All posts by Celeste Hall

My Top 3 Tips to Beat Writer’s Block

Writer’s block can feel like monumental problem when you’ve got it. It helps to know that it is one of the most common afflictions writers have struggled over throughout history. Songwriters, composers, and other artistic types are not immune either.
There is a great debate on what causes writer’s block, but physical illness, depression, a rocky relationship, and financial stress might have a hand in it.
In theory, anything that stresses your mind, could stall your creativity. The good news is that we can beat writer’s block if we can remove the stress or manage our response to that stress.

Writer's Block
Tips to Beat Writer’s Block

Here are my Top 3 Tips to Beat Writer’s Block

Find Your Moment of Zen

Cutting out distractions can help you get in the zone. If there is a time of day when you’re less likely to be disturbed, set that aside for writing. It helps if this time is during a period in which you have high energy and not after you’ve worked all day. For me, this is early in the mornings before anyone else is awake. My mind is rested and it’s quiet in my office. Find your moment of Zen.

Daydreamers Welcome

If you’re siting in front of a white screen and can’t find the right words, close your eyes. Think about what first inspired you to write the story. The characters, or the plot, or whatever it was. Now daydream yourself into that storyline. Imagine how you would respond to the situation. Let the scene play out for a bit so you can see the larger picture and get a better feel for the characters or the environment, then describe the experience in story form. When I was studying the strategy of content marketing, we learned to use something similar to understand how customers view our content. So, take a look at things from another point of view and see if that helps to open up your block.

Start with the Basics

If you’re struggling with how to start the story, or how to get the characters from point A to point B, take a deep breath and simplify the situation. The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. Start with a basic outline. Character is unhappy in this situation. She runs away. She meets a dog. They travel together. They are chased by bad guys. And so forth. Start writing down a possible pathway for your story to flow and then add more too it as the creative juices start flowing.

Whatever you do, make sure that you keep trying. Keep giving yourself time to work and think and plan out your story, because nobody ever beat their writer’s block by avoiding their work.
Work for an hour, up to 90 minutes at a time, then take a fifteen-minute break and go for a walk to get your blood pumping and clear your thoughts. Then come back and work for another hour, writing outlines or bullet points, or whatever method you use to keep pushing forward. Write a description of the character. Write a description of the environment. Just keep forward momentum and you’ll eventually break through that block. Good luck! I know you can do it!

CelesteHall.com

5 Important Tips for Mastering Twitter

Twitter might be a train wreck right now but try not to give up on the little blue bird just yet.

It’s important for you to be on the same platform that your target audience spends their time on. Twitter has over 396 million users globally, roughly 38% female and 61% male, between the ages of 18 and 29 years old. This does vary a bit between countries however, with the UK being closer to a 41/58 split, but all areas are male dominant.

While it started out as a micro-blogging platform, Twitter now ranks in the top 15 of social networks. What this means, is that if your target audience is male, you absolutely MUST be on Twitter.

Tips For Mastering Twitter
Tips For Mastering Twitter

So how do you write a Tweet which doesn’t get lost in the crowd?

Twitter can be an absolute battleground of wits. It can also feel very lonely if you’ve been posting day after day and your tweets aren’t being noticed.

Show Your True Self

Tweets that gain the most attention are the ones that make an impression. Stick to subjects that your target audience can relate to and inject your personality into the conversation. Find your voice. Use your humor, your unique point of view, to make your tweets unique. Even if people object to what you say, it will still start a conversation, which will get you noticed.

Retweet with A Purpose

It might be easy just to retweet everything that sparks your interest, but it could hurt your fan base. Your followers might be following the same people and have already read that same tweet. If you’re just parroting back information, they’ll unfollow you to cancel out the noise. Keep the retweets to a minimum. A better option is to use the reply button instead. Add your voice to the conversation.

Keep it Simple

Keep your tweets short and sweet. The ideal tweet is only 100 characters, although the platform will allow more. So, think about what you want to write and then refine it down to one or two perfect sentences.

Spellcheck And Scheduling

Just like everything else, it is a really good idea to spellcheck everything before you post. Plan out your posts with a word processer to be sure that your writing is clean. Then schedule posts to come out at key times. For Twitter, the best time to post is Monday or Thursday, around 8am in the morning.

Use Your Hashtags

Every industry has relative hashtags. If you’re a romance author, you might use hashtags like #amwriting #writerslife #writingpromt or #bookgiveaway. Just make sure that you are using the right hashtags for your tweet. If you use the book giveaway hashtag but you’re not giving away a book, your fans will obviously feel tricked and that will cause them to hit that unfollow button fast!

celestehall.com

Unlimited Free Trees

Aspen Runner Okay, so here’s a challenge for you. A healthy forest should have forty to sixty trees per acre and include a rich tapestry of biodiversity. So, I’d need about five hundred trees to transform a high desert, ten acre wasteland, into my dream property. That’s a lot of trees!
There’s absolutely no way I could afford to pay nursery prices for that many trees, so I started looking into alternative sources, like online companies. I did manage to pick up a few tiny, bareroot trees which survived shipment and the first few weeks in their new environment, but that taught me how much I needed to focus on trees grown closer to my location which were already adapted to our environment.
The answer hit me when I noticed that my neighbor’s aspen trees had sent up almost a dozen runners in my side yard. After a quick look around, I discovered that I also had elm, sycamore, locust, and crabapples growing up from seeds in the little nooks and crannies that I couldn’t reach with a lawn mower.
In a normal year I would have chopped these seedlings down and added them to the mulch pile because they were not in places they could be allowed to grow, such as too close to buildings or in places where their roots might eventually damage water or power lines. And that got me thinking, how many other people were out there chopping down saplings in their yard right now? Saplings which I, and others, would pay good money for at a nursery?
Now that was a sad thought!
So, I put a few tentative feelers out on Facebook to see if any of my local friends might have saplings sprouting up in their yard which I could come collect. The response was overwhelming. You would not believe how many people just mowed right over their saplings like I’d been doing!
All of these saplings were growing in the USDA zone that I needed and could be carefully moved with some, if not all, of their root ball intact, greatly reducing the time it took for bareroot trees to adapt to new growing conditions. Not only that, but they were free! As many free trees, grown in my area, that I could desire, and all I had to do was dig them up.
Now, would you like to hear the best part? You can do it too! Just put some feelers out there asking neighbors and friends. I bet you’ll be just as surprised as I was!

Willowbark Is Born

After years of searching for a little patch of level land to build my dream home, I finally ditched the idea of building from scratch and purchased a decrepit old manufactured home on ten acres of desert land. Yeah, not exactly ideal for a future permaculture farm, but there was a really good well already in place and the house had year round access via a large highway nearby, so it would be easier to bring in supplies.
Although it was a manufactured home, the neighborhood was good with a dozen nearby homes valued at over half a million dollars, so if I needed to resell the property in the future it wouldn’t be impossible.
How much did I pay for this little stinker? Well, I worked out a deal with the owner. I would pay $50,000 down and he would carry the remaining $30,000 at ZERO interest for the next seven years. He also threw in the deed for an acre of water rights which would have cost me between $7,500 to 10,000.
I knew the house was going to need some work, but it had a brand new roof and was partially gutted for a remodel. I felt confident that my daughters and I could finish up the project ourselves, so I sealed the deal and Willowbark was born.
Oh my goodness! I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the house had some secrets that we were about to discover. To make things more interesting, it was now the dead of winter with one of the worst snow storms in decades brewing on the horizon!
Welcome to Willowbark! Sit back and enjoy watching us on this crazy adventure to make something out of nothing on a remote patch of desert rocks.

Happy Halloween!

The pandemic has certainly had an impact on our lives this year and I’ve reached a point that I’m doubting it will ever be under control, but I haven’t let it stop me from doing the things I love. I’ve had to make some changes, such as requiring visitors to go through the side gate instead of the house to reach my garden and asking that everyone wear protective face shields or masks, but life goes on.

I’ve been working hard to sell my old Victorian home and close that chapter of my life. It’s been a very emotional rollercoaster, to be sure, but I only have a few more weeks before we’re finalized. Meantime, my youngest has requested a very unique Halloween costume that must be finished as quickly as possible and requires quite a bit of research to complete. I’ll be sure to post the results on YouTube so be sure you’re subscribed to me there!

I know everyone is waiting for the next book in their favorite series to come out and I’m happy to announce that it shouldn’t be much longer now. I’ve managed to cram some writing into my hectic schedule at every opportunity and hope to have TWO new books to release soon!

Stay safe out there and have a very happy Halloween everyone!

Farm Tractor

It’s that time of year again!

Translated Books and Website issues

Links to translated books are coming soon!

I’m still trying to iron out all the problems with this new website and in the process add the translated versions to each of their respective pages. This has been quite a long and time consuming operation, especially when my attention is being constantly drawn away by other responsibilities, like homeschooling my daughter during this lengthy quarantine, and keeping up with a trainwreck of other daily chores.
I am aware that there are still books that need to be added to the site and I will try to get them added as soon as I can.
Thank you all for being patient with me as I wade through this mess!

Working Mom
Multitasking Mom Feature – Activated!

CelesteHall.com

Welcome back friends and family!

Let’s get this party started!

I’m in the process of redesigning the entire website, so please excuse my dust.

For whatever reason, my previous web host decided to sell their service. When they did so, I wasn’t notified. I eventually figured it out when I had someone mention they couldn’t reach my website anymore and I went online to figure out why.

The new hosting service assured me they’d have all my information migrated to their servers and have me back online in no time. So I waited. And waited. And waited! Months went by, and I still had no website.

To make a long story short, I finally gave up on their service and purchased a new place. The wordpress tools were all fairly much the same as what I’d had before, but I’d lost my old template and all of the information I’d uploaded to the old site. So I’m starting over again. Literally from scratch. It’s going to take some time to pull all the links and get everything running smoothly again.

I hope you’ll stick around and join me on this crazy new adventure! This new site has lots of new tools and widgets I can add to make your visits even more fun than before. I can’t wait to have it all finished for you!

CelesteHall.com