The CSA in Coffee CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The entire initiative is run by a group of farmer co-ops that are in turn 100% owned by the coffee farmers. When you get your coffee from Coffee CSA, all the funds go right to the farmers. There is no middle man here. This is about the best definition of fair trade at work that I can think of.

What makes buying your coffee from them great is that you know exactly where your coffee comes from. You can go to there site and look over individual farmer profiles and see pictures, videos, and other little snippets of information about the farm and farmers.

For example, I decided to get my coffee from a farmer in Peru by the name of Belhermina Aguilar.

She and her family run a small farm located in the mountains of Peru spitting distance from Machu Pichu! From the website you can even see from Google Maps where their farm is.

There was even a great video showing a typical work day for them. This is a great insight for anyone knowing how coffee is grown, processed, and ultimately how it gets over to your kitchen counter as well as putting a face to the beverage you love to enjoy.

So, how much does it cost you ask? Not as much as you think it would. Yes, it’ll cost more than the crap you can get from your supermarket, but it doesn’t cost more than the overpriced and over hyped coffee beans you get from Starbucks. Even better is that they are organically grown and freshly roasted before they are shipped out. I can smell the awesomeness through the box when it’s delivered to my doorstep by my friendly neighborhood UPS person.

Normally they sell it on a subscription, but if you’re shy of commitment, then just buy one of their one-shots and determine for yourself is this is the way you want to go.

Believe me when I say going to the source, the farmer themselves, is the best way of getting really good single-origin coffees. It doesn’t get any fresher than this.

I’d like to thank Martha Garzon at M5 Design Studio for helping me get over my WordPress issues and to getting the new site online. She does great work and is awesome with WordPress at great prices. If you need some work done, she is the one to go to.

In the mean time, today is the start of another NanoWrimo, and I hope to take advantage of this month to write an idea I’ve always wanted to get down onto paper. I’ll keep this page updated with my progress.

Thanks for being patient and here’s to a good month.

Far, far, behind.

So, right now the site is looking a bit out of sorts as I work out yet another new theme. Which, ironically, I haven’t had the time to do.

One thing I want to mention though was that while some of the actual theme designers were less than helpful, the people who run the marketplace, MojoThemes, are incredible. They have helped me to get through this and have finally identified a theme and designer that actually believe in helping their customers.

I wholeheartedly recommend purchasing from them. Why you ask? It’s simple: The only way you find out if you’re working with a good company is when something goes wrong and what they do to resolve it. MojoThemes is a great company and they care about the satisfaction of their clients.

Putting the theme troubles aside for a moment, I will be also moving Renegade Sanctuary to a new server after upgrading to a higher tier of service with my ISP. I should’ve done this long ago since it gives me a great amount of flexibility.

Hopefully the next post you see will be on the new server and with the new theme fully deployed.

Thanks for your patience!

The saddest thing I found is that many of the passwords in there were mostly names, dictionary words, or a combo with a few token numbers through in for good measure.

People, this is not smart.

Whenever you register for any site, you’re trusting them to protect your information, but not all site administrators are created equal. Some are diligent and will keep track of current security trends, apply security patches as they come out, use strong passwords to prevent brute force attacks and utilize strict access controls to keep people from gaining access to their systems.

Others just slap a server up, turn on auto-update and hope for the best.

Writers with accounts at Writersspace found out today the value of a good system administrator.

The problem this affects these users far beyond Writerspace. Especially if they used those e-mails and passwords for other accounts. Which a lot of people who aren’t technically, or security, inclined tend to do. Now they’ll have people they don’t know posting very damaging things online from their accounts who they thought would be safe.

We’ve seen how easy it is to destroy a reputation online. And that’s just from someone posting the wrong thing. Imagine if someone posted all sorts of wrong things on your behalf! The only way to keep this from happening is to to protect yourself.

Here are some ways as a writer you can do this:

1. Use a different password for every site you are on: This way if a site is compromised like Writerspace, then you won’t have to worry about other people accessing your other accounts.

2. Use long, random passwords: By having your passwords randomly generated by your computer, it will be almost impossible for people to figure them out. Even better if the generator is using a combination of numbers, letters, and punctuation marks.

3. Get a password manager: If the idea of managing your own passwords seems daunting, use a password manager like 1Password or RoboForm to manage your passwords securely. They make it easy to have separate passwords for each site and can also generate difficult to guess passwords.

If you follow those three steps when something like Writerspace occurs the only thing you need to worry about is the compromised password on that site and not everything else in your life.

25 Things every Writer Should Know

How do you get the word out about your book while building up a following at the same time?

Simple: Introduce your readers to you.

The best way of getting people to want to read your stuff is by using the same technique that grocers have used to get people interested in what they’re selling: Giving out free samples.

Now, I’ll admit that sharing writing isn’t as easy as rolling up a pice of ham and putting a pretzel stick through it to entice people to buy, but with social media and blogs you can easily put out something for people to “chew on” before the release of your novel.

A good way of doing this is to write short stories that take place in your universe.

What do you write about? You know that big stack of notes in the corner that you made about your world while writing the novel? Put those to good use and write a prequel short or a story about a character you would love to introduce more detail on. Or you can write about some ancient historical event that forms the basis for some of your character’s beliefs. Those legends and myths have to come from somewhere, right?

After you’ve written these stories, place them on your book’s website, or author’s blog, for everyone to see. Then post the link to Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else you can think of. Place a link to it on a business card. People will read the story and if you did a great job in writing the story they’ll be ready for me.

Now you have a instant reader. Just add book!

A good example of this practice is what Peter Orullian did for his Vault of Heaven universe. He wrote three short stories that took place before the first novel, The Unremembered. I’ve included the links below. This was a great example of getting readers into your book without even having released it yet!

Sacrifice of the First Sheason

The Great Defense of Layosah

Battle of The Round

As always you can find me on Twitter and on Tumblr where I post more of my inane ramblings.

If you’re an author or an aspiring writer and you aren’t on Twitter, you’re not doing your career any favors. Follow these people and get some insight into the people you’re submitting to.

Best Literary Agents on Twitter

Will I actually win this year? That’s another thing entirely. I’ll keep you all posted so look here for updates as I try to finish the first draft of my YA novel.

I’ll also try to keep this blog a bit more updated, too.

It’d be easy to say that I stopped because I don’t know what I want to happen in chapter two, but nay such is not the case. I can unequivocally state after several weeks of plotting I know exactly what is going to happen. The problem is translating that outline item into a chapter.

I could blame stress, lack of sleep, or who knows what other numerous amount of items I’d like, but it simply comes down to I’ve stopped. Cold. I need to start allocating more time to writing instead of other activities. Not blogging, since that is a nice li’l warm up activity to get my fingers running across the keyboard, and as it is, I don’t do it enough.

Chris Brogan posted a blog entry on “How not to write a book”. Take a look at this list if you find yourself not moving forward. Do you see yourself doing some of these things? I know I do.

On the good news front, I’m trying at mixing up the projects I’m working on and moving forward with one when I find myself stopped in another. Looking at my queue, I know I at least have five that I’m working on. Any progress in one is a win to me.

Now, back to writing.