Heart Like a Dog

The Good, the Bad, and the Oh My God of living with dogs!

What Was I Thinking?

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I’m freaking out a little bit as well as second guessing myself.

Have you heard of National Novel Writing Month?  Those in the know, refer to it as NaNoWriMo and their motto is, “November 1st-30th Thirty days and nights of literary abandon.”

My friend Donna, from Donna and the Dogs Just Toby asked me if I’d participate with her.  And in a moment of folly, I agreed.

The challenge is to write the rough draft of a novel, (50,000 words) in a month.

The month of November. You know the month that’s currently four days away.

The same November which includes the last 30 days in my personal challenge of writing a blog post every day for two consecutive years.

Now I’m sitting here saying, what was I thinking?

  • I’m 33 days away from completing my two-year challenge.
  • I’m in the beginnings of hosting a fund-raising calendar event.
  • I just started a Co-Hosted Follow-Up Friday Blog Hop.
  • I’m helping throw a baby shower in three weeks.
  • I’m going to visit my sister for three days over Thanksgiving.
  • Delilah and I are signed up to start a tricks class on the 13th.

Just where the hell am I going to find the time to write 50,000 words?

You may remember the success I had with my previous novel.  Yeah, you know, the one that’s stalled at about 27,000 words.  27,000 words that took me MONTHS (that’s a plural right there) to write.  The same novel I haven’t touched in months.  Now I’m no mathematician but I know damn well 27,000 is way less than 50,000 and 90 days is way more than a month.

I have to tell you, I’m kind of stalled with the first novel and the second novel is rolling around in my head, in fact it’s been rolling around for months, which I think is exactly why I haven’t been working on the first one.

Donna messaged me Friday night and asked if I still wanted to do it.

I’m pretty sure I do.  I’m also pretty sure I won’t get 50,000, but I won’t know unless I try. 🙂

In order for this to work, something’s got to give.

You guys know I love comments right?  I love your comments and I love responding to your comments.  It can however be very time consuming sometimes.

It pains me to say this but, I may have to stop replying to every single comment.  I may have to lump them all into one single comment or (HORRORS) not reply at all. 🙁

That’s my plan for the moment. If it changes, I’ll let you know.

By the end of November I’ll probably look like this.

Permanent expression after NaNoWriMo? I sure hope not.

 

What is that saying?  If you want something done, give it to a busy person. 🙂

Any tips, thoughts or suggestions?  I could use the assist. 🙂

 

Heart Like A Dog

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As most of you know, I’ve been looking to take the next step with my blog.  For me that means moving it from the free WordPress account to a self-hosted blog.  My struggle has been what to name the new blog.

The problem is that the wordpress account was www.jodistone.wordpress.com.  Normally speaking you wouldn’t want to change the blog name, just remove the wordpress and make the account a dot.com.

As I’ve mentioned here, there are already at least two authors using the name Jodi Stone, one of which has the website with the dot.com, which meant that I can’t use my name.

I could have gone with, Life With Sampson and Delilah but my plan is to have an official website for all my writings, and some of those writings may not be about Sampson and Delilah.

For months I’ve been popping around your blogs saying, “Just Be The Dog.”

I really did love that saying, but as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts there is already a website with a similar name.

After months of agonizing and indecision, I saw a saying posted on facebook one day and it ended with Heart Like A Dog.  I knew immediately that was the perfect name for my blog.

When I think of a dog’s heart, I think of courage, faith, determination, persistence, generosity, wisdom, devotion, strength and love.  These are just some of the traits I admire in my dogs.

To give of myself to others like my dogs give to me, is a worthy goal in my opinion.

Yes, it’s true, I really want to be more like my dogs.

Great!  I found a blog name.  Then the real agonizing began, I didn’t want to ‘launch’ it until it was perfect. The problem is I know very little about marketing and designing websites and that’s where some of my amazing blog friends came to my rescue.

Without these incredible women, this blog would not be here today.

So I’d like to say a huge thank you to:

Jodi Chick from Kol’s Notes who spent a rainy (at least it was rainy here) Sunday afternoon listening to me whine chatting with me on facebook and who was the one who came up with the tagline, The Life, Loves and Writings of Jodi Stone.  (I think it’s something in the name.) 😉

Julie Melfi (yes, Cali’s mom) from The Daily Dog Blog, who transferred the blog from the free wordpress account to the bluehost server, and has answered many ‘how do I do this’ e-mails.  Maybe you didn’t know this about Julie, but besides writing a daily blog, she’s also a website designer.  You can check her out at legupcreative.com.

And last, but certainly not least Kari Pike from Houndgirl who designed the entire website.  That header, she whipped it up one afternoon.  I can tell you here and now, her child is extremely lucky because Kari has the patience of a saint.  I’m a bit of a perfectionist and she never said a bad thing or told me to shut my pie hole and stop e-mailing her.

These ladies all come highly recommended by me.

Jodi, Julie and Kari, thank you from the bottom of my heart. xoxo

(If I did this right, you were re-directed to this site automatically.  I’m not sure how it works as far as subscribing to the blog or how it is affected in your blog readers.  Please take a moment to add my feed to your readers.  I’ll be working on the subscribe button this week.)

Please bear with me as I figure out the social media buttons and how to subscribe features. 🙂

Belated Thanks

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Well here I am once again a wee bit late in thanking a few blogs that chose to honor me with an award.

I love getting awards because I know that people are actually reading and liking what I’m writing about.  It makes me feel like I’m on the right track. 🙂

Today I’m acknowledging two awards, the first was presented to us by Misty Shores Chesapeakes and is called Blog On Fire Award.

The rules that go with this award are easy, link back to the person who awarded you, share five things about yourself, and pass it on.

1) I’m often times my own worse enemy, meaning I always doubt and second guess myself.

2) I’m never satisfied with something I’ve written.  I can always go back and think of something I should have added or a different way to phrase something.

3) Number two is why I decided to start using Follow-up Friday on my blog. 🙂

4) I’m a big Lord Of The Rings fan, I could watch those movies back to back to back.

5) In fact when I’m having a blah day, I’ll throw one of the LOTR movies on, or if it happens to be on tv, no matter if I’ve just seen it or not, I will turn the channel and watch it again.

Misty passed the award on to five blogs, so I will do the same.

Donna and the Dogs – Donna’s ON FIRE! LOL this woman has it all going on.  She recently won the AKC fiction writing contest for 2012 and if that wasn’t enough, she actually has sent her recently completed novel out to a couple of agents.  Watch out for this one, some day we’ll say, I knew her when. 🙂

For The Love of My Dogs – I started following this blog a few months back, Deanna is one of those amazing people who inspire me with their dedication to animals.  She currently has three dogs of her own and she still fosters!  She is on fire for animal rescue.

Hound Girl – I love Kari’s blog, she says it the way she sees it and in my opinion it doesn’t get better than that!  Kari is on fire, she has sponsors and give-aways and is a mover and a shaker.

Mazzie Takes Manhattan – This is one of the news blogs I follow.  Miss Mazzie is a lab mix (I think) and lives the glamorous life in Manhattan.  Join her on her many adventures, that little city girl gets around. 🙂

Thecvillean – I love this blog, Al is sarcastic, funny and just downright entertaining.  If you haven’t checked this blog out yet, I certainly encourage you to try it!

Thanks again to Misty Shores for the Blog on Fire Award.

As if that wasn’t enough, we were also presented with the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award, not just by one blog but by two!

Thank you to Collies of the Meadow and Donna and the Dogs

On July 17th, Chuck and the Collies from Collies of the Meadow presented us with this award and yesterday Donna from Donna and the Dogs gave us the second one.

This award requires I tell you SEVEN things about myself.  You’d think this would be easy since I put so much of myself out here, but that’s what makes it so hard.  I basically tell you everything about myself already.  But I’ll give it my best shot.

1) I had set Friday night aside to work on my book but didn’t do it.

2) I’m actually thinking of going back to the beginning of the book and see if I can add some more description to it.

3) After reading Donna’s AKC fiction story, I can see that much of my writing lacks description. :0

4) I walk the dogs as much for myself as I do for them, even though sometimes I complain about it.

5) I have a license to carry a concealed weapon in the state of CT.

6) I drive a Hyundai Tucson, I hate it.

7) I’m a big military supporter and think we should have better benefits for our veterans.

According to Donna’s post I need to pass this on to seven blogs.  I’ll give this my best shot. 🙂

Kol’s Notes – I get so many nutritional tips from this blog, besides look at that cute puggle face and tell me you can resist it.

My Brown Newfies – Really her escapades with Leroy are about as legendary as mine with Delilah and besides she was cool enough to give me her cell phone number. 🙂  Brave or crazy, I’m not sure which. 🙂

Long Life Cats and Dogs – I just started following this blog, she works in animal rescue though, so what’s not to love.

Rescued Insanity – Have you ever seen a tornado on a leash?  LOL yes that is Kristine’s motto regarding her rescued dog Shiva.  When I read about Kristine and how far she has come with Shiva, it gives me hope for Delilah and me. 🙂

Something Wagging This Way Comes – I love reading about Pamela and all the lessons she is learning from her Golden Retriever, Honey.

Thank you again, Collies of the Meadow and Donna and the Dogs.  I really appreciate the recognition.

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