From Sh!tshow To Afterglow, published July 2020

The new book from Offbeat Bride author Ariel Meadow Stallings is here to hold your hand while you cry, and then help you put your life back together. Filled with raw, personal stories and practical, research-backed advice, From Sh!tshow To Afterglow will help you overcome personal trauma through creative self-development.

“Yeah, Totally!”: Don’t confuse interest with commitment

When you’re doing something big and interesting (like, oh, say, organizing an online community) and are looking for people to help, please, for the love of niches and all that matters to you, understand that not all yeah totallys are created equal…

Identity policing is not a game we play

We’re going to bring back our atrophied “noteworthy comment” category to share a comment that came in this week. This comment was deleted, and after you hear this bunny act it out, we think you’ll understand why…

Teach me to be AWESOME: How to write a DIY tutorial

At the Empire, we love to see how you do all the amazing things you do. Reader DIY submissions show us so much! We can all learn to cook vegan bacon cheeseburgers, turn coffee tables into chalkboard canvases, and make our own wax seals from buttons. Our DIY archives have a big bright rainbow of how-to-DIY posts, but many of us are hungry, like some kind of craft-zombies, for MOAR BRAINS… err…. MOAR DIYs!

Here’s the trick: sometimes we need just a bit of help teaching each other how to do the awesome things we do ourselves. Framing the steps into a process we can repeat with huge success is easy if we all put our teacher hats on. Here’s a great outline for teaching us all how to be YOUR kind of awesome – how to write a DIY tutorial.