Tag Archives: give away

Disgruntled Groveling

23 Mar

Hello folks! I’m going to attempt to sound more cheerful that I was in my other blog post from this morning. Because there are happier things to talk about here! More exciting things!

Things that also maybe sort of kind of possibly involve that super awkward thing called “money”…

No! Please don’t go yet! I promise I’m going to try to be funny in writing this! Then you don’t have to give money, either! You just get to laugh! Laughing is good, right? RIGHT?

I am only one largeish cup of coffee into today’s caffeination, I swear.

Aaaanyhoo. First exciting thing: books! I have them! For you! Wooo! So, what are these books? Well, these books are writing-containing-things that I’ve talked about on this here blog thing before, except now they’re even cheaper! Why? Because I decided that I wanted to make my books cheaper, actually. More accessible. Especially my memoir about life with (and moving towards without) an eating disorder and depression and other mental health stuffs. Because I wrote it in the hopes that maybe it would be helpful for someone out there. As a place to find sympathy. As a place to direct the friends and parents and extended relatives with their bagillion questions for answers. Perspective, more so, really. You can throw statistics and diagnostics and symptoms at people all you want, but that’ll still only tell them what a disease is, not what it’s like. So that’s what I tried to do with my memoir. Show people what living inside an eating disorder is like.

So. Lower prices. (Some of my poetry + short story collections are even less than $3 now!) More accessibility. Good stuff. Check out what’s available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=miceala%20shocklee

Also, heads up, my memoir is almost half as expensive if you get it direct through LuLu, because Amazon hasn’t updated the price change I made:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/miceala-shocklee/drop-dead-gorgeous/paperback/product-20635940.html

 

Other exciting thing! I’m going to the Galapagos in two days!!! It’s literally a dream come true for me. Yes, I’m a writer, but I’m also a biologist. Who loves animals. And nature. Especially cool nature. Do you know how much cool nature there is in the Galapagos??? All of it. ALL of the Galapagos is cool nature. I’m seriously not kidding.

I’m lucky enough to get to go on a mostly-completely-paid-for science research-ish type trip to the Galapagos through a class I applied for and was accepted into at Caltech. We spent the entire term, 11 weeks of it, talking about evolution and geological history and 16S RNA genome mapping stuff and LOTS and LOTS about the Galapagos. And this Tuesday, I get to wake up before 6 am and head out to LAX with the rest of my class to hop (well, probably more like “sleepily bedraggle”) onto an airplane that’ll take us to Quito, from where we’ll be sent off straight to the Galapagos!

So, like I said, very exciting. Me, a biologist, gets to go to the Magical Land of Biology. Dream come true.

Also, as I said, the trip is only mostly completely paid for. I did still have to pay for my own flight. Which means that I am $700 of life savings short and recently graduated. I kinda get these knots in my stomach whenever I’ve thought about my bank account over the past few days…

But oh man! I set a “GoFund Me” page to hopefully help make some of the stress-knots stop attacking my insides! In return for donations, I’m writing Galapagos-y things (poems, flash fiction, pieces, short stories, etc.), printing them out all pretty-like when I get back, signing them, and sending them off to donors! The more stress-knots you slay, the more literary goodies you get!

So, um, if you think you would like to help fund my scientific writerly trip to the Galapagos, that would be super nice! But no pressure. Really. It’s cool. Money’s tight. I get it. I like smiles too!

It’s really hard to ask people for money. Katherine Fritz on her blog has called it “shameless whoredom.” I’m calling it “disgruntled groveling.” Because I’m kinda sitting here in my chair all tensed up as I write these paragraphs in which I presume to suggest that maybe if you like my writing you could possibly help fund it and my dreams and travels but if you can’t it’s really okay and you can forget I ever mentioned it okay bye please keep reading.

Here’s that link you can totally forget about to the GoFundMe page thingy that’ll be up till some time tomorrow:

http://www.gofundme.com/53r4wo

Okay. That’s enough being balled up in a whole-body stress knot for the day.

I swear, I was going to make this post more positive…

Um. Here. Have a puppy.

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Let’s Make Some Goats

1 Dec

All right. I try really hard not to throw promo stuff at you all too often. There are so many ad pop ups and commercials and “after these messages from our sponsors” in life, I really don’t feel the need and in fact cringe at the thought of adding to the splew of buy-this-you-need-it and give-money-to-insert-cause-here that’s already descended upon our society as the eleventh Great Egyptian Plague that God apparently forgot about until just recently.

But… sometimes, there are really cool things happening, and they’re worth talking about, and, well, they just inherently involve asking for money…

This is one of those times.

Let’s start by talking about some books. For those of you already familiar with Patrick Rothfuss and his book series The Kingkiller Chronicles, I’ll just leave you to go finish your fangirl squealing for a bit and explain what’s driven you all to hysteria to those poor unfortunate souls who don’t know about the Amazingness that is Rothfuss and his literary brainchild, Kvothe.

So, Rothfuss is an orgasmically well-spoken geek of a fantasy author who’s churned out two books of a three-book series, known as The Kingkiller Chronicles. The books’ve got a paradoxically mysterious yet entirely relatable main male character, subtly complex side characters, a couple or so Strong Female Characters who are also weak and smart and stubborn and loving and bullheaded and real. And he’s got a beautifully constructed fantasy world, a plot mercifully free of irrelevance and wonderfully full of hints and riddles you don’t even realize are there till long after you’ve read them. Basically, Rothfuss’s writing is what I strive toward as an author. If you want to know more, go look up his books your goddamn self.

Because our most beloved fangirls are probably done squealing now, and I haven’t even gotten to my main point.

So. Rothfuss, this spectacular human writer thing, is also apparently a spectacular human philanthropist thing. The Tinker’s Pack, Rothfuss’s writerly “gift shop” of sorts, donates proceeds to Heifer International, an impressively corruption-free charitable organization that turns money donations into animals – like goats – that by providing milk, labor, babies, and eventually meat give families sustainable solutions to hunger.

Yeah. Pretty damn awesome.

And what’s more, in an attempt to garner more traffic through the Tinker’s Pack and thus churn out more goats for starving children, Rothfuss is having a Thanksgiving sale all through this weekend, and a Worldbuilders event (Worldbuilders is Rothfuss’s name for the umbrella organization of his charitable schemes) coming up soon.

So. Yes, I am telling you to go visit the Tinker’s Pack this weekend and buy something. Yes, I am telling you to keep an eye out for the upcoming Worldbuilders event and participate in that too. But hey, by spending $30 on a cool book, or some talent pipe earrings, you get something super awesome, and somewhere a kid gets the best any-day-of-the-year-present of a livestock animal that’s gonna keep them from starving anymore.

Honestly, sounds like a win-win.

And, to incentivize you all even further, I’ll even throw in a chance to get something FREE out of all of this! FREE! Woohoo!!!

After you’ve gone and bought something from the Tinker’s Pack sale, comment below with what you got (honor code, people, no lying. let’s all be decent human beings here). You can even make a separate entry per item purchased! The give-away will run until the midnight interface between Monday December 2nd and Tuesday December 3rd Pacific Standard Time, when I’ll throw all the names into a hat (no, seriously, my boyfriend has a top hat that I’m totally stealing to do this with later) and pick out a couple. The two people chosen will receive a FREE signed copy of my memoir AND a poem I’ll write specifically in their honor. AND I’ll ship the whole shabang to the lucky winners and pay for postage and whatnot all myself.

Sounds pretty cool, hunh? Yup, I thought so. So hurry up! Get out of here! Go ravage the Tinker’s Pack! Let’s make some goats! Now Now Now!

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