectators through flashing lights, and narrowing the gap between you and a global audience who will be eager to unwrap your genuine and unique gifts. 

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Autonomy For A Writer Is A Balancing Act Between Desire, Distraction, And Discipline

Location, location, location…A realtors’ motto, a web writers’ maxim that will help you get the most of your online engagement experience and marketing mission.

Determining your favorite places to show up will help you maintain a relevant, relatable, and realistic presence on the web. Here's why:

2. Relatable - Not every person on every site will relate to you, your topic, products, or services. It’s not beneficial to simply have a presence everywhere. Select your friends, followers, and stages carefully. I don’t like the layout on Facebook and designing business pages and running contests is more than I want to do. Twitter is fast and fleeting. I'm there but I’ve always had challenges with the limit of 140 characters and I’ve never been able to figure out how to post photos with my tweets. So I’m starting to navigate more towards Pinterest because it’s simple, visual, and less textually limiting. Plus, if the numbers I’ve seen are accurate, visitors spend more time viewing pins than tweets and spend more through that platform. But that’s just one example and my opinion. Do what works best and where it makes you the happiest.

3. Realistic - Marketing is a long-term commitment. If you don’t enjoy the places you’re hanging out or engaging doesn’t feel sincere, it will be more difficult to stay the course and keep plugging on. If a task feels forced maybe that should be a red flag warning that you need to change directions and choose another avenue for advertising your products, services, and connecting with consumers.

You hope your ideas will spark interest. You need the time invested online to pay off. But in the end artistic expression is a treasured gift. Entrepreneurialism is a thrilling gamble. And social media can be a passageway to profit if you learn to:

- navigate the confusing corridors to locate your most relevant arenas

- enjoy exploring and engaging with relatable individuals

- stay realistic by avoiding the platform pitfall of being all things to all people while trying to show up on every site.

Desire can be dangerous, delicious, or daunting.

For a writer, desire can close the gap between procrastination and poverty, and productivity and profitability.

Desire can push you through challenges and pull you through tragedy.

Desire is the seed that when planted, cared for, and cultivated, will propagate into accomplishments, accolades, and awards for your writing abilities. So...

1.   How do you acquire it?

2.   How do you keep it?

3.   How do you react if you lose it?

1.  How do you acquire it?  

Desire is individualistic. A quest that demands belief in order to fulfill it and begins with questions only you can answer, such as...

*  Why do you want to be a writer?

*  What kind of writer do you want to be?

*  Who do you want to write about?

*  Where do you want your writing to appear?

*  When are you going to act on the ideas that are calling out the loudest to escape from your imagination and be released to the world?

2.   How do you keep it?  

Remind yourself why you’re in the writing game by giving yourself mental and physical reasons to fight to the finish.

Find pictures, view videos, listen to webinars, and attend conferences that represent and help you realize the endless possibilities in your answers to the questions from number 1.

Study the photos to keep you focused and on track. Scour the web for videos of successful authors. Support webinars that are sponsored by writers you relate to. Seek out conferences because a personal handshake still trumps a virtual one.

3.   How do you react if you lose it?  

First, desire may not be lost but simply sidelined by circumstances. If your desire becomes diluted identify the reason, isolate what or who is responsible, then either remove the culprit or, decide if the goal itself is the stumbling block.

Is this an ambition you’re ready to release and let go of or replace with another desire?

Writing technique is a learned skill. But no one can teach, train, or instill in you the deep passion, which mirrors obsession, that you feel when you have a message that must be delivered and stories that must be shared.

Conditions change and attitudes evolve. So roll with it and accept that it’s okay to alter your desire from time to time.

Sometimes feeding off another author’s desire can strengthen your own. Articles or blog posts are wonderful sources of contagious enthusiasm, energy, and education. Little snippets of surfing and scanning the web are beneficial. Don’t linger to the point of longing to be like other writers. Look enough to get yourself motivated to move on with your own masterpieces. 

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Easy Way To Add Active Table Of Contents To Your Ebooks

There's an app to touch, trace, and track every part of your lives. Software probably exists to sort and organize the writing material for your ebooks as well. But since I only have a 'dumb phone', it's no surprise that this is my old school system for arranging text into an online book. 

Perhaps the best way to explain the method to my un-technological madness is with an excerpt from this ebook.

This is number 2 of 3 purging tasks that I suggest to help you become more prolific:

2. I would live a technologically celibate life if I could because the frustration of dealing with it chips away at my creative energy. I’m convinced that computers are possessed and schizophrenic. Today it’s necessary to be part artist, publisher, technologist, and marketer. But if you are spending more time on digital tools than writing it’s time to re-evaluate because those moody machines should support your writing not sabotage it. Simplifying your social media and sharing sites will save your scribe’s sanity.

Technology runs on systems, linear formulas, equations, consistency, and discipline. An artist does not. When choosing each digital tool decide how you can use it from a creative point of view. Your voice on each video, audio, page design, and tweet is what keeps it fresh for you and your audience. Keep technology as a vehicle to enrich not drain your time.

As an artist you are the perfect person to turn technology upside down and create the “wow! Here I am” impression and not just “I’m here.”  I’ve concluded that for a right brain soul mastery of the digital domain is never really achieved. It’s frustrating, alluring, and constantly evolving.

One of my biggest challenges with technology are all the steps it takes to accomplish the end result from signing up, selecting passwords, developing profiles, page design, updating pictures, tweets, following up through autoresponders, dealing with platform non-compatibility, and struggling to reach support. 

My new resolve is if a piece of technology takes more than a few minutes and distracts me from my writing for very long I skip it, find another way, or another service to accomplish what I want. It doesn’t pay to beat your head against the wall expending energy and effort trying to do something you weren’t meant to do.

There is an online group, tribe, or culture for probably most of the hobbies, specialties, and business segments that currently exist. Instead of only signing up for the major players, such as Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook investigate some smaller sites by Googling your industry. Fewer participants can mean more targeted, easier to obtain, and closer relationships in your specific niche rather than sifting through masses of people to locate one segment of folks that you need to reach. For example, I upload recipes to cooking centered websites like http://www.bakespace.com  http://www.justapinch.com  and http://www.foodista.com  Bakespace even has a unique application that allows me to upload and sell my cookbooks from their site. I’m able to reach out to a community of home chefs that are also interested in trying, tweaking, and tasting new recipes.

I use http://www.redbubble.com to sell photography and motivational art. Then there’s http://www.goodreads.com for writers. http://www.vimeo.com is geared more towards artists. http://youtube.com has some of everything. Whatever service your company represents there’s usually a place where like-minded people congregate.

Don’t buy into the, “ours is the best out there, nothing like it, no one can do what we can” rhetoric. Dig beyond the shiny surface and decide what is right for you. The one stop shop concept can be very appealing but be ware, if that one shop goes belly up, new owners take control, or another person is crowned CEO all of your operational technology could be at risk. Consider diversifying your digital tools. For example, house your autoresponders, audio, video, email, and media storage in different places. Ideally, you need physical storage such as, hard drives or DVD’s plus cloud storage as a backup to be completely safe. No one system is fool proof.

There's no one-size-fits-all system. Choose the path that feels right to you and that enables you to reach your objective of becoming a more productive, prolific, and profitable artist!

What system do you use to write and organize your ebooks? Do you depend on technology or, are you too a pen and paper, on the floor storyboarder?

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