Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is! Anne Frank

Read more at Brainy Quotes

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Hello everybody, how are you doing? I hope life is treating you well and if not remember, you are in my thoughts and prayers!

Happy Good News Tuesday!

For today’s good news I am sharing a video by Great Ormond Street Hospital. Their surgeons have separated conjoined twins in several operations. The BBC mentioned them yesterday and I am just amazed at what is possible today. You can read about it in this article on the BBC webpage.

As far as I understand they are well and hopefully now have the chance for an independent life. Great Ormond Street Hospital has made a video to explain further what they achieved. Please follow the link under the video if it doesn’t play in this post.

video credit: Great Ormond Street Hospital on YouTube

If you are in need for some more good news please head over to JoAnna’s Blog and find some more. Or do you have a post of your own? Then please let me know and I come along.

The Bee Codes (or at least tries to)

It was rather cold overnight here in North Norfolk but warmed up as soon as the sun came out. At 10.49 am we have 19C/66.2F and I already watered our veg, did some weeding and worked on a page project for Free Code Camp to finish the tests for learning HTML & CSS. They say about themselves: “FreeCodeCamp.org is a tiny nonprofit that’s helping millions of people learn to code for free.” and you can support them here on their donation page if you have a little to spent and want to help people like me learning to code and hopefully find a new job at last.

I am supposed to create a tribute page on Code.Pen which is a site where you can play around with code for free. The test description is here if you are interested and my page to Octavia Hill is here.

So far I have the basic set up and the HTML. HTML in coding gives you the content of a page and CSS helps you to present in a good way. That is where I struggle a little. I have read and gone through the chapters and in theory understood what everything stands for but when I am supposed to implement it then my mind goes blank.

And the procrastination automatism kicks in. Mine consists of W3School for reading up stuff, Sololearn which I have as an app on my phone to repeat everything I already know and Grasshopper to get ahead and play around with JavaScript. I didn’t know that Java and JavaScript are different things but the good old “For Dummies” series told me that. Yes, on top of all of that I am reading “Getting a Coding Job for Dummies” by Nikhil Abraham. That book is from the library and from 2015 so I take its information with a grain of salt. 4 years is several lifetimes in tech and coding as far as I can see but at least it should give me the basics. And it mentioned Free Code Camp as a good way to learn so it can’t be that bad 😉 .

It also mentioned that if you learn by yourself you get stuck and it would be a good thing to join a community to get some support. Coding seems to be a community thing anyway. Coders help each other when they get stuck with what they created or help each other to test out their code. I like that but at the same time I am a little well really very insecure and I just don’t like to ask. So here is a lesson for me to learn 🙂 .

Yes, I have already joined the Free Code Camp forum and read several posts but haven’t said or asked anything yet. Don’t want to waste anyone’s time. I think I might just have to get over myself. I keep you updated.

Have you ever tried to learn something by yourself? How did it go?

And what else?

And what else will I be up to today? I usually walk the dog a second time around lunchtime but she is a little reluctant lately. There are tons of squirrels where I walk her and she just stands there and watches before trying to jump at them. You can imagine that I am not too keen so I try to coax her into walking along. It wasn’t a problem until a couple of days ago. She just ran ahead to the next squirrel tree. But now she just stands there and looks at me and her eyes say: “Yes, go on, try me!!!! You’re not gonna win MUM!” LOL.

So today I will either walk her somewhere else which usually makes her run mad with sniffing out the new area or I just do some training at home in the garden. I feel a bit guilty driving to other places to walk her because I consider myself a rebel for life and using the good old petrol car should be out of bounds for me. However, it’s a little C1 that doesn’t use much and the wellbeing of our dog is important, isn’t it? So I tell myself 😉 at least.

Besides that, I might keep on renovating our bathroom. It’s tiny and pink and I hate, hate, hate pink. So I started to scrape off the color on the wall in March I think. Haven’t gotten far because it is a rather unthankful job. But I told the best husband (Jeremy Clarkson voice) in the world that he doesn’t need to do anything so I am stuck with it.

I also need to do the shopping and get some more dog food. And cook. And then there are so many cool blogs to read which I have neglected a lot lately.

Here are some of the bloggers I visit:

Karen Deanna Joyce

JoAnna

And for my German-speaking readers:

DGHDE

Well, I won’t be bored, will I?

Originally I wanted to write a poem for you guys too but my concentration is down in the dumps now. I need another coffee or something to eat so I send you over to Carol Anne where I have posted a poem of the day already.

This just leaves today’s blast from the past from 2015:

Tips For Writers by John Matthews (A Blast from the Past)

Today I am honoured to have a guest post John Matthews who has kindly agreed for a guest post on writing tips for self-published authors:

If you’re a self-published author or are now diligently working on your first book, then read these three important tips for writers. Competition is fierce to become successful and achieve your sales goals. You need to establish your brand as a writer one step at a time and get credibility. It is important to be proactive, work efficiently, and have a lot of patience with the self-publishing world.

• Create the best content possible. The tougher the competition is, the more important it is to produce a top notch manuscript. Read other best-selling authors in your genre to get ideas of which writing styles work. Learn from their successes and improve your writing technique. The best writing methods have held true for decades and as new authors, we all have a ton of learning to do. Once you think your manuscript is finished, get a few close friends to read it and give honest feedback. Use any constructive criticism positively. Tweak your manuscript as you see fit until you are really ecstatic about your final product. Finally, get it edited and proofread by other friends and a professional. Make sure that book is squeaky clean when you are ready to publish it.

• Pitch to book review blogs. Find lists of blogs that do book reviews for self-published authors. Make sure that their reading preference includes your genre. Read about the bloggers first and take a look at their social network profiles. Take a look also at other book reviews that have been posted on their blog. If it looks like a good fit for your book, send a courteous and professional email. First have a close look at the submission guidelines on each blog so you can meet their specific requirements. Remember that you are only sending a request for a book review and that anyone has the right to politely decline it. Book reviewers are very busy and usually get more submissions than they can keep up with. Here is a helpful list of ten great book review blogs.

• Organize your marketing efforts. There are a lot of options for self-published author marketing. What’s important is to manage your time and money effectively. Know what your budget is and try to do as much of the work yourself as you can to keep things low cost or free. Find websites and blogs for self-published books that have forums and accept guest posts. Write high quality articles for submission on these sites and participate in forum discussions in your genre. You have to have time to keep writing your next book, so don’t allot more than half of your working time to marketing. Maintain a list of all blogs and other websites you are working with. Get into a daily routine for your marketing efforts and be efficient. Patience is key and remember that everything you write is important for establishing your brand as a writer.

Using these three key tips for writers should help you in your writing career. As is always the case with self-published authors, patience is the key. Establishing yourself will take time and perseverance, but if you succeed the payoff will be well worth it.

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Thank you very much John for your tips on self-publishing!

If you want to know more about John please look here:

John Mathews is a tenured University Professor of English and living in Rome, Italy. Immersed in a long and somewhat stressful career, he feels the desire to break out of the mold and delve into macabre thriller fiction novels which focus on the dark side of human nature. He writes captivating thriller and suspense fiction books with the goal of pulling the reader into the plot through the minds of unforgettable characters. Complete with great suspense, plot twists, and shocking scenes, his stories will keep you guessing until the very end.

(Taken from John’s Amazon Author Page)

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You’ve managed to read the whole post? Blimey, I am impressed and thank you very much for staying with me for so long. Want a cup of coffee? Tea? Cocoa? A cookie? You certainly deserve all of it. LOL.

Take care my dears and don’t forget:

love & rage my friends love & rage