Food Confetti: Scoops Parlor: Memphis Black Restaurant Week 2017

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Husband and wife team, QuaSheba Jones-Callicutt and Terrance Callicutt, are the owners of this unique place in in the city of Memphis, TN located at 106 GE Patterson Ave. I visited them next on my tour for Memphis Black Restaurant Week. The diversity of African American culinary is extraordinary and reaches beyond stereotypes. At Scoops the gelato is locally made! I had the salted caramel gelato and it was the best I’d ever had. It is the perfection of salty and sweet! I find the salty caramel mix either too salty or too sweet but this was perfection. I had the Main Street Crepe. Savory savory savory… and my spinach salad was fresh. Service here was excellent. I definitely have found a new lunch and gelato spot.

~Nikki

Just Keep Writing/Creating/Dreaming

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As a writer and an author, if I were to be honest with you (which I choose to do because why not?), being a babe in this industry can be frustrating, confusing, challenging, discouraging, and frightening. Literally, for those of us who are starving artists and care more about the art than being fed at times, until you hear the growl in your belly or notice the negative sign in your bank account. We work, we hustle, we do whatever we can to produce the best work possible. Many of us don’t have big bank accounts to match our big dreams. At least, not yet. However, we will save, we will sell, we will do whatever it takes to see the pieces of works manifest.

I have two novels I need edited. I have learned the hard way, the hard headed way, I cannot edit my own books. So as I vet our editors, I also vet out pricing. In average I need about $350 per book for the editorial services I desire. I do some soft editing, writers organization and consulting, book formations (manuscripting) and etc. for a heavily discounted price. I’m like the blue collar consultant (lol). Right now my two novels are on soft release on amazon. Before I go full fledge promotion, I want them to be the best they can be grammatically. I have received amazing feedback and I know I have the gift.

I wanted to encourage some writers, artists, creators today because I had that tiny feeling that “things are not going my way as easily as I had planned! Not as quickly as I want them to!” When deep down inside you know this is like the artist “right of passage.” Your initiation into the creative world.

JUST KEEP CREATING! JUST KEEP SAVING YOUR COINS! JUST KEEP WRITING! KEEP COOKING! KEEP PAINTING! AND NOW I SHALL BREAK OUT INTO THE CHORUS: “DON’T STOP!…BELIEVIN! DON’T STOP! BELIEVIN!” #JOURNEY Sing along everybody!!!

 

~Nikki

Creative Comrades: ON YOUR MARKS

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It’s the quiet thought that floats around in the back of your mind as you create your work of art, your book, or your music. I don’t know where you may have gotten it from, television, some disparaging soul, or authority figure. You know “You can’t make a living being an artist” some doubtful person poured into your subconscious. When I hear some sort of doubt rise in the back of my mind about being creative as an artists or writer, I always think about if I am being creative ONLY for an income. No, I am not. I am being creative because its who I am and I can not separate that from my being.

If you have hidden your creativity and stuffed it somewhere in the closet  of your heart, because of what someone thought or of a bad experience, you are not as happy as you are pretending to be. So, I am here to encourage you today with the TRUTH and that is “YOU DO NOT NEED ANYBODY’S PERMISSION TO LIVE A CREATIVE LIFE”- ELIZABETH GILBERT