40 Random Acts of Kindness in 40 Days for my Big 4-0

Last month was my 40th Birthday and I celebrated by doing 40 Random Acts of Kindness (RAK). I was inspired by reading a post by a mom that had celebrated her birthday by doing 35 acts of kindness with her kids. This was a challenging but fulfilling experience.  One of the unexpected benefits was I became a better listener and more aware of people’s needs as I searched for the next unique RAK I could do.  While I don’t think I am one of those people who can do a RAK every day yet, I look forward to doing more kindness acts in the future.

Highlights from this experience:

• Having my girls help me with the acts of kindness. My 6yr old holding me accountable, by asking me what my RAK count was every day.
• Several folks telling me they were inspired to do Random Acts of Kindness
• Brainstorming RAK ideas with friends
• Seeing kids using some of the items left (toys, books)
• Making someone’s day with a RAK

If you would like to learn more about the kindness movement checkout the website Random Acts of Kindness. When coming up with my RAKs I referenced the following two posts, What a Ride!: My Birthday was Awesome and 366 Random Acts of Kindness, and adapted the ideas to what worked for me. The first post had a list of simple ideas that can involve kids; the second post had a lot of charity organizations. For my 40 RAKs I wanted to thank the people around me as well as do random acts for people I didn’t know. My belief was everybody can use an act of kindness.

Here is my list of 40 RAKs. Enjoy!

#1 – Paid the bill for a father of two girls that was standing behind me at the LEGO store.

#2 – Left fancy chocolates, cookies in the company break room

#3 – Surprised my Pilates instructor with a cup of coffee

#4 – Gave a homeless person a $5 gift card to McDonald’s

#5 – Gave the librarians at our local library a box of chocolates. They are always so patient and helpful as I always have a ton of books on hold under three different library cards, across three different loan systems. It can be quite complicated sometimes.

#6 – Brought donuts for my co-workers. Normally one of the managers brings donuts every Friday, so it was fun confusing my colleagues as I brought the donuts on a Thursday.

#7 – Box of chocolates for the children’s librarians at another local library

#8 – Left a Large tip tonight during my birthday dinner.

#9 – Box of chocolates for the staff at my kids’ gymnastics club

#10 – Treated my girlfriends to dinner.

#11 – Wrote a gratitude letter to my baa (maternal grandmother) with the help of my mom. This act of kindness also made my mom happy too, bonus.

#12 – Wrote a gratitude/get well card to my Aunt.

#14 – Donated some toys to my Mother’s Helper. She redistributes them to other kids that she cares for.

#15 – Left some current magazines for others to read at the gym.

#16 – Gave each of the members in my writing group a book on writing great characters.

#17 – Donated a $5 McDonald’s gift card to a person in need.

#18 – Pushed the swing of a 4yr old at the park and ended up making a new acquaintance with the mom.

#19 – Gave chocolates to our pediatrician’s office and donated some books.

#20 – Gave activity packs, books, and DVDs to the children’s ward at the local hospital. This was a lot of fun, as the kids came up with the painting sheets idea.

#21 – Donated old coats, DVDs, and books to the family homeless shelter.

#22 – Sent words of encouragement to a new mom that was going back to work.

#23 – Gave a friend a voucher for a free ski lift ticket

#24 – Paid the bill for the person behind me at the drive-thru

#25 – Watched a movie tonight with my girls instead of doing my own stuff (clean the house, surf the net, etc).

#26 – Hid scratcher lottery tickets in two books at a book sale

#27 – Paid the parking meter for some people

#28 – Gave scratcher lottery tickets to the workers at Subway

#29 – Gave a homeless man a $5 gift card to McDonald’s.

#30 – Left jump ropes and hula-hoops at the park for kids to enjoy.

#31 – Gave out scratcher lottery tickets to the service staff at work

#32 – At Target gave a re-usable bag to the person behind me since she didn’t have one. The retailers no longer give out plastic bags as our city has a ban on them.

#33 – Corralled some lost shopping carts.

#34 – Gave a small thank you gift to a co-worker for helping me out with some customer debug issues.

#35 – Donated some clothing for local foster kids. For those of you living in California, Sleep Train is currently running a Pajama Drive til March 3rd. Just drop of new PJ’s, underwear, or socks and they will be distributed to foster kids in your local community. 

#36 – Left coins at the vending machine

#37 – Gave the neighbors some homemade Texas chili

#38 – Started a mini-library at my kids’ gymnastic center

#39 – Made two micro-loans via KIVA

#40 – A BIG  thanks to all my family and friends for their in-person and on-line continuous steady stream of likes and positive, uplifting comments. Coming up with nearly 40 unique RAKs was a bit hard, but having you all by my side made it easier.

2012 – Year in Review

A belated Happy New Year to all my wonderful readers. I am writing this post about a week later than I would have liked too, however that is a good sign for me. It means I am sticking to my New Year’s resolution on meeting my weekly writing goals before blogging. More on that shortly.

2012 was an awesome year for my blogging. Increased the readership multiple-fold, partially due to establishing a presence on Facebook and Twitter. I wrote 68 new posts this year the majority of which were picture book reviews that were contributed to Perfect Picture Book Friday, Children’s Bookshelf, Kidlit Blog Hop, and the Carnival of Children’s Literature. I highly recommend you check out these sites for other great kidlit reads or information on children’s literacy. It has been an absolute joy conversing with you about great kids’ books. The top 5 read posts of the year were:

One Grain of Rice: A Mathematical Tale
Where is the Green Sheep?
The Big Orange Splot
Cookies: Bite-Sized Life Lessons
See Inside Your Body

Interesting since the Big Orange Splot and See Inside Your Body were posted in 2011. These posts were all popular with SEO, since people (most likely educators) were searching for the book title plus activities. Susanna Hill from Perfect Picture Book Friday was onto something when she required all reviews to have activity ideas. Thank You Susanna.

While my blogging year was good, I did not generate enough new picture book material.

• Completed five drafts for the 12×12 Picture Book Challenge (instead of 12). An excellent community of PB writers. Sign-up is going on for 2013 here. I highly recommend it and will be doing it again this year.
• Completed PiBoIdMo 2012 (come up with 30 PB ideas in 30 days). This was my third time participating and it was easier for me to come up with ideas than in year’s past. Yeah!
• An almost polished version for my PB concept story.
• Attended SCBWI Illustrator’s Day, East Bay Regional Conference, and several smaller workshops.
• Took Anastasia Suen’s Picture Book Writing Workshop
• Participated in two wonderful critique groups.

My goal for this year is to get more picture book content generated. This year I am trying to stick to this priority order:

• Complete PB writing goals for the week
• Social Media (12×12 related, reading blog posts on the craft)
• Writing Book Reviews

I feel this change is necessary if I am going to get up the initial learning curve of PB writing. I do still plan to tell you about the greatest in children’s books. I do not know what my blogging schedule will be at this time. Right now I am trying to see if I can keep up with my weekly writing goals and will then determine if I can create a blogging schedule that I can keep to.  I will still be updating my Goodreads on a regular basis, if you would like to follow me there.

My writing goals for the year are :

• Have my PB Concept story polished by March 2013
• Submit PB concept story to several publishing houses in 2013.
• Write 6-8 new drafts
• Have three polished manuscripts by the year-end.
• Complete Character-Driven Workshop from Picture Book Academy
• Attend one writing conference, possibly Books of Passage in June or a Big Sur Writing Workshop put on by Andrea Brown.

Since I only seem to get things done by creating deadlines. I created sub-tasks for each of my writing goals for the year and put them into Google calendar. I then printed out the task list and hung it in my office, so it stays at the forefront of my mind.

On the reading front, I just finished reading-aloud The One and Only Ivan to my 4.5yr and 6.5yr old girls. They loved it. Next we are reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and I told them we could watch the movie, most likely the old animated one. The girls are really starting to enjoy doing read-alouds and I hope to continue it throughout the year. I also read 200+ books this year.

What are your reading or writing goals for the year?

We Will Rock You – 12×12 Blog Party

It is 12-12-12 today and time to celebrate the first year of 12×12 in 2012 Picture Book Challenge. While I only finished 5 drafts this year, it has still been an amazing year connecting, learning, supporting, and being supported by my fellow picture book writers. It is such an awesome community, you guys are GREAT!

A Big, Big thank you to the amazingly, talented, organized, and creative Julie Hedlund (check-out her Beastie Boys song).

I can honestly say I don’t know where I would be in my writing without the wonderful 12×12. If you are a picture book writer, check-out the info for 12×12 in 2013, it just gets better and better.

Since I LOVE 12×12 for its repository of knowledge and supportive nature. Here is my very quickly done riff off of “WE WILL ROCK YOU” by Queen.

We Will Rock You – 12×12

<stomp – stomp – clap>

Buddy you’re a young writer, fast learner
But you need to join 12-by-12 today
You think you’re an ace
You big disgrace
You need to check-out 12-by-12′s knowledge base

We will we will rock you — EDITORS!
We will we will rock you — AGENTS !

Buddy its hard road, long road
But 12-by-12′s says you’re gonna make it someday
Put your butt in its place
Leave no blank space
Start writing words all over the page

We will we will rock you — EDITORS!
We will we will rock you — AGENTS !

12×12: July Update

It only took three months, but I finally finished my duckling story. I am not too thrilled with the manuscript. In fact, I am wondering why I procrastinated for two months. The thing is my first drafts suck .. ALWAYS. But I don’t mind, I figure there is only one direction for the story to go and that is UP. The lesson I learned is that I should NOT procrastinate on first drafts, and that I just need to get the story out. I usually don’t like my stories until revision three anyways.

What else did I do? I finished Anastasia Suen’s class. I enjoyed learning how she dissects picture books. Some of the material was a refresher while other parts were new for me. For one of the assignments, we had to write down what the illustrations were showing and what the text was saying for every page in the book. This was really cool, I could see the symbiotic relationship between the art and text. I did this for Mac Barnett’s “Oh No! Not Again” and was in total awe of the craftsmanship. I highly recommend doing this sort of exercise on your favorite picture book or even your own work-in-progress.

As for my “Monsters in the Park”, I had a last-minute panic attack when I made a dummy and realized my story was 2-3 scenes too long and at least 1-2 rough spots. As a result I did not do the conference submit. But on the flip side, I was one of the winners in a query contest and submitted my Monsters in the Park manuscript to an agent at EMLA! (this happened before I realized my story was too long … eek) Now I am patiently waiting for a response.

I guest blogged at Rate Your Story on using their service as a litmus test.

Here is what I am doing next month:

1. Going to Hawaii tomorrow for a week with the hubby, and unplugging. Only taking pen, paper, and books to read … and my iPhone. We’ll see how well I do with being off-line.
2. Writing my August 12×12 draft, hopefully while in Hawaii.
3. Catching up on posting book reviews.

Happy Writing to all of you!

12×12: June Update

As we know the life of a writer is made of peaks and valleys. Was definitely in the valley this month, but I believe its because I am climbing towards a peak. Here is a list of the things that I didn’t get done this month:

- Didn’t finish my duck story draft that I started in late April.
- Dropped out of the Teachers Write: Summer Virtual Writing Camp
- Didn’t get to write a post for the 12×12 Halfway Blogfest. But you should definitely check out all the wonderful posts by the other 12×12′ers, they are a creative bunch.

So where did all my time go, you ask? For the last two weeks I have been manically revising my Feb 12×12 draft “MONSTERS IN THE PARK” to try and get in by the July 7th deadline as a conference submission to an editor. Not sure if it will happen or not yet. Will be doing the dummy over the next few days to help me decide. It seems every time I fix one aspect of the story, another one breaks. Very frustrating. Also the big question I am having trouble answering is “How do you know when the story is ready to submit?” Does it have to be perfect? Can there be some rough spots? Knowing you can’t submit a story more than once to an agent or editor, definitely adds pressure to the mix. Would love to hear your thoughts or experiences.

Here is what I am doing next month:

1. Finish my duck story, yes I have no excuse for not getting it done next month.
2. Complete Anastasia Suen’s Intensive Picture Book Workshop #1-6.
3. Guest blogging on Rate Your Story on July 11th.

Happy Writing to all of you!

My TBR Bookshelf will now be moved to its own separate post, so stay tuned for it!