Fi Phillips

This is a little different - not an actual, physical gift but something incredibly useful for a writer. Why not set up a blog for your writer friend? A Blogger blog can be set up for free. There are numerous templates to choose from, also free. Visit www.blogger.com Using wordpress.org or wordpress.com , you can set up a blog with the downloaded Wordpress software. Any expense comes in hosting the website, buying a domain name, and if you want to use a template (or in Wordpress-talk, a 'theme') that isn't free, although many of the free themes are perfectly workable. Again, you can set up a tumblr blog entirely free of charge. Tumblr is what they call a 'microblogging' platform. It suits blog posts that are smaller such as photographs, gifs, quotes etc. You can find more information here .

Have you heard of 100 happy days ? Yes? No? I hadn't until I started to see photos cropping up on various social networking sites with the hashtag #100happydays. Some friends posted images of their latest adventures. Others shared photographs of their loved ones, recipes or most recent purchases. The subject matter was of no concern - these were images of things that had made them happy on that particular day. The 100 happy days website says this, " We live in times when super-busy schedules have become something to boast about. While the speed of life increases, there is less and less time to enjoy the moment that you are in. The ability to appreciate the moment, the environment and yourself in it, is the base for the bridge towards long term happiness of any human being." "71% of people tried to complete this challenge, but failed quoting lack of time as the main reason. These people simply did not have time to be happy. Do you?" The aim is simple....

How do you promote yourself online? Or do you? For a long time, my online presence was purely the website for my murder mystery script writing business - no blog or Facebook page, just the website itself. What this prevented me from sharing, however, was the people behind the business - the personality of myself and my co-writers. My existing clients knew who I was through our communications but anyone coming fresh to the website had no idea. There was no connection and hence no reason to choose our scripts over anybody else's. That changed when  I set up a blog for Murdering the Text. Suddenly I could talk about why our plays and ways of operating would suit customers over other companies. I could chat to my customers, share our and their successes, and let them know of new scripts and so on. This created a whole fresh level of communication. What I also took from the new blog was the realisation that I wanted to share more about my writing in general so I set up this blo...

I told you about the River of Stones writing challenge on the first day of 2012 and you'll have noticed that I've included a handful of them on this blog. Aside from one weekend, I've been writing a small stone each day and you can find all of them on my Tumblr blog, What I see, what I hear, what I am . Have you been writing small stones this month?

A friend recently pointed out Tumblr to me. It's a name that I've heard now and then but have never really paid much attention to. In essence, it's a hosting platform for microblogs where you can share photographs, text, music, links, videos and basically anything you'd include in a normal blog. So here is my Tumblr blog - What I see, what I hear, what I am . Let me know what you think.