Abundance in Action: Participate in My 2024 Giveaway for Good

Happy December! If you’re new, welcome to Writing Your Resilience, a weekly newsletter where I share writing and healing tips, tricks, and wisdom, so you can create transformational stories that change the world. If you’ve been here for a while, thank you for sticking around.

In 2020, I started my Giveaway for Good prize extravaganza so I could create some lightness during a very dark time. To be honest, I needed to feel a sense of joy. My life and writing depended on it. Today, as we enter yet another period of uncertainty, it feels even more vital. It also reminds me of the importance abundance and generosity play in our writing lives.

Writing can serve so many purposes, and we write from so many places. Sometimes, urgency or yearning drive us to the page. At others, it’s a need to be seen or understand something we’re grappling with. We write to feel deeply, play, and have fun.

We access our truest stories when we’re sitting fully in our power. This is true regardless of the genre you write in. When we tap into our power, we create from a place of curiosity and openness, unafraid of what we might discover. As we do this, we uncover our deepest truths, and because we’re feeling centered, we share them with honesty and grace.

Readers can tell when we’ve achieved this. They feel seen, connected, and deeply held. Characters are rendered with fairness and compassion. The writing voice feels confident.

But it’s impossible to spend all our time there. Life happens. Uncertainty and fear creep in, which leads to scarcity thinking, where we project doomsday scenarios onto life’s big screen. When we’re living in scarcity, we tend to question the validity of our writing and worry about its reception. What if we’re wrong? Worse, what if someone calls us out for being wrong?

The more we clamp down on projections and try to find certainty, the more we stifle our creative energy because we’re telling our nervous systems things aren’t okay. While there are certainly times when that’s true—even then, and perhaps especially then, we need to remind ourselves of our abundance.

Abundance, like gratitude, isn’t a dismissal of the darkness. It’s a reminder that you can be okay inside it. It’s what helps us make it through the tough stuff, both in writing and life. Personally, it’s what helped me survive my chaotic upbringing, my brother’s suicide, my divorce, six years of Lyme disease hell, and the ups and downs of daily living. You can connect with your abundance and have a finely tuned bullshit meter or prepare for difficulties ahead. You can acknowledge that things are not okay and that the world is full of dangers you wish would go the hell away but aren’t. You can feel afraid/upset/confused/unmoored and be abundant

While abundance is technically a noun, I see it as a verb, because it’s in giving that we truly experience it.

As the days get darker (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), I want to help you connect with your generous, abundant, and powerful spirit through my Giveaway for Good Challenge.

Here’s how it works:

If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a free subscription to this Substack
Donate $25 (or more) to a charity of your choice
Click the button below to send me a screenshot of your receipt
Each receipt gets you one ticket into my 2024 Giveaway for Good prize extravaganza.
Donations made between November 15, 2024 – December 19, 2024, are eligible for the giveaway.
The more donations you make, the more tickets you can earn.

Here’s how you can increase your Giveaway for Good fun:

Donate $100 or more and you’ll earn 3 tickets into this year’s challenge.
Donate to one of my favorite charities below, or your local food bank, mental health nonprofit, or nonprofit writing center, and you’ll earn 4 tickets

Lisa’s Favorite Giveaway for Good Charities

This is an equal-opportunity challenge. If you’re strapped for cash, you can earn a ticket into the Giveaway for Good by completing 3 acts of generosity in your community. This includes things like helping a neighbor, completing volunteer service, or writing 3 – 5 sentence book reviews for your favorite new author on Amazon and Goodreads. For each act of kindness, share a 3-sentence description of what you’ve done along with a photo. Please send screenshots of your reviews.

Since its inception, the Giveaway has earned over $54,000 in charitable donations and countless acts of service. Last year’s total was $12,777. I can’t wait to beat it. To ensure that happens, prizes will be based on your generosity.

Here’s a list of this year’s Giveaway for Good prizes.

Everyone who donates will be invited to Thrive in 2025.
If we reach $3,000, I’ll give away 5 one-year subscriptions to the paid edition of this newsletter, which gives you access to my Ask Me Anything sessions.
If we reach $5,000, I’ll give away the prizes above, plus one thirty-minute coaching session.
If we reach $7,500, I’ll give away the prizes above, plus a one-hour coaching session.
If we reach $10,000, I’ll give away the prizes above, plus a one-hour coaching session with a ten-page manuscript evaluation.
If we reach $13,000, I’ll give away the prizes above, plus a twenty-five-page manuscript evaluation.

The deadline for submitting your donations is Friday, 12/20/2024. Prizes will be announced in my January 7, 2025 newsletter. You must be a subscriber of this newsletter to win.

Submit Your Giveaway for Good Donation

Over the years, you’ve been incredibly generous, and I want to thank you in advance for continuing to lean into your abundance, being the light the world needs, and writing stories that change the world.

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