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Challenges about Budgeting and Grocery Shopping

Budgeting and grocery shopping is one of the best ways to trim down your monthly expenses and daily spending- but there are dozens of challenges out there- especially the advice that is ultimately unrealistic. Here is a list of budgeting and grocery shopping challenges and how you can make them realistic strategies to save on grocery shopping! Challenges about Budgeting and Grocery Shopping Challenge #1- Unrealistic Research I've spent a lot of time scouring Pinterest and have not felt entirely satisfied with the results. Some articles seem too unreasonable to be applicable. More often than not, it comes down to unrealistic costs of groceries . For example, I cannot find 1 gallon of milk at my local Walmart for $1. And our Dollar Tree out in Montana doesn't have a grocery section- we do have a freezer section, but it is only 2-3 doors of frozen dinners. And our bread and produce is not as cheap as the other articles. What I have done to get around this challeng...
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A Short Story Story & Tips


Tips!
During my freshman and sophomore year in college, I had been lax in my creative writing classes.
I turned in random chapters that I had written for The Phoenix & The Crow and the instructor was fine with it. Last spring, as I looked at other colleges’ requirements, a lot of the upperclassmen courses consisted of creative writing or writing classes where I may or may not need to write short stories. I began to realize that I couldn’t just write chapter drafts for my novel’s series plus I couldn’t just keep handing instructors really long pieces of work that never was finished off with a nice teensy bow. I needed to write a short story.  An actual story that had the diagram properly worked its way through it.

Otherwise, how would I ever grow as a writer if I only knew how to write fantasy?

I started taking short stories more seriously. I got to read more samples of short stories in my Brit Lit class last spring also when we hit the 20th Century  time period. I learned an approximate page/word count for short stories (1,500 to 30,000 words) - I actually got to read a short story that was only ONE OR TWO PAGES LONG on one piece of paper front and back!  
I was able to see then, how short stories are pushed together. It’s fantastic, really. If you think about it, a short story has an entire novel storyline packed all into a 30,000 word count or less! It’s thick with rhetoric and every time someone reads it, there can be a new story right between the very words! Characters represent more than their names and actions, their names can represent an entire theme into those teensy stack of page. Their words cut into us in a special way each time it is read…. The irony, the metaphors...And I could go on and on….But these posts are suppose to leave you all with something helpful to keep in mind….so I will get back on track….

I started to take the “story diagram” more to heart too. I have now accepted a challenge from myself to work on the Short Story Formula. Think about it everyone! You should do it too! We writers everywhere should be trying to make time or actually making time FOR WRITING. We are writers! We shouldn’t take lulls between projects or lack of inspiration. We need to think of things and condense the beauty of that story into something that is like 12 pages. Things that are a thrilling challenge! Prompts or tasks that we need to try and….. well, try to overcome. We can’t just stay where we are comfortable, and believe me, I am trying to do that same thing.
I can’t keep writing only fantasy. I can use other book genres, movies, tv shows and stuff to write other stuff so that maybe that good stuff could find its place in what I want to write for my fantasy books.


  1. The Story Diagram is helpful.
  2. Consider and recognize parts of a short story when you read it. Find the parts of the story and analyze it. See where tones shift, where rhetoric is and see if there is significance and recognize how it is done and how it affects interpretation.

  3. After you have dissected the story, try to push the parts back together in your own special way.
  4. Use as many resources as possible: books, songs, poems, tv shows, other short stories pictures….










~Happy Writing!
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