When Traveling | Guest Post By Rachel

ten things to do while traveling.

1. Keep your eyes, heart, mind open.
2. Love the people even if they’re different.
3. Recognize the humanity in all of us.
4. Absorb & discern.
5. Put the filter on your Instagram pictures, but not on the way you view things or how you know God views things. It is what it is. And it isn’t what it isn’t.
6. Listen to the sounds of the city.
7. Listen to songs while traveling or walking around. They’ll help you remember things, later on, that you wouldn’t normally remember.
8. Breathe.
9. Learn.
10. On the ride home? And after you get back? Remember. Remember what it felt like to be walking around the haze-covered streets with multitudes of other people you’ll never meet, remember what it felt like to eat freshly fried fish at high noon with sweat on your skin and salt on your lips, remember what it felt like to sit quietly in the subway and watch everyone’s gazes follow each other, then quickly jerk away when eye contact was made. We shy away from connection; why do we do that?

Traveling is more than the place. It’s more than you experiencing the place. To be able to recognize our differences and see the evolution of cultures and yet still be able to know that, underneath, we’re all human?

That’s special. So keep it.

Rachel | Silver Mess | Instagram

The First Issue of Paper Comets

Hi! I am extremely excited to introduce to you all a collaborative project that we have been working on for the past several months: the zine, Paper Comets!

The history about Paper Comets and Freckled Minds is this: both of the founders rarely ever interacted in the blogging world, except for the occasional comments every once in awhile. One lazy summer day, the idea of creating a yearbook anthology sort of thing for the 2016 blogging community strolled into Morning's mind, around the same time Ava brainstormed an idea for creating a community zine. The two emailed each other at around the same time on the exact same day.

Great minds think alike, huh?

Both founders decided to collaborate together to create a creative hub community, known as Freckled Minds, and since both of us each wanted to do our own little thing, we both created our own zines: Ava's zine is Sacred Zine Club (publish date to be determined), focused more towards the visual arts aspect, while Morning's would mainly overlook Paper Comets, the zine focused more towards the word-writing aspect and the idea of artistic vision.

For Paper Comets, roughly fifteen bloggers gathered together to share their artistic talents, and now, we are ready to reveal the final product that has been in the works for over fifteen months! 

Our theme for our first issue was words: words that we felt were important to us. Tell us what you all think! We're constantly looking for contributors, both in the zine and the Freckled Minds site, so if you are a female creative mind over the age of fourteen, looking for a platform to cultivate your personal artistic voice, this is a platform that can potentially bring you out to a larger audience! We're expanding out to more electronic mediums: songwriting and film making are a few to name. If you wouldn't mind, could you possibly provide us feedback using the form below? And if you would like to contribute, visit the link here.


We hope you enjoy the first issue of Paper Comets (and possibly we will see you contribute soon)!

FM Update, Fall 2016

We are now accepting contributor forms for the winter zines (themes and more info coming soon)!!

Are you or your friends young creative teenagers yearning to seek a platform to allow your artistic talent to shine? Then you've come by the right place! 

If you're within the age range of fourteen to post-college graduate, then fill out a contributor form to find out how you can be a part of our neat-o projects. 

Too busy to commit? Don't worry, we have a whole list of other options:

1) Interact with us on social media. We're available on Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Tag photos or tweets of your artistic projects or other activities that you have been up to recently, using #FreckledMinds, and your photo may just be featured on our social medias for the weekend! You can also submit photos to us via our email, freckledminds[at]gmail[dot]com to potentially have your photos incorporated into future zine issues!

2) Guest post. Guest posts can be written on virtually any subject, although we do have a certain set of general guidelines listed here. We accept any medium: art, writing, collages, even videos: i.e. beat poetry, song covers, short films, and dances! For inquires, please email us with the subject line, "Freckled Minds Guest Post."

3) Name an artist. At Freckled Minds, we are hoping to expand outside of the US blogging community and meet more individuals from various countries and walks of life, such as fellow songwriters, video producers, prose speakers, landscape photographers-- and we'd like for them to meet you to and potentially inspire all of us! If you have a friend within any of these fields of interests, invite them over to see Freckled Minds.

4) Suggest ideas. Ideas and imagination are both the epitome for creative minds. Have an idea on a social media theme or a post series we could do? Share it with us via our email, using the subject line, "Suggestions."

We can't wait to meet you!

Morning & Ava

Ps. We have a new editor, Nicole! She will now be in charge of organizing and editing all non-accouncment posts. :)