Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done—so I feel for you. 1st. Live as well as you dare. 2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold a slight sensation of cold, 75 degrees or 80 degrees. 3rd. Amusing books. 4th. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea. 5th. Be as busy as you can. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 8. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely—they are always worse for dignified concealment. 9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10th. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11th. Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best. 12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence. 13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree. 14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue. 15th. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant. 16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness. 17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. 18th. Keep good blazing fires. 19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth (1820)
101 Things to do in 2004: Say Thank you to worst enemies for spreading stories

The "Me" in Media: Me and My Story
Since we are embarking on a New Year, a New Years resolution is in order if you have not already broken it...
The rise of mass media in the last half of the 20th Century turned us all into consumers and took away much of the natural human inclination to be creators, performers, singers, musicians and storytellers.
Today, the rapid proliferation of inexpensive professional-quality media-making tools, paired with the drastic decrease in the cost of content distribution is leading to a quiet, but quite real revolution in the quantity and quality of " amateur" content. It's the democratization of media, the "Big Flip" as Clay Shirky calls it, and we think it's going to play an increasingly important role in how unknown writers make, share and consume media.

I don’t think that I’m a natural writer by any stretch of the imagination...
Attempts to produce the Great Australian Story remain, on the evidence of the latest catalogues. Here is love, death, history and memory, childhood, adolescence and old age. Here is some beauty, some truth and a certain amount of ambition. The business of writing is to fail every day, anyway...An incredibly well written story, which is heavily marketed, has a much greater chance of getting made than a script sitting on a writer's shelf which has been read by one or two producers. And following that: The writer who heavily markets his well written script has a much greater chance of getting hired to write other stories and/or sell his/her other scripts.' And probably even more accurate is: 'An excellent incredibly talented writer will never become successful (outside of some freak stroke of luck), unless he/she markets him/herself aggressively.
I hope writers who haven't achieved their full
potential will look at the last year and make the resolution to double or triple their efforts this year in marketing their talents. So Writers czech out these articles:
· Why Mass Media Is Failing Writers: Brilliant! Dazzling! Extraordinary! [via Idea Flow]

Move Over St. Francis de Sales
Many booksellers serve as patron saints of favorite authors, but Susan Wasson of Bookworks in Albuquerque, New Mexico, went beyond typical high-volume handselling with Kris Radish's Elegant Gathering of White Snows. Bookworks sold nearly a third of the entire first printing of the title, which was originally published by Spinsters Ink. Wasson also (with Spinsters' permission and blessing) sent a copy to Bantam, which bought the rights. Bookworks went on to sell nearly 400 copies of the Bantam edition. To date, the bookstore has sold over 1,100 copies of Radish's novel.
It was wonderful to see the women bonding, Kris [Radish] was nearly in tears. Susan gave the book its initial push, but now it's taken off on its own merits.
· Radish Novel [via BookWeb ]