No, I didn't forget about my blog. I can't even say that I got really busy and couldn't post, although, like nearly everyone, I would say that I'm busy. No, I didn't post for three years because we had a big change in our lives, one that I wasn't permitted to blog about. It was such a huge thing that I couldn't see myself blogging about normal everyday things without being able to speak about it, so I just didn't blog.
It's taken over four years (since it all actually began), but I'm nearly to the place where I can post about it. Soon. For now, though, I was feeling like I wanted to do some writing about another little development and so I'll start with that.
Back when Honour was Highland dancing, I designed a little notebook for her that I had printed at Staples, to make notekeeping during dance class easy. As a private music teacher, a notation book is essential; I would never dream of sending a student home and asking them to practice without having detailed exactly what they were to work on. Why should dance class be any different?
To increase the chances that she'd take more effective notes (or to give the teacher's assistant a structure), I had the notebook printed up with subtitles of all the dances she was working on. Highland dance is nice and structured that way; each dance level has a common set of dances most teachers will work on with their dancers. This is supported by competition organizers who will then ask for those dances at competitions or festivals.
I had the idea at that time of having the book professionally printed, and perhaps try and sell them to some of the shops and vendors that I often saw at Highland Dance competitions. I did a bit of looking into how to get it printed, but didn't get very far and then it became one of those "someday" projects.
Well, "someday" has arrived!
A few weeks ago I was reading through a post from a Facebook group I'm in where SAHM's were listing their "side gigs", or extra ways to make money while they are mostly at home taking care of kiddies. I noticed that one woman talked about publishing "low content" books on Kindle. I checked out what she listed, and found that low content means very little actual writing. Her books were journals of various types, that she had created pretty covers for. This is when I discovered that Kindle offers something called Direct Publishing. You upload your book in digital form, and when someone orders it, Kindle prints that one copy and ships it out to them. This was perfect!
Now that I'm on break between my masters courses (oh yes, another development I'll have to write about sometime soon), and we'd been given a challenge by our financial coach (oops, another development!) to somehow "find" $500 during the month of May, I thought this would be the perfect time to try and get this project off the ground. It took me a little longer than I thought it would (don't these things always?), but as of yesterday I had all five books uploaded, approved, and listed on Amazon. To help promote them, I created a website on Wix, and also a Facebook Page. I've already got 23 likes!
So here's a few links to check out my project:
The Facebook page:
The website:
Or hey, you could just go straight to Amazon and buy them!
As you can read about on the website, I've included more than just subtitled note pages. The notebooks also have corresponding pages with check-charts for monitoring and encouraging practice at home, log pages for documenting details of competitions, check lists for all the items you don't want to forgot as you head to competitions and finally, a journal section with prompts for the dancer to get their thoughts and feelings about Highland dancing down in writing. Oh, and a few pages of cute badges for when the dancer masters each dance of that level.
So if you know of any Highland dancers, please feel free to share any of these web locations. This is a great resource to organize and memorialize the Highland dance journey!
