Mynx Writes

SARK isn't exactly a Muse, but she puts mine to shame. When I was a teenager, I found this poster by SARK in a Toronto mall and immediately fell in love.  I took it home, gave it a place of honor on my bedroom wall, and made it a point to read it from start to finish at least once a day. Some of the best advice I've ever received for fostering my personal creativity came from "How to be an Artist", and to this day, the words remain with me, even though the poster has long since disappeared. If I could, I would take every single bit of advice in this poster and turn it into one of the 12 Steps For Fostering Your Creativity this weekend. However, rest assured that you don't need to stop at the 12 steps listed here today.  Find your own copy of this poster, frame it up, and hang it in your writing space - and don't be afraid to open yourself up to being the creative creature that you are. Are we ready, then?  Grab a notebook and a pen or open up a fr...

Writing and blogging is an addiction. Admit it - if you write or blog - you are addicted to it.  It's your drug of choice, and you'd probably give up breathing before you put away your pen and paper or your laptop and bid adieu to the Internet forever. This is also the only addiction (that I know of), that you should want to become better at. With that in mind, every Friday for the year of 2012 I'm bringing you the Mynx Writes Weekend Workshop.  Consider it your own personal 12 Step Program for the weekend. Starting next Friday, with each Weekend Workshop I will tackle a different subject related to your addiction, including: 12 steps to overcoming writer's block 12 steps to putting off procrastination  12 steps for brainstorming 12 steps for fostering your creativity 12 steps for creating believable characters 12 steps for building a better blog 12 steps for social networking for writers and bloggers 12 steps for world building Becoming a Grammar...

I'm going to preface this blog by saying that I think that the basic social media sharing options on Blogger are great, but they are a far cry from covering all of the options available for sharing your blog posts. So, what do you do when you want to add more options? The easy way is to look for plug-ins - those lines of code that someone else has already done all the work on, and you just have to click your mouse a few times to install it.  If you use Blogger as your blogging platform like I do, you no doubt get frustrated with the fact that the plug-ins are pretty basic, and it's hard finding ones that do what you want them to do.  You are also limited as to where you can place your plug-ins on the blog template. For instance, I wanted to add a StumbleUpon button for readers to be able to use to share my blog posts.  Logically, I went to my "Design" tab on the blogger dashboard and tried to find the appropriate plug in.  I found a grand total of one and quick...