a website & community for women who write & blog
You know you need to schedule a photo shoot. On more than one occasion you’ve been asked for a headshot and you’ve had to send an embarrassing selfie instead of a professional portrait. The Welcome, About, and FAQ pages of your website all have stock photos or no images at all. And you don’t even have a picture of yourself in the sidebar of your blog!
You know you need to schedule a photo shoot, but you just can’t build the courage to do so. Trust me, I understand. (more…)
I had no idea I’d lost 20 pounds.
My pants were easier to button, my dresses easier to zip. But since I usually only step on a scale when a medical professional forces me to do so, I had no idea I’d lost 20 pounds.
Then I went to a wellness screening mandated by my health insurance provider, stepped on the scale, looked down and saw a number 20 pounds less than the number I saw the last time I’d weighed myself.
“Your scale is broken,” I declared to the nice nurse practitioner filling out my paperwork. She just laughed and assured me it was not. I didn’t believe her. When I got home I weighed myself again and those 20 pounds were still nowhere to be found. “Maybe my scale is broken, too,” I thought.
Last week my fellow teachers and I returned to work after a two and a half month summer break and that’s when I realized those scales must have been right.
“Oh my gosh! Javacia, you look great!” one co-worker exclaimed. “Wow! You got so skinny!” said another. “Girl, what did you do?” a colleague asked.
Good question. What did I do? And how can I use the same principles I used to lose weight to help me with my writing and blogging goals?
I’ve realized that there are four things that helped me lose weight: mindset, movement, motivation, and momentum.
During my first year of teaching, my classroom looked as if it belonged to a 40-something-year-old white man. Why? Because before I was hired it did belong to a 40-something-year-old white man and when his classroom became my classroom I didn’t bother to change anything.
When you’re thinking of the fashion capitals of the world, Birmingham, Alabama is probably not a city that comes to mind. But the founders of Magic City Fashion Week (set for October 24 – 28) are out to change that, and this is great news not just for local models and designers, but for local bloggers, too.
Sometimes you meet certain people who are so interesting and so inspiring you just know your life will be different because you met them. This is how I felt about the woman behind the blog and the brand Vic Styles when I first met her last year at a Boss Babes Brunch she hosted in Birmingham. I later had the pleasure of interviewing her for B-Metro magazine.
Though based in L.A., Vic has family in Alabama so she visits the Magic City often. During her most recent trip, she spoke at a Bloggers Night Out event hosted by the organizers of the upcoming Magic City Fashion Week. Vic is a full-time lifestyle blogger who has figured out how to essentially get paid to live her life and be herself. In a recent interview with 21Ninety, Vic described herself as a “freelance life-liver.”
Since Vic is living what is nearly every blogger’s dream, you can be sure the room reserved at Blue Monkey Lounge last Wednesday evening for Bloggers Night Out was packed. Here are five gems dropped by Vic that I really needed to hear.