Two things changed my life yesterday: Evernote, and the Coursera mobile app. Let’s start with Evernote

If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly absorbing everything internet. I eat internet. I sleep internet. I would speak internet if I could. The problem here is that there’s so much coming at me all of the time, it’s hard to hold onto the things that are really cool that I want to save for later. Half the time I’ll stumble upon something inspiring and store it in a million different places. I have like a zillion poetic lines and website ideas stored in everything from Google Drive to the Notes section of my phone. Everything is so scattered and it sucks.

I have goals. You have goals. I have favorites. I have snippets of text that I like. I have pictures I love. I need reminders. I need motivation. I need a place to store my mottoes, my grocery lists, my potential children names. I used to just throw it all in my phone or whatever was easiest to access when the moment called for it but now! Now there is a solution. Now I have discovered the fucking excellence that is Evernote. And it syncs to ALL OF YOUR DEVICES. I’ve got a Mac, a PC, an Android tablet, AND an iPhone. I haven’t been able to find a service that lets me sync everything so I can access it from any device, at any time. Until yesterday

How badly do I sound like a commercial right now? I promise I’m not getting paid for telling you this

But this Evernote story started out Everhorribly. I’d heard of Evernote before, but was too lazy to try anything new until a coworker last week suggested it when he saw me using another task management app, Asana. So yesterday I decided to try it out. I registered, neglected to watch any of the videos on how to use it, and just dove right in

And you know what? It was fucking terrible.

It sucked. I hated it so bad. I was so frustrated. I couldn’t make a new notebook when I wanted to, I was having trouble sorting, it was a big mess. I closed it, and almost never looked back. Then for some strange reason I told myself to give it another chance. But did I go back to their website? Did I actually seek out the ever loving team at Evernote? Absolutely not. I went where everyone on the planet goes when they don’t know how to do something. I went to fucking YouTube. That’s where the people are.

I ended up finding this AWESOME tutorial on how to achieve goals with Evernote by some guy named Scott. After I was done watching it, I was freakin’ hooked. And now I feel like a brand new person. I feel like someone just cleaned my apartment for me. And organized all of my mail. Everything is sooo shiny. I can store screenshots, I can set reminders, and in the app I can even snap photos of shit I want to save for later…including DOCUMENTS! This is just too awesome to talk about any longer without going over the top, so I’ll stop. But truly, give it a whirl.

Second life changing thing? The Coursera mobile app. This is a shorter story, I promise.

Coursera is free school. You can literally take any online class you want there for free. I can’t stress this enough, guys. Free. (What’s that, business school? Did you say something? I didn’t hear it, I was too busy getting a free education.)

I’m currently taking a free online Stanford class through Coursera called Organizational Analysis. It’s 6 weeks long, and totally legit. You can even earn a distinction. I took this class because I’m obsessed with learning about how organizations tick, being that I’m going to form one at some point in the not too distant future. I sort of want to know a thing or two.

The class was going great until I fell really behind. I couldn’t squeeze in the right time to listen to the lectures between working all day, blogging, and trying to work on my new website side project. Coming home and having to sit in a chair and listen to lectures was just excruciating because I really just wanted to blog, write, and read. As much as I love learning, I just couldn’t get in the mood to listen to a professor after a long day of work.

Then I found out that Coursera has a mobile app, and that you can LISTEN TO ALL OF THE LECTURES ON YOUR PHONE WITHOUT AN INTERNET CONNECTION. Sorry for the caps, but do you realize what this means. You literally only need to have phone battery to learn any freakin’ subject you want. (Granted, the app is $3.99 but seriously, I pay more for coffee). The time we live in guys, the time we live in…

So basically, I’ve been listening to my lectures while I drive, and it’s been working out BEAUTIFULLY, since my commute has gotten really dull, and the radio these days just gets my blood pressure up (if I hear Bruno Mars or Holy Grail ONE more time…). I just find it so amazing that we can learn anywhere. There’s literally no excuse not to, if you want to. And I so want to!

So much awesomeness, it feels like Christmas. And the week’s only just begun…(Carol King, is that you?)

(UPDATE: Correction, the Carpenters sang “We’ve Only Just Begun”, not Carol King…thanks, hindsight).

There are women in my life that I have never met, who inspire me every day. Whether it’s through Instagram, blogging, Facebook, or Twitter, I have come to know a handful of them through their words of encouragement, their careers, and social shares. While I am inspired by all sorts of women in my life, I was inspired today by Sarah Jenks (bottom left), and decided I needed to write a post about these women, who create such an impact on a daily basis in the lives of complete strangers–like me. Since they make me feel so awesome, I wanted to share their blogs/websites so you could feel awesome too. Awesome should always be shared.

Nisha Moodley (top left): I discovered Nisha through Brittney Castro (middle). Her blog, Fierce Fabulous Free, is about finding your freedom, being creative, and ultimately loving all that you are. Her posts are so inspiring to me because ultimately I crave the free life, one in which I am free from the burdens of self-sabotage and self-doubt. I follow her on Facebook as well, and she’s always posting great little nuggets of wisdom there too. Also her blog design is perfect.

Sarah Jenks (bottom left): I’ll be brutally honest here, I just discovered Sarah Jenks today, and she made me feel better in that first visit. She guest posted on Nisha’s blog not too long ago about her issues with weight loss, and how she lost a ton of weight by loving herself, being happy, and not dieting, which is something I’ve never heard of and am anxious to learn more about. She also has a kick ass ‘About’ section, in which she talks about the things she enjoys and her journey losing weight. By the time I finished reading it, I was in a better mood somehow. And even though she is a complete stranger, I saw on her blog that she’s having a baby, and the way she displayed that news on her website made me so happy for her it was unreal. I will definitely be returning there.

Brittney Castro (middle): I found Brittney through another woman and awesome entrepreneur I actually know, Jaclyn Mullen. Brittney is a financial advisor, who makes managing your money sound easy and fun. I follow her on Facebook and Instagram, and while my finances are usually the last thing I feel like talking about, I love the stuff she posts, and following her growing success. This is a woman who believes in loving yourself, and she inspires me every day with her quotes, book reviews, videos, and other projects she’s working on. You can tell that she truly loves what she does, and I am always interested in hearing whatever she’s got going on. You can find her very informative website, Financially Wise Women, here.

Erika Napoletano (top right): You’ve heard me talk about this gal before, so of course she would be included in this list. Erika Napoletano is an entrepreneur, author, and blogger that inspires me every damn morning. Her blog posts usually revolve around things she’s learned, things that annoy her, and things that help entrepreneurs the fuck out. Or anyone really. There’s not a single post that comes in my email from her that I am not completely excited about. She’s always teaching me something new about owning your own business, and she gets so into the nitty gritty of it that I get so excited and grateful that she is around to give out the kind of information I am constantly looking for. You should definitely subscribe to her ‘useful shit’ as she calls it, because her honesty about kicking ass in your personal and professional life is so necessary.

Kendi Skeen (bottom right): Kendi makes my day, every day, with her fashion blog, Kendi Everyday (how fitting right?). To be honest, I am not all that into fashion, but I am 100% into her blog, and to date, hers is the only fashion blog that I ever visit. I think there is a certain normalcy and realness about her that I adore. Her and I are the same age, and she has gone from working in a cubicle (like me!) to a complete fashion icon in the blogging world. I even saw her face in a Gap advertisement. A Gap advertisement! I feel like she is my daughter/cousin/sister or some other distant relative, and watching her turn her fashion blog into something amazing for herself makes me so proud. She even has her own clothing store. Basically, watching her bloom into a business woman from starting out as a random gal posing in front of a camera is amazing to me, and inspires me daily. I see no reason why she wouldn’t inspire anyone else as well. Okay well if you’re not into fashion maybe not, but still. It’s the story behind it, people, the story!

So if you’re feeling at all dulled out and low today, I hope you’ve checked out a couple of these fabulous strangers I know, and felt a tad lifted because of it. Because you’re worth it. (Not to sound all L’Oreal or anything, but you are.)

I know exactly why seeing the scrawl inside of this book makes me want to cry. Because I was crying when I wrote it. Hell, I’m crying now. I pulled out this book tonight because I’m going to mention it in the e-book I’m writing about applying to business school, and I wanted to refresh my memory. I was completely taken aback however, to find what I had written on the first page.

3/29/2011 was ten days after my dad passed away. His death was so sudden, all I could do with the time off work was read, drink a lot of coffee, and cry, cry, cry. I had been reading this book, Trust Agents, well before my father passed, but finished it shortly after. It’s written by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan, and the front cover definition of the book says it’s about “using the web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust.” But really, it’s about so much more than that.

I remember buying it because I was a big fan of Chris Brogan, and wanted to learn a little something about building a reputation on the web. This was around the time I’d just started loving the internet and had been thinking about starting my own business doing something cool.

Essentially, this book took me from thinking about wanting to do something cool on the web, to actually doing it. It taught me “how to use the internet”, it taught me to play nicely with others (on the web), and how to ask for something without asking for it. It taught me patience. It taught me to “let them want to come to you” in terms of building an audience. It literally gave me the confidence I absolutely did not have to start this blog, to tell people “I want to start my own business!”, and to take advantage of all the opportunities the web had to offer. This book is the reason I went from partying and a 9-to-5 job to partying, a 9-to-5 job, and a bazillion side projects. It provided light in the darkest time of my life, and I think I realized that after finishing the book. What else would have driven me to write such a thing on the very first page? I do admit however, I was not in my right mind at the time, but that’s neither here nor there.

Every day we live, we are changed. Certain things happen to us, people influence us, yell at us, and misfortune says hello. All of it reshapes the way we think about things, no matter how subtly. Every once in a great while though, one huge event, one great circumstance, rocks the center of our being and shakes the ground we stand on, and in the heat of the moment, we usually don’t have a pen or a pencil to write it down with.

Finishing this book was my heat of the moment, and I wrote that shit down because it shook me.

Pray tell, has there ever been a book that shook you?

You know that point when you’re puttering along, writing your novel, and you get stuck? You can’t decide what this character should say next. You can’t figure out where this scene should go, or what dilemma to present. Some people like to call that writer’s block, I just call  it my stopping point.  I truck along elsewhere, I do laundry, I take a nap, I try to get around to finishing that review for that one book. I read. I don’t really let it get to me, because I know that the next scene or scrap of dialogue will present itself to me eventually. It always does.

I was on Twitter earlier, looking up all the tweets under the hash tag #firstworldproblems. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, you should be, because that is where your characters are just waiting to be born. And I’m talking more than just 140 of them.

This got me thinking of all of the places I randomly steal snippets of dialogue, facial expressions, and weird people-isms for my writing. If you’re stumped on ideas of where to go next in your novel, considering it’s NaNoWriMo and all, here are a few really unique places I find them.

1. Twitter. It depends on what kind of character you’re looking for, but if you’re looking to write a funny, sort of shallow character, type in the hash tag #firstworldproblems in Twitter search, and let the character write itself. In scrolling through the tweets from the hash tag #firstworldproblems, you get a lot of shallow people basically making fun of themselves. If you’re not familiar, consider this tweet. And this was the one that gave me the idea for this post.

“My cleaning lady hasn’t texted me back yet. WTF! #firstworldproblems.”

If a character in a novel said this, I would crack up. I would just die. These are the characters I love. They are kooky and sort of shallow, interesting and good natured. These are the kinds of things you could use as character dialogue because they are real and relatable. Admit it, even though it’s fiction, we all love characters that are real and relatable.

Also, try reading a few bios on Twitter. They’re short, but they are great starting point for developing character background. For instance, I read one bio earlier that read “Motorcyclist, Robot-fighter, writer, living in Brooklyn.” What are you waiting for?

2.  Post Secret. We’ve all heard of Post Secret by now. People send in their secrets, a few people publish them in a book. Aside from the heart wrenching experience it is to look through all of those secrets, it really is a great place to find ideas. One secret can make an entire character. I read this one about this woman who would write love letters to men and stick them in various mail boxes, so their wives would think they were having an affair. That’s a story just waiting to be told.

3. Texts From Last Night. There’s a wonderfully dirty website out there that it’s okay to be caught looking at called TextsFromLastNight.com. It’s powerfully hilarious. Look at any of the texts people send each other there, and you are automatically forming stories from them about the night before. And you weren’t even there.

4. Trashcans. Specifically, other people’s. The other day I went into a friend’s bathroom and saw the following: the box for a pregnancy test, rubber bands, and an empty duct tape roll. I’m not talking digging in there, but just a glance inside the occasional trash can once in awhile. There’s bound the to be an odd combination of items that might get your juices flowing.

I’ll have you know that I am ever-discovering new ways to keep myself amused, and in so doing, fiction is found. This list may grow as long as your hair, in which case I’ll either edit, or post anew. Stay tuned, and good luck.