Cropping With Friends

The weekend (a long one for me) was fabulous. Scrapbooking. Chatting. Catching up with friends. Making new ones. Every time I attend a retreat, I remember how much I love them and then start scouting for another one. I was going to say I didn't know what I loved most about crops, the dedicated scrapbooking time or hanging out with crafty friends, but I know the answer: spending time crafting with my friends. In talking with one my friends, we realized we hadn't spent time together since I dropped by at the last crop...at the end of September. Life sometimes gets so busy with to do list items (some important some not so much) that time is spent doing items rather than being with people. Or has been for me over the last year.

Time with friends is one of the reasons I love crop retreats so much. It's time dedicated to being with them and also for telling my family's story. This year, I made a vow to get more crafting time in so I can work on my scrapbooking albums and other craft projects. I love crafting and for some reason it always goes on the bottom of my list. It's a toss up if I get more pages done at home or at crops. At home, there are so many to do list items calling out for my attention: laundry, current WIP, dishes, cooking. It's hard to complete a lot of layouts as I feel guilty working on pages (doing something fun) when there is so much work needing done.

At retreats, I work on more labor intensive layouts (the Epcot page took almost 5 hours to complete), so I don't finish as many layouts as I'd like. But, I must say I usually love all the layouts I create at crop retreats. The time dedicated to scrapbooking allows me to create guilt free and I also am surrounded by many scrapping cheerleaders who tell me the time I'm taking for the double page spread will be so worth it in the end. They were right. I spent all of Saturday working on my Epcot and Rapunzel pages and I have to say I'm so glad I did. They are some of my favorites in our Disney vacation album.

I'm looking forward to the next retreat I'll be attending from April 6-9 at Alpine Lakes in Terra Alta, West Virginia. I have another one on my schedule for mid-April, and I'm on the lookout for one or two to crop at this summer.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet--You Could Win a Box of Books!

Argh. Every day I open my email and think: I don’t have time for all this. I especially don’t have time to update my website, to check all the posts on all the list-serves I belong to, visit every online community I need to, and comment on everyone’s blog as I should.

But I do have time to Twitter. Apparently, the rest of the world agrees. The site has reported an eight-fold rise in visitors since 2007, and in December reported 2.7 million people stopped by. At this rate, it is poised to overtake Facebook. It’s especially popular among the young and restless. One in five people between the ages of 18 and 35 with Internet access have “tweeted” or posted short messages of 140 characters on Twitter at least once.

Why do we twitter? Because we can. Because I can dash off a 140-character (that’s letters and symbols, not characters as in people who populate books!) post to update people on the release date of Cut, Crop & Die, the second book in the Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery Series. (That’s June 1, so mark your calendars or go to Amazon.com and place your order.)

Because I can post regular journaling prompts to remind scrapbookers the world over to write about their own lives. (Check it out at twitter.com/joannaslan. If you are an author, the journaling prompts are great tools for overcoming writer’s block. Try them and you’ll see!)

Because I can follow my favorite authors, geeks, and newsmakers by hitting the FOLLOW button.

Because I can make a post to Twitter from a Blackberry. (Try doing that with a regular blog post. I mean, if you are young and have well-trained thumbs, you probably can handle this, but I can’t. Yet.)

Because Twitter will automatically take any regular URL and turn it into a tiny URL and post the link for me. Because I can quickly scan the posts and see what interests me. Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” so I think he would have LOVED Twitter.

Because Twitter fits. I can squeeze it in.

Want to see how it works? Become one of my followers on Twitter and I’ll enter your name in a contest to win a Box of Books. Yep, I did find time to cull an entire box full of mysteries from my bookshelves. (It's a BIG box.) So, add your name to my followers on Twitter by going to twitter.com/joannaslan, hitting FOLLOW, and then emailing me at savetales@aol.com and telling me you are now following me. Be sure to tell me your “twitter” name so I can see that you did it! (No cheating!) I’ll choose one follower and mail him/her that box of books. (Please include your postal address with your email to me at savetales@aol.com. If you don't include it, and if I can't email you and get it within a day or two, I'll draw another winner.)

Let’s see if this Tweeting works!

PS You can hear a live broadcast of a scrapbook crop at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/circle-of-seven/2009/02/14/readers-entertainment-radio-with-guest-joanna-slan-author-of-paper-scissors-death If you have NO idea what a “crop” is, or why women love them, this will be very, very enlightening!