Hello everyone!<\/p>\n
This is just a quick update for something near and dear to my heart (as the title of this post would indicate!).\u00a0 As November approaches, the NaNoWriMo insanity is starting to get closer, and I wanted to post a quick link to my Classy.org donation page for NaNo.\u00a0 NaNoWriMo, if you didn’t know, is a non-profit organization.\u00a0 It’s not just November where they’re active — they do many different things throughout the year.\u00a0 One facet, which I find SO important, is the literacy outreach work that they do.\u00a0 I may be ten years removed from high school, but I do remember those years, as well as the ones before it.\u00a0 As a creative kid, I always needed an outlet for my ideas.\u00a0 In middle school, I was extremely active with the literary magazines, as well as the school newspaper.\u00a0 I was a bit busier in high school with the band and other activities, but you’d better bet that I was writing short stories and webzine articles and all kinds of things on my own then.\u00a0 If I hadn’t had a creative outlet or people encouraging me, then I would’ve been a different person today.\u00a0 We’re now living a time where schools are lacking funding, and they’re starting to cut arts programs first.\u00a0 To me, this is entirely unacceptable.\u00a0 My mother is a teacher herself, and I can speak for the fact that many of her teacher friends in the arts are finding it hard to get funds, and are supplementing their projects with their own money.\u00a0 One of my mom’s friends, who’s a librarian, found her position cut this year.\u00a0 I was AGHAST when I heard this!\u00a0 I know school libraries aren’t entirely what they were when I was young — I mean, there’s no flipping through the card catalogue to search for books using the Dewey decimal system (thank goodness!), but the librarians who worked in my schools were always such an invaluable part of helping me create and encouraging me to continue to read.<\/p>\n
I know that I have friends whose kids just aren’t as into reading as we were back in the pre-iPad\/iPhone\/electronics days, but I do still think that kids need the exposure to these things, as well as the encouragement to create their own works.\u00a0 This is exactly why I’m such a big supporter of NaNo’s community outreach.\u00a0 As you can tell if you check out my reading list page here, I’m also a giant fan of reading, even to this very day.\u00a0 So far, I’ve read over 150 books alone just in 2015, and I’m not done yet!\u00a0 If others aren’t encouraged to read, then where will we get new, fresh voices from?<\/p>\n
To wrap this post up, I’m going to post the link to my Classy page.\u00a0 If you’ve got anything to spare at all, from one dollar to one hundred dollars — WHATEVER the amount, please consider donating something to help support NaNoWriMo and their amazing work.\u00a0 I’ve met a lot of people over the past few years doing NaNo, and I know it’s left an important mark on all of our lives.\u00a0 Let’s help ensure that the future will continue to have lots of different literary voices!<\/p>\n