Be Brave! Face Life!

By Walter Steve Williams

Submitted by L. Avery Brown,
Founder, Real Bloggers United
Editor-in-Chief, RBU: The Group Blog
When A Southern Woman Rambles…
The Magnolia Blossom Review

The following poem was written by my father, Walter Steve Williams in the late 70s as he faced his first bout with cancer. His works were left in my care when he lost round two in 1993. To me, nothing sums up the way we should approach life because it is so short. And what better New Year's resolution could one have than to ‘Be Brave! Face Life!’ ?

An End and A Beginning

By Frank Brinkman http://icare2be.wordpress.com/

The days of 2010 have been put behind us.

The year filled to overflowing with memories.

Good, bad and even some mediocre

Days sometimes filled with stress and anxiety.

Jobs lost for many mamas and papas,
Even single ladies and gents weren't immune.

Mortgage payments late and late again.

Eviction notices served, homes lost.

Homeless shelters filled to overflowing.

Food pantries empting faster and faster.

Young men and women leaving families,

Soldiers fighting in far off lands.

Unknowns strapping on bombs,

Or sending bombs to terrorize all.

Yet hope remains, dented,

But on the mend.

The old heroes and stars

Are passing on to their just rewards.

The new heroes and stars

Striving to achieve and succeed.

Vote for Blah, Blah, Blah.

Don't vote for Nah, Nah, Nah.

Politics, here, there, and everywhere

Wore many nerves very thin.

Vote for none of the above

Became a favorite of some.

Signs of recovery late but welcome

Bolstering hope just slightly.

All are hopeful it is a new beginning.

Like the new year just beginning.

Each person expectant and hopefilled

Searching and looking for reassurance.

Opportunities to fail and succeed.

Achievements accumulate each day.

New year days and months

Filled with overflowing possibilities.

Like rivers, todays flow out into tomorrows.

Tomorrows flood into months to fill up a year.

Another year has begun creating memories

Each moment will be a precious gemstone.

Each a beautiful stone to be anticipated,

Kindly gathered and enjoyed fully.

If a new year is about to begin

An old one slipped away into the night.

I have a drawer full of last year's precious jewels,

Many different colors, kinds, sizes and shapes.

Each gemstone unique, too precious to trade or sell.

Each stone represents success or failure, pleasure or pain,

Also rocks containing boredom to chaos happenings,

Each appreciated individually with gratefulness.

Another collection of a years worth of memories has begun.

Each moment will be precious.

That is not a promise of things to come

It is a fact based upon many years of gathering memories.

So begin your journey with anticipation

And expectations of traveling an untraveled road.

Originally written: December 15, 2010

 

Countdown

By Scott Riddick
http://atypicalread.blogspot.com/


10...
Long years we have kicked and scratched, and fought through this thing called love to end up somewhere between Hell and back.

9...
official anniversaries prove that we both have more to look forward to, bracing against whatever challenges await us, while holding the hand of our first child gitty with laughter and beaming a huge smile too.

8...
false starts to get to where we are today, our troubles threatening to end what we had worked so hard for if either of us made one more wrong move.

7...
years an itch waited for one of us to scratch with tender fingers of our lovers grasp. A milestone in marriage achieved that most these days fail to exceed, but we did it - you and me.

6...
times I made you cry or more, some of which I tried to deny, I wish I could take back the hurt, the guilt, the extra weight you put on and the shame; but, that was then, and bringing up the past…I should refrain.

5...
times I tried to be the man you deserve, the husband who loved you for all that you were. Instead, I found fault in our love, our marriage, our life that was not there, just to be right in the relationship, a mistake I had to bear.

4...
years you spent serving a dish best served cold, and the equal amount of times I went to bed without my dignity or the manhood stripped from my soul.

3...
years in Philadelphia, trying to start anew, hoping to rekindle that love we both knew, lasting just long enough for me to finally see the real woman I married so long ago, and to find that spark still burning for you.

2...
years recently I mean, the days we spent trying to repair the wound. It took a lot of love and many kisses and a lot more apologizes to see us through. Nevertheless, we found a way, when no one else seemed to see the light at the end of our lovely little cliché. With hand in yours, we looked one another in the eye. Our candle of passion burning the midnight oil, wrapped in one another’s arms, laughing, loving, and creating the one thing missing all along.

1...
little girl who calls me daddy and you mommy, loved by us, cherished by us, breathed life by our love that once upon a time felt lost. Our daughter, the child you never thought would be, held tightly in our arms. God, we did it, this, can you not believe? Where is your heart, your mind and your lust? Where are you? I scoot closer. You lean into my shoulder. We listen to the light little snore in the monitor as the ball drops, holding our glasses celebratory in the air. I toast a new year for us, one that I look most forward too. You toast to our health and agree. We drink from our glasses and make eye contact. There you are. We make love, again, and again, rediscovering the two hopeless romantics from a decade before.

This Year I Mean It!

By Glen Staples
Managing Editor, RBU: The Group Blog
http://glenslife.com/

January is here and I guess that means I have to sit down and think about the year ahead. What am I going o change, what am I going to keep the same? Somehow I suspect that whatever I come up with, will be completely forgotten about by the end of the year.

No.

This year.

This time.

Really, I mean it.

And so here we go with my brand new 2011 predictions and plans.**

1. Get published in some more magazines – try and move that desire to be a bona fide writer forward.

2. See Rob (my Gym guy) again and this time try and keep going for more than two blog posts.

3. Distance myself a little from Steve (the guy who answers the phone at Dominos).

4. Encourage my children not to fight with each other every time I leave the room, through the use of mime.

5. Using more mime, attempt not to shout at said children, more than twice a day.

6. Encourage my wife to spend less time buying shoes, by carrying her piggy back whenever we go out, thus saving wear and tear on the ones she already has.
7. Cross that 100 followers threshold.

8. Actually get paid from Amazon for my affiliate banners, by getting over their pay out threshold.

9. Encourage Sandra Bullock to marry me through the use of the Robot dance.

10. Lose my virginity (preferably with Kim)**+

So there you have it. There are my 10 Resolutions for 2011. Let’s hope we still have Real Bloggers United running next year so that we can see how I got on.

To all of you I’d like to wish the absolute best for this New Year.


Glen.

** This list of resolutions was first published in January 2008, 2009 and 2010. This year I probably mean it.

**+ Resolution number 10 was first published during my 6 day trial of keeping a journal when I was 13, back on December 31st 1984. That is exactly how I wrote it down. I had high hopes for my time with that young lady, but I love how my young mind was wise enough to only ask for “preferably”, at the end of the day I’d have happily lost it with the kitchen sink – let’s face it. Not only did I fail to lose my virginity that year, but Kim dumped me on the first day back to school in January. I guess I know what her New Year’s resolution was – I should respect her for achieving her dreams so quickly really.

MY WRITE1SUB1 RESOLUTION

By Milo Fowler
http://www.milo-inmediasres.com/






  


Once upon a time, Ray Bradbury was a struggling young writer in love with the craft. He wrote a short story every week, polished it as fast as he could, and submitted it to a magazine. Rejection letters flooded in, mainly due to his prolific number of submissions: the more you write, the more responses you get. There were also acceptance letters along the way, and they inspired Bradbury to keep doing what he loved: telling stories as only he could.
This year, I'm following in Ray Bradbury's shadow. Here's my new year's resolution:

• I'm going to write and submit a short story every week, starting the first week of January 2011 and ending the last week of December 2011. My goal: 52 new submissions in 52 weeks.

• I don't have to write and submit the same story within the same week--although that's what Bradbury did. (Sometimes it’s better to set a story aside for a while and come back to it.)

• The length of my stories will be as short as Twitter fiction (140 characters) or as long as a novelette (15,000 words). Any style, any genre: whatever I want to write that week.

Care to join me?

Visit Write1Sub1 to sign up and participate alongside fellow writers and Bradbury fans. We have a weekly as well as a monthly participation level, and you can post the corresponding badge on your blog to let the world know about the adventure you'll be embarking upon this year!

It's never too late to sign up. Regardless of your commitment level, WE WANT YOU!

Editor's Note:  We highly suggest to all our members that they visit the site  http://write1sub1.blogspot.com/ and to consider participating.  It would be a fabulous opportunity to hone one's writing talent!  Thank you Milo for the wonderful suggestion and here's wishing you much luck with your resolution.



Happy New Year!

By Layla Morgan Wilde
http://laylamorganwilde.com/

A Message From the Founder's Keyboard...

Greetings! Welcome to March and to another wonderful edition of Real Bloggers United: The Group Blog.


Regardless of where you may be, whether it’s hanging out in the Northern Hemisphere or enjoying the flipside of this beautiful big blue marble in the Southern Hemisphere, March is a month of terrific changes. It’s a time when each morning brings a fresh perspective on things be it some bright flowers bursting forth from deep beneath the soil as it reaches toward the longer days that Spring brings with it or thick, rich green leaves mellowing into warm spicy colors as Autumn creeps across the horizon. Yes, it is a time of visual delights.

It’s also a time when we bloggers, who consider ourselves as artists, no matter if we are writers of prose who paint stories with words, poets who find feelings hidden in lyrical phrases or photographers who can bring to life moments captured through a lens, often find ourselves feeling a bit restless and itching for our unique voices to be heard. And that is exactly why RBU developed this group blog; to be a place where you, the bloggers who truly care about blogging as a legitimate outlet for artistic expression, get to have a voice beyond your personal blogs.

If you’re a member of RBU or simply a regular visitor to RBU:TGB you’re sure to know that we typically follow a monthly theme format wherein we pose an idea, ask our members to wrap their thoughts around it, and submit they way they perceive the notion. And in the end we always wind up with topnotch submissions that prove time and again how very talented our members are because it can be really difficult though quite fulfilling to step out of one’s artistic comfort zone to try tackling a new idea.

But we know that sometimes our members would simply love to let the world in on their style the way they would do it on their own personal blogs which is why every so often we like to have a month where the theme is ‘Blogger’s Choice’…the completely UNthemed theme where every day there is the chance to read something that is not only ‘new’ but also something that could be totally off the wall or very serious. Blogger’s Choice also means that one day you might see a bright floral pictorial essay filled with whimsy and the next day a dark, moody photo that speaks to our collective conscious.

Yes, this month at RBU:TGB we offer to the blogosphere a hodge-podge of stylistic submissions where you get a chance to see our members shine with their own unique flair because just as the month of March come in like a lion and leave like a lamb and can flip flop back and forth between the two extremes so too does the thoroughly UNthemed theme of Blogger’s Choice.

We do hope you enjoy. And if you find yourself moved by a particular submission, please make sure to drop by the site of the blogthur who offered it because that one click could very well lead you to your next ‘most favorite’ blog site!

A Message From the Founder's Keyboard...

Greetings and Happy New Year!

As we here at Real Bloggers United and  RBU: The Group Blog step into a shiny new year where anything is possible, I'd like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the wonderful things that happened in 2010 for our merry band of bloggers...

January 2011 marks a milestone in RBU's brief history as our group was formed on January 20, 2010 at Blogcatalog.com out of one woman's desire (that would be my desire)  to find like-minded bloggers who wanted nothing to do with the proliferation of annoying spammers who trawled the general discussion boards and the rag-tag groups that were found at BC.  I wasn't exactly sure how it would turn out.  After all, with so many 1,000+ member 'groups' on the social blogging site, I didn't think I would find enough people who blogged purely for blogging's sake to legitimately call RBU a 'group'. 

But lo and behold...I did!  Within a couple of days about 20 people had passed the 'are you legit?' test and were allowed in to our group.  (No, I don't like referring to it as 'my' group because I simply came up with the idea...it was YOU, the members, who really made us a group!) and we spent lots of time discussing whatnot and soforth through our group's discussion board.  And before long we were up to about 75 members. 

Once our group started growing a few people suggested creating our own group blog where we could showcase our talents.  And I thought it was a fabulous idea.  But I wanted it to be different from other group blog sites I'd visited where there was no rhyme or reason to the postings.  Rather I decided to borrow an idea I'd seen used very well in several of the literary periodicals I received and that idea was monthly 'themes'.  I simply loved the idea of being given a sentence like 'I reached toward the door knob and...' then being asked to generate an entire story around it.  Likewise the notion of being given a photo or illustration and being asked to 'tell the story of what you see' was so intriguing.

And challenging, too. So I figured why not have our group blog do something similar?  Why not give our members a chance to challenge their writing styles, step out of their comfortable word zones, and tap into talents they might not have realized they had?  That's why Antony Waller, Glen Staples (a couple of terrific behind the scenes fellows) and I thought we'd try using monthly themes.

We launched on April 1, 2010...April Fool's Day...what a day!  We'd either do really well or we'd, well, we'd end up looking sort of foolish.  But no!  It wound up being a terrific first edition and I couldn't have been prouder because I knew that our members were seriously top notch writers. 

The months have carried on and each one has been exciting for me sitting here at my virtual Editor-in-Chief desk.  Yes, there have been a few 'lean on submissions' months but we've never been anything but full on quality!  I'm hoping that this year, 2011, will find our little group growing larger and our group blog continually filled with amazing poetry, prose and photos.

I suppose that's all I really need to say other than 'Here's to a fruitful New Year at Real Bloggers United'!

I hope you'll come back soon to see what amazing posts we have to offer the whole virtual world.

Cheers to you all!