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I have lived in Houston since I was a junior in high school. Yet, I have never attended the rodeo. My family was never into that kind of entertainment, and none of us had much interest, or even mild curiosity, about what it all entailed. Each year, I gave a nod to the fact that it existed by dressing in a western wear outfit to go to school with my students.

This year, however, I had someone invite me to visit the rodeo twice. Wow! What a show! I had no idea it was such a huge and truly fun event. The first visit we did, I got to see the piglet races. OMG, they are too adorable for words. The little pink guys go into the racing gate boxes and come out running. Occasionally, one seems to forget they’re supposed to be racing and just meanders about. The names they give the piggies are super cute. This year there was a Britney Spareribs; a Kim Kardashiham; and, of course, Kevin Bacon.

Speaking of pigs, I got to watch the hog competition. I was astounded at the complexity of factors these judges take into account for determining which hog places first, second, third, etc. There’s how they stand, and how they walk, and their width when you look upon them from above, and just soooo many other pieces. Honestly, they all look the same to me.

The second visit, I got to see the sheep herding competition. Three sheep are released into the arena and a sheep dog works with his/her handler to herd them through an obstacle course and into a pen. The handler uses a whistle to issue commands to the dog. Some dogs keep all three sheep in a nice tight group and move them along swimmingly. Other dogs have to go after one or another sheep that strays away. Occasionally, the sheep will turn and stare down the dog. I am not clear on whether dogs lose points when these things happen, or if there’s room in the judging to account for the difficult sheep situation. Is it a sheep issue or a dog issue? Hmm.….

The rodeo also includes a carnival. There are several Ferris wheels, and other rides, scattered about the carnival area. Now, I’m not a fan of roller coasters or dealing with heights. I was happy when we chose to ride the merry-go-round cause that’s not overly crazy. The first time, I did go on one of the Ferris wheels and my companion chose to rock the basket a bit. I was already a petrified from being up so high, but I managed to maintain my composure. The second time, he cajoled me onto the Tilt-a-Wheel. It wasn’t so bad, though more oof an adrenaline rush than what I need in my life. What turned out funny was that he ended up being the one that got sick.

And that was just the livestock and carnival portion of the event. The rodeo itself is amazing. There’s the calf roping, the buck horse riding, the barrel racing, the cattle wrestling, and it all culminates with the bull riding. Why anyone wants to ride an angry bull is a mystery to me, but…

There’s events for the little ones, where five and six year olds are bundled up and put on the back of sheep. Then they ride the sheep, holding on as long as possible. It’s adorable.

Now that I have discovered the awesomeness of the rodeo, I think I will definitely need to go again next year. There were so many events we didn’t get to as the whole thing takes three full weeks.

Leave us a comment on your favorite part of the rodeo.

As I’ve been looking at the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I realized that this year I’ve taken a very important proactive step. Inklings Publishing has hired a publicist to work with our authors. Mickey Mikkelson, of Creative Edge Publicity, will be working on retainer to help each of our authors increase their visibility.

Looking at these opportunities has also made me realize the importance of developing a cohesive brand for each author. As more people get to know them through these publicity events, they each need a strong online presence that will hold the interest of those that look them up. Hence, the time has come to develop training modules.

All companies conduct in-house training for their people as well as encourage them to engage in continuing education. Up to now, Inklings has done very little training in-house. We have encouraged our authors to increase their knowledge and create strong networking connections by attending various literary conferences. We’ve also worked to place our authors on panels at these to help cement their expertise in the industry.

Now, however, we will begin to put together modules of training for our authors. Creating an online platform and strong cohesive brand as an author takes time and skill. Hence we will be working to train our authors on a variety of areas that are needed to create their cohesive brand and establish a strong online presence.

Deciding on a look for their individual author personas, one which perhaps coordinates well with their book covers, and which speaks to the genre they write is step one. All of that begins in the construction of an author website. As you can see, my author website and my cover art all work together to present the potential reader and fan with the feel of a science fiction/fantasy novel. Here’s a picture of my book cover. You can look at my website at www.fernbrady.com.

For some authors, creating this look can be hard because they may not yet have a first book to use as a basis for the color palette or design work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t launch a website early to capture connections. The key to a brand new author is to create a look based on the genre of the works you want to write. Before I had a first book out, I created an author logo. The color palette of my first website came from this logo — white and purple. These colors remain integral to my brand, especially purple which is the color I dye my hair as part of my author persona.

There are key pieces to creating a strong website, and it is critical to integrate capturing visitors’s emails into a newsletter. Once you have these, a major part of maintaining engagement is keeping the connection open with these newsletters. What kind of things go into a newsletter? Author newsletters can contain excerpts of work in progress with an option for readers to opine on what they felt it lacked or what their favorite part was. They can also contain short stories that are unavailable any where else as a thank you to fans, or artwork that connects to your novels and the genre you write, among other things.

While we are doing these training for our authors, Inklings Publishing will be working with Abundantly Social to create these modules and to deliver the learning program through the Monday night authors training program “Through the Eyes of Authors.” If you are interested in getting into these training pieces, contact Aimee Ravichandran at  to be added to the mailing list so you can know when the trainings will be given and how to register. One of the things that matters the most to me is to offer all the help I can to not just my own authors in-house, but to all authors in our writing community.

I’ll share more on other modules we will be giving next time, but for now hope your author/life journey is full of happiness and success.

My last few blog posts have been about time management. I got started on that topic after reorganizing my office space as the kick off to 2022. Coming out of a pandemic situation, as life seems to be restarting for us, I have begun to re-read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. I was introduced to this resource many years ago and have found its advice truly impactful in my life.

Habit #1 is being proactive.

Thinking about the changes that have occurred in the realm of my small business because of COVID, this has become a crucial part of my life. At first, I was very reactive, and to be honest, somewhat lethargic about the whole thing. All the great selling venues dried up so gone was the bulk of our income. As comic cons and other events start coming back, I have to decide if that is really what I want to do. It is a heavy toll working these events and, while fun and a good revenue source, the physical elements of setting up, breaking down, and being there all day for multiple days is just not something I necessarily want to keep doing.

One proactive step I’ve taken is to enter into a contract with a publicist who will work with my authors. This will provide new avenues for promotion which I hope will translate into sales. Looking at online ways to promote has become a focal point as I try to rebuild revenue with less exhausting methods. Becoming a part of Author Talk and starting The Hot Mess Express is another element to creating avenues to reach new readerships without the physical burdens of shows. Though I have to admit I do love the cosplay part of the events gigs and we will still do several this year.

But the habits are not just about work. I’ve started to analyze what areas of my personal life need a more proactive approach. Lately, I’ve reflected a lot on my need to be proactive in self-discipline, especially in areas that affect my health. Choosing foods wisely and getting more exercise is a must.

I love walking Arya and that certainly has been a great source of exercise, but I am really working to see if I can build in at least a couple days a week of yoga or maybe a Zumba tape as well.

I know I’m not going to do any kind of gym membership because that has never been my thing, probably because I’m so self-conscious about being a chubby girl at the fitness center with all these hot bods around. But at home with my DVDs I can start getting more into the routine of doing a little extra piece of exercise to help get my body more in shape which will help with the diabetes management.

What areas are you all struggling to be proactive in? Would love to hear from you on any of these topics. Until next time…

So you might be thinking, okay Fern, I did the scheduling thing and I have this handy dandy ideal world itinerary, but now what?

Well, now we talk about implementation. The ideal world calendar is a guide, to help you hold space for the things that are needed and those you want to pursue. It labels spaces in wide categories, like work, writing time, cooking, or real estate work, inklings work, or whatever your categories turned out to be. Those hours are reserved for those things. On a daily basis, what actually happens during those time sets can vary.

Each Sunday, I sit with my ideal calendar and I look at my weekly planner. The first thing I do is place the things that will happen and that cannot be moved. Unlike the ideal week, here we add the more specific pieces of what we are doing for that time. So not just I’m working teaching classes at this school, but a notation on the specific lesson and the week in the program to track the progress. Not just, we have a podcast, but the specific guest we will be interviewing, or a general topic we want to at least begin with.

Now, I look at things that have come up that are not on the master plan. Like for example, lunch with a friend, or a mail run that can’t wait for the prescribed week when errands are done. You look across the week and see where the unexpected extra can go. In the week pictured here, the extras that popped up where needing to do a mail run and have lunch with James. Since I already had to be out of the house to go to Shuffleboard on Wednesday and I would be in the area of town where James could meet up and the post office I prefer is located, it made sense to put these events on Wednesday. This meant that my Wednesday writing time was cut.

The biggest consequence of course to cutting that is in what the next writing time work will include. Normally, Wednesday is the time I implement revisions from the feedback gained during Tuesday night’s critique session. But doing that on this particular week ended up happening instead during Friday’s writing session. This made Friday a little heavier on the revision side and less time with moving new pieces forward, but how could I say no to lunch with James?

As I work to fill in the rest of the time spaces, I look at specifically what needs to b e accomplished that week. I don’t just write “Inklings work.” Instead, I itemize the specific task, like on Monday completing the draft of the HOA first quarter newsletter that we do for a specific association. As it’s the first Monday of the month, we have the Houston Writers Guild board meeting. I Don’t just write “board meeting.” I specify the overall topics needed to discuss.

The first weekend of January kicks off with a writing intensive. So I list not just the session times, but for my writing around those what I want to accomplish and in which project. You can see the specific week’s schedule in the ongoing planner v the idealized itinerary in these pictures.

By having the time labeled and specified for ideal use, it makes planning the week’s specific tasks easier. I know I have to draft the newsletter and I know exactly when that needs to be done. This helps keep things flowing.

If you did the idealized plan work from my last blog post. Try using it to formulate proactively the next few weeks. See if it helps you. Drop me a line if you want to comment or share how it went.

This year started with a reorganization of my office space and bedroom. Along with that, I reorganized my schedule to better allocate my time. Now time management is one of the toughest topics for most people. Yet, time is the great equalizer. Unlike money, we all have exactly the same amount of time. Day in and day out, we each get 24 hours to use.

I used to teach a course on time management in the days before Covid. Since the theme of this year seems to be reorganizing/restructuring your life, I thought I would do a quick series of blog posts on the process I use to create my schedule and manage my time. If you’re wondering why how I manage time even matters, you might not be that familiar with everything I do. I run Inklings Publishing, I run the Houston Writers Guild, I teach with Writers in the Schools, I run a real estate business, I am a writing coach and developmental editor for private clients, and I write my own books to publish. That’s on top of my personal life and family needs. To do all this successfully, I need to really control my time.

All that being said, here is the first step to managing your time effectively. The first thing you need to do is create a couple of lists:

1. List the things you do every week that are set in stone — example: your job hours, choir practice, taking the kids to their piano lesson, etc
2. List the things that you NEED to do but that don’t have a set time when they happen — grocery shopping, laundry, cooking, etc
3. List the things you WANT to do but feel you never have time to fit into your schedule — read for pleasure, write the great American novel, crochet, etc

Once you have these items listed, you can begin to create your utopian itinerary. This is where you set up what your ideal week would look like. Obviously, no week will ever flow so perfectly, but by setting up what the best use of your time looks like you can take more control of it.

Start out by using notebook paper and laying out the days of the week hour by hour, as shown in the picture. Start with the hour at which you want to wake up.

So you itemize your itinerary layout by first plugging in for the week the items that are absolutely set in stone. These hours are not going to change and there’s no other use you can make of them. Here’s a picture of what that looks like for me. Note that the teaching sessions as well as my podcast session are set plus my critique groups and shuffleboard times. These don’t change. So they go in first.

Next, you plug in must dos. It’s important to consider things like housework and such because these small but crucial pieces of life can easily derail you and cause stress if you don’t know when and how they will fit into your schedule. Some of these things occur weekly, but for me some are monthly, or bi-monthly — like cooking. Also, somethings happen while you are doing other things — like laundry loads which can be done simultaneously to other things.

Now, you have the spaces where time is yours to allot. This is where you plug in the sessions of things you really want to do. Once you have that on your paper, you can put it cleanly together on a big page so it is all available at a glance. So, here’s what the final itinerary looks like for me.

Once you have worked out this utopian use of your time, weekly and monthly, you can begin to implement it on an ongoing basis. Tune in to my next blog post where I will share how I use this schedule to formulate my ongoing time use. Until then, try making one of these ideal schedules for yourself. Here’s a picture of a blank planner page if you want to use this one.

The start of a new year is both exciting and daunting. It is a moment to take time and reflect on what has been accomplished, process the not so great parts of the year that’s closing, and plan ahead to a new beginning.

As 2022 drew near, I decided it was time to rearrange my space. It began with Arya. My little husky and I share a twin bed which is way too small for the two of us. So when I got her a nice cushion for the office area, she decided it was infinitely more comfortable. But she sulked because it wasn’t in the bedroom.

After much thought on where in the world I could place her cushion in such a small bedchamber, I opted for behind the door. When I close the door to my room it creates a nook with the wall of the closet. Having made this decision I realized that I would never again enter my room through the door. Thankfully, you can enter the bedroom through the bathroom which has an exit to the space officially supposed to be a game room, aka my office.

This arrangement opened up the possibility of using the space behind the now permenantly sealed door for other things. My wing of the upstairs in our house has a small walkway area which allows you to either turn to enter the bedroom or go toward the game room area. This is mostly wasted space in homes as there is little you can do with it other than just walk through.

However, I’ve installed some bookcases, and the closing off of the door allowed me to use that space for my curio cabinets. By shifting these out of the office space, the possibility of a new arrangement of the workspace loomed. And so, the first week of 2022 began with the rearrangement of furniture and the organization, finally after two years, of the books on the bookcases.

Of course, about mid way through the process, I regretted having started. I mean, my space was in chaos and completely unusable, my back was hurting, and the enthusiasm with which the project began waned quickly. But, I was also beyond the point of no return. So, I had to continue to plow through.

Because the room is a rectangle, my previous arrangement of two square spaces had the effect of making it feel smaller. By placing the desk in front of the bookcases, it became a much more open space, running as a natural rectangle. It also had a great effect in the view as I come out of the bedroom. Rather than coming out into a very tight space blocked by the desk and work tables, I enter my office into a wide open and inviting sitting area.

After essentially two massive days of hard labor, my new office arrangement was set, and the books organized. The new flow of space works beautifully. I’m very pleased with the improved functionality and feel of the space. It is a fresh start for the year, one that provides more organization and a beautiful space to sit and reflect.

Now, time to get back to work…