Charity begins . . .

I recently had cause to go begging for donations to a worthy cause and it got me thinking. The cause I was begging for was St Jude's Children's Research Hospital. But there are many worthy causes out there. And I suppose that published authors get hassled for donations a lot.

Let me digress for a moment: I used to live in a very affluent suburb. Many charities used to target this area with both door knocks and phone ups. Often when I answered the phone or the door whoever I spoke to assumed I had Money. No, not just Money but Real Money. I wish.

Published authors no doubt have the same problem at times.

Now I didn't assume anything of the kind. I understand that a recognisable name does not equal money in the bank and that there are limited numbers of author copies given to authors by their publishing houses. If no one had responded I wouldn't have been offended. Luckily some generous authors did respond.

Anna Campbell,

Christine Wells

and Tina M Clark

were all generous enough to help research into catastrophic diseases of childhood. Many thanks to them.

Even if I had Real Money, or author copies of a new book, there is still only so much I could do with them. Lots of worthy causes out there, you can't help them all. Still if I ever have name recognition I will try to help where I can. But where?

Having gone into teaching for the money I guess I'll make my charity offerings just as self serving and choose literacy charities, that will build my potential readership base! (Have I mentioned that you can nearly always tag my words with sarcastic, ironic or tongue in cheek?) Children's causes, breast cancer research and heart disease research are all likely to be things I will always try to have room for as well. And should that story about a surf lifesaver ever see the light of day Surf Life Saving Australia will be getting a cheque from me.

So what do you do? How will/do you give back to the world?

H! :)

Writing and sanity (or insanity?)

Last week I had the fortune of putting my neck out. Yes you read that correctly. It was the kind of agony that pain killers didn’t touch. Although the wine I had did improve my mood.

To put it in perspective on a scale of 1-10, I would rate child birth as a 3 and this as a 10. So of course I didn’t realise my good luck immediately. It was only after for 24 hours when my brain went loopy that I thought ‘I can use this’ and grabbed the nearest pen.

So I wrote a few notes on not so rational thought and pain, while I counted down the hours until my appointment with the back cracker. It took the chiropractor under thirty seconds to twist my head and make the pain bearable and less interesting.

I can now move my head again, and I have something I can use in my writing.
So I pose this question,
You know you’re a writer when…?