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It’s time to celebrate!

Thank you listeners, guests and loyal subscribers for your support!

We show up each week for you.

Our hope is you feel inspired to keep taking the next step on your creative journey.

This week on the podcast, we’re taking a walk down memory lane as we look back at our year of podcasting.

When we started the podcast, we had no idea what we were doing, but we knew we wanted to offer valuable guidance to writers and share great stories.

It’s become our favorite project each week.

We keep it authentic and real because we know it’s important.

You want to hear real stories from real writers and that’s what we offer you.

It’s not easy to pinpoint a favorite episode because each one offers something unique to you.

If you’ve joined us later in our releases, we hope you’ll take a look back at episodes that came along earlier.

Many of our early episodes are still being downloaded today.

The behind-the-scenes data gives us insights into our community of listeners and we dig into the details in this episode.

We are transparent about the challenges we’ve faced creating an online community space for writers and how this has led to the creation of courses.

The Memoir Cohort Course led by Elizabeth is a course that will transform your writing. If you’re looking back at your year and you haven’t reached your writing goal for your memoir, it’s a course to put on your calendar for 2025.

Stephanie will be offering a course in January 2025 to help you organize your writing using Scrivener. If you’re overwhelmed and getting lost in Word or Docs, you’ll want to join this course to discover how Scrivener can change your writing experience and productivity.

In December 2024, we’re taking a break from podcasting to allow the pause to rejuvenate us for the coming new year, so if you’re not caught up on episodes it will be a great time to binge listen to ones you’ve missed.

As you listen this week, what can you celebrate?

Thank you again for joining us on this creative journey!

We invite you to subscribe to our email list to be the first to know about our weekly podcast episodes and upcoming group programs for writers!

If you prefer video versions of the podcast or want to leave a comment on this specific episode, you can find all of them on our YouTube channel.

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You've been there. You walk into a room and feel overwhelmed by the mess in the space. It can feel like a lot to figure out how to get it organized. You’ve tried before, but it just doesn’t stick.

You might just want to look up our guest, Julianna Strickland, who has been featured in the New York Times and has a partnership with the Container Store, on this week’s podcast for inspiration and connect with her to help you get organized.

There’s no shame in getting help.

In fact, it can be incredibly empowering to connect with someone who can help solve something you’ve been struggling with that’s blocking your creativity.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, getting organized might be your answer.

When you clean up your space you open space for creativity.

There's something about knowing your things are in their place that allows your brain to focus on your art. Even when you're not paying attention, you're naturally organizing your things and it's distracting for your mind.

You want the feeling of being organized because it far exceeds the experience of looking at the space.

You're clearing space in your brain and it can become addictive to organize your space when you begin to see the result of being more productive.

You’ll feel more connected to your creative work.

You don’t have to be type A to get organized and transform your life.

If you have the desire to be organized, you can do it.

If organizing is not your thing, you'll benefit from having someone teach you how to get your space in order so you can get back to your work as a creative.

You naturally see the beauty in all that you have and you want to enjoy it, but then you get lost in what you have, like the 100s of books, and forget to focus on your own creativity.

There can be a domino effect to making one simple change and allowing it to flow into the next.

You can make your space functional and beautiful. It’s okay if you need to call upon someone for help.

website: https://spacecamporganizing.com
course: https://spacecamporganizing.com/makebetterspace
IG: https://www.instagram.com/makebetterspace/
Personal IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianna_strickland/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/makebetterspace/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@spacecamporganizing
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@makebetterspace

We invite you to subscribe to our email list to be the first to know about our weekly podcast episodes and upcoming group programs for writers!

If you prefer video versions of the podcast or want to leave a comment on this specific episode, you can find all of them on our YouTube channel.

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It’s an especially exciting episode this week as we welcome an author who is local to us, here in Colorado, and we’ll be welcoming her to our local book club meeting next month.

Lara’s book, The Table: Seasons on a Colorado Ranch, was the result of completing her MFA at Western State University and submitting it for consideration for publication by the University’s press. It was selected and Lara was surprised and incredibly grateful.

It was a process of taking a series of personal essays and turning them into a full-length memoir. Her memoir shows her grit and gratitude for the seasons of life and reflections on the golden moments to embrace when navigating through difficult times.

It’s a memoir about her life on her family’s ranch where they raise Hereford cows and gather thousands upon thousands of bales of hay each summer. What you’ll discover as you read is it’s not just the stories of her family’s experiences, but an invitation to walk in her shoes and understand the experience of ranchers in our area in Colorado.

You’ll learn about the challenges being faced by ranchers as developers moving into the area are offering attractive sums of money to acquire land for multi-family housing developments.

There’s insight into cattle ranching and the meaning of its impact on our environment.

She was fortunate to have the support of her family who gave her space to write her book, but there were still struggles with staying focused. You’ll be interested to listen and learn about a special visitor to one of her writing spaces.

Lara masterfully weaves together various threads of her life story to connect the pieces that have contributed to her family’s success in their ranching business and in their lives. It hasn’t always been easy, but there’s a true sense of gratitude and fortitude in the work being done.

There’s a discussion of the editing process and how even with a publisher you can find errors after a book has been printed, but you can reach out and make sure any changes are made before future books are printed.

You’ll appreciate it when she talks about getting distracted and how easy it can be to be pulled away from your work. We’ve all been there. It’s why finding a place that’s not in your own backyard can be beneficial to your writing process. It can be too easy to decide to do the laundry, mow the lawn, or any other number of house chores.

We invite you, like Lara does in her memoir, to join her at The Table: Seasons on a Colorado Ranch. If you’ve written personal essays, you’re sure to find inspiration for turning your stories into a full-length memoir.

Who is Lara Richardson?
A former white-water rafting guide on the Arkansas River, LARA RICHARDSON lives with her husband and five kids on their family ranch in Salida, Colorado, where they raise over 300 Hereford mother cows and calves and grow over 30,000 bales of hay each summer. A voice for land stewardship, sustainable beef production,
and the family farm, she is a 2021 graduate of Western Colorado University’s MFA Program in Nature Writing. The Table is her first published work.

Find Lara online:
Lara Richardson Website
Lara on IG
Lara Richardson on Facebook

We invite you to subscribe to our email list to be the first to know about our weekly podcast episodes and upcoming group programs for writers!

If you prefer video versions of the podcast or want to leave a comment on this specific episode, you can find all of them on our YouTube channel.