Stay Healthy
During a time like this, it is incredibly important to keep your entire self healthy. This includes body AND mind. We’ve seen a lot of posts around things to keep us busy, methods to unwind, and other creative challenges to keep us sane (relatively, anyway).
A great creative outlet for anyone and everyone, and our personal favorite of course is, you guessed it, writing. You could be a seasoned novelist, or have never written more than a text message in your life, and still enjoy and get a lot out of writing.
Whether it sounds daunting, overwhelming, or exciting (we hope it’s this one), we have some great suggestions:
Bullet Journaling: If you haven’t tried it, this could be your new obsession. It combines some creative doodling and combines it with every Type A persons’ biggest organizational dream. Kimberly has tried it, and found that her favorite parts were the habit tracker, mood tracker, birthday calendar and top books/and movies pages were the most fun to complete. Give it a whirl. Go to Pinterest to start (sorry not sorry for the hour of your life you just lost on Pinterest)
Poetry. You don’t have to be a regular Dr. Suess or Edgar Allen Poe to bust out something truly amazing. Pick a topic, write a short note about your feelings and BAM! A poem.
A short story. 3-5 pages. Make it fun. Make it a mystery. Make it a love story. Make it for your kids. Make it for your significant other. The options here are endless, and fun! If you like to draw, add in illustrations!
Timelines. Write down some family timelines. When was your first this, first that. You’ll thank yourself later when you cannot for the life of you remember if you moved into your first house before the Jonas Brothers broke up or after…
Interview Parents/Grandparents. This can be a great time to make a call and hold interviews of sorts recording your relatives' stories. Need help with question ideas? Send us a note at library@longoverduestories.com
Your favorites. Write down your favorite memories, foods, days, months, flowers, cities, this list is ENDLESS. This is a great one if you just want to focus on the positives. Want to make a game out of it? See if you can guess your family’s favorites. If not, hey, you learned something new today! :)
Have some other awesome writing ideas? Share them with us! We're happy to publish any of your posts as well, just send again to library@longoverduestories.com
Above all, we wish you, your family, your community safety and health over the coming weeks and months.
Quote of the month:
"Why did we all start loving this game? Why did we all start playing it? Did we do it because we wanted other people to watch us or did we do it because we actually loved it?'
-Bill Self , Head Coach of Kansas Jayhawks Men's Basketball
This was part of Bill Self's response when the NCAA originally announced the tournament would still happen just without fans in the arenas.
Obviously that all changed, but I still love this quote and think it applies to any passions you have. What's that thing you love to do, that you would still keep doing regardless of the number of fans in the crowd, money it makes, fame/accolades? Those are the things that are always worth doing.
Speaking of Basketball
We know college basketball fans are missing the NCAA Tournament right about now. So, to help fill the void, we've got two new basketball ebooks to share. One is an ongoing work in progress, the other is finished.
You ever look at the bracket, see one of the #16 seeds and think to yourself, "Wait, who!?"
"Road to a 16 Seed" is the fictional journey of the Midwestern Basketball Conference and who will win the coveted automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
Chapters available:
For Kansas Jayhawks fans and alumni
We know this March Madness cancellation is especially hard for you since KU finished the season #1 in the AP poll and had a good shot at winning the whole thing. Hey, no need to sulk. Instead, enjoy a trip down memory lane with the ebook: "14: A Look Back at the Historic Big 12 Streak."
You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Also available for sale on Amazon, but we recommend accessing the versions on Long Overdue Books instead:
1) Because it's free
2) Nostalgic videos and photos.
Introducing Long Overdue Writing Groups
We wrote about this in more detail in a separate post, but one issue we've noticed for self-published or hybrid published authors is their books often get lost in the millions of other titles on Amazon. There's not really a "local authors" table online the way there is at the local bookstore.
We want to change that. To help, we are rolling out three Long Overdue Writing Groups: Writers of Lakeview Chicago, Authors of Traverse City, and Alumni Writers of Hope College.
Our hope is these groups can become more than just ways to group local books/authors together. We'd love to see these morph into little writing communities. Maybe people join as writers, others as editors. Artists hop in to help with cover designs, photographers for back-of-the-book author photos. Maybe writers start meeting up at coffee shops (well, eventually, for now maybe best over email) to write together or share ideas. We're excited to see what these Long Overdue Writing Groups become.
And if you'd like to create your own group, let us know and we'll get one set up on Long Overdue. We think doing it by location or something like "Alumni of" works out really well but if you want to start something like, "Sci-Fi writers" or "Children's book authors," hey, why not! We'd love to be a part of that.
Excited to see where this goes. If you'd like to join the new groups above or form a new one, just email us at library@longoverduestories.com
New Book in Progress
Chicago-area author, James Warda, has two fascinating books in progress and we are thrilled to showcase his work on Long Overdue Books. His first book-in-progress is focused on leadership lessons (featured above), the next one is an incredibly helpful and genuine guide for anyone navigating the emotional rollercoaster that is the modern job search.
Check out "You're Being Watched" and more details to come on James Warda's next title soon!
Improv Meets... Writing?
We love this idea and totally wish we could take credit for it. One of our featured authors (Victoria Leigh) came up with the concept of doing a book as a group writing experience. She'd write the first chapter and whoever wants to hop in and take Chapter 2, go for it. Next chapter, new author. And we'll see what happens from there.
You can read Chapter 1 here. If you want to write the next chapter, let us know. We have no idea where this story will go... and that's okay!
Hope College Roots
One of our Co-Founders (Chris O'Brien) is a proud graduate of Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is known to go on-and-on praising the English/Creative Writing department and will tell anyone who will listen about his favorite coffee shop near campus (Lemonjello's).
Recently, Chris had the opportunity to write a guest blog post talking about how and why Long Overdue got started, the fun of running it with a couple of close friends, the challenges of building a business while maintaining a full-time job, and how the whole entrepreneur process feels a lot like writing a book.
You can read the article here or by clicking on this image below.
Where to follow us on social media
Our next newsletter I'm targetting a release of either Tuesday, April 7th or the following week, Tuesday, April 14th. We'd love to hear from you in between. Gonna throw in that email one more time - library@longoverduestories.com