Trust Your Voice

It’s amazing how I always want to make the same changes when revising my fiction. I red-penned my manuscript and am working on transferring the changes in Word. I just read a passage in my computer copy that didn’t sound quite right, so without looking at my red-penned revisions, I began re-writing. Afterward, I took a look to see what I originally intended on changing and it was almost exactly the same!

As I tell my students, I think your writing voice is loud and clear after you write for a while. You know what you want to say and how you want to say it. Trust your instincts and just write. Don’t worry about what’s selling or who’s buying. Good writing will always sell at some point. Just make sure you are writing the best possibly story and one day, you will see your book sitting on that shelf. Better yet, you will see it in front of an avid reader at the front counter waiting to be checked out!

April is National Poetry Month

I would be remiss if I didn’t remind everyone that April is National Poetry Month. Why would I be remiss? Because the first thing I ever published was a poem, well two poems actually. I heard through a friend that a local community college was looking for entries to publish in their literary journal. Since I started out writing poetry and had a slew of them in a binder, I decided to enter a few of my poems. Two of my poems were selected that year and then another two the following year when I was also asked to read at their publication luncheon.

Have you written any poems? Break all the rules and just write one. It doesn’t have to rhyme or have any certain form at all. Mine are all free-verse and were done for my own enjoyment. I think that is how I found my own style. By not caring what anyone thought, I wrote what I wanted and kept it to myself. While I am entering a book of poetry in The Fiction Project, I don’t expect to be a well-known poet any time in the near future. That quest is reserved for my novels. I just write poetry because I have something to say and that is sometimes the only way to get it out of my head an onto the page.

No one has to see your poetry, but I would love it if you posted it here. I’ll start you off with a simple poem I wrote as I approached a milestone birthday. Enjoy.

With Age

It comes with age

this peace,

this calm,

this knowing

I will be able

to slay

any dragon

who follows me home.

I know this

because

I have slain

dragons

before.

 

 

Ride the Coworking Wave

This looks like a great idea for freelancers or anyone who works from home. The Bourse is a new coworking space in New Haven. I’m interested in this type of place after learning about their existence sometime last year and visiting one in New York City.

At one of these coworking establishments, you get a place to work, usually free coffee, printing facilities and use of a copy machine, and you can even rent a conference room for meetings. They provide a variety of membership options, too, if you just want to try it out. If you just need to get out and work around other people, it seems like a perfect solution.

I would love to hear from you if you have tried one of these coworking places. Did you meet anyone interesting with whom to collaborate or did your creativity blossom around other entrepreneurial spirits? Let me know.

The Fiction Project

This is one of the coolest projects I have come across.

The Fiction Project promotes writing as art. Writers sign up and pay a $25 entry fee. In return, they get a Moleskin notebook to fill up with stories, poetry, or anything they want. Their only requirement is that the book end up being at least 51% filled with writing. That’s it!

After hearing about their Sketchbook Project last year, and thinking it was interesting from a scrapbooking perspective, I jumped into The Fiction Project this year. I plan on including some of my poetry after being inspired by one of their categories: Face in the crowd. So far, that’s the title of the poem, but we will see what it turns into.

Check out The Fiction Project at http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/fiction/features and let me know if you enter. Deadline for sign ups is March 31st with submission due May 1st, so enter soon.

 

 

Join me in the courtroom tomorrow

I have been fascinated with the fact that reporters are allowed to Tweet from inside the courtroom of the Petit case. Readers following #hayes (and other hash tags) have been privy to all of the testimony in 140 characters or less. I imagine it is much easier to experience this case from OUTside the courtroom and my heart goes out to the Petit family and friends.

Join me on Twitter tomorrow or via one of the many Twitter apps available.
@writerobrien

Writers don’t only write!

I laughed when I watched this. Too many writers think when the book is published, it is all over. It’s not! Every author should take advantage of every media outlet available to them. New venues should be explored and tweaked until you can use it to promote your book, then promote it already! You need to blow your own horn for a change. You want eyes on your books? You have to find those eyes and stick the book in front of them, one way or another. Find those ways and you will find your readers.

A literary gold mine is discovered

In Yiddish Author’s Papers, Potential Gold

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/books/18grade.html

I thought this was so interesting. This Yiddish author and lecturer, of whom I have never heard, died over 30 years ago. His name was Chaim Grade (gruh-DAY), and his wife refused to let anyone publish any of his work. In fact, she would not let anyone even examine his notes and papers! Grade was a learned person who survived the Holocaust and then wrote and lectured about it.

Now that Mrs. Grade has died, it’s open season. Since she died without a will and with no survivors, the Bronx public administrator is in charge of overseeing the estate. He has asked four organizations to determine the value of the writings as well as the manner in which they should be disposed. Here is a piece of the article naming the four:

The four are the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan; the New York Public Library; the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.; and Harvard University, through its Yiddish scholar, Ruth R. Wisse. Mrs. Grade blocked access to Grade’s papers by some of these very institutions, so there is a certain paradox in the idea that they might gain control of his work — and possibly unearth a never-published manuscript.

My writing students over the years have learned I have this first manuscript that sits in a drawer and will never be published. I keep it to remind me of how much I’ve learned about writing and publishing, and of how far I’ve come, quite frankly. I would hope that my work, though not scholarly by any means, will be read and enjoyed by others with the exception of this one crummy manuscript. All of my poetry, my journals, whatever I am working on at the time – all of it – should be read, examined and published if there is a market and someone may enjoy it. I’m not saying my work is anywhere in the range of Mr. Grade’s, but my point is that it was written to be read by people.

I just have to wonder what Mrs. Grade’s motivation was. Her husband had previously published, so she knew he wanted his work to be read. That’s where my ideas for possible motives ends. I cannot think of one reason why she would not open his work to scholars who might bring him a larger audience and, therefore, educate the world. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I would love to hear them.

This time it’s a non-paying Mommy magazine!

It doesn’t matter how long I work as a writer, and notice the word “work,” I will never understand how people can sleep with themselves at night when they don’t pay their writers. They produce publications with advertisers who pay and readers who subscribe for a fee, yet it is okay for them to accept words for these publications without paying the people who are providing their product.

This latest magazine was a parenting magazine specifically geared toward women who are moms and write about their mommy experiences. What?! The best part is that they charge for submissions! My first problem is with, of course, the publication. My second issue is with the writer. Do these women value their work so much that they willingly give it away for the joy of seeing their name in print along with one complimentary copy of the issue in which their work appears?

There are better ways of getting clips for your clip file, people. You can write for your local newspaper where your name will become known much faster, or write for an organization you believe in that does good things like feed the hungry or house the homeless. Working for free so that a magazine can reap the rewards of your labor is simply beyond me. It is reminiscent of the old sweatshops where the workers were paid peanuts while the garment factories profited. It did not matter how many hours the women worked or how many of them died due to illness and lack of food due to low wages. The factories could always find willing participants because they were desperate.

Are we that desperate? I most certainly am not. I value my work and therefore expect to be paid for the time it takes me to create the product that is going to make money for a magazine. Yes, sometimes when money is tight I work for a little less, but I never work for free. I am a writer by trade and anyone who gives away his or her articles is cheapening my trade, especially if that person is a mommy who writes.

I will not tell you which publication spurred this tirade, just rest assured they will not benefit from my experience until they do the right thing and pay their writers for the product that fills their pages. It would surely be no great loss for them if they knew this, but it is certainly my gain. There is one less magazine in the world profiting from this writer’s time and talent. If nothing else, it makes me feel better as I cash my checks from reputable publishers with integrity.

What’s wrong with having fun while working?

Why is it that I sometimes put off the fun stuff for the “gotta get it done” stuff? Is my life the sum total of what I accomplish in a day? That is twisted. My life should be about how many books I write during a lifetime or better yet, about how much I enjoy the process. After all, I am not following my own suggestion about enjoying the journey when I work my head off, am I?

I am going to make a concerted effort to make my life about the latter. Even if I accumulate 800 emails over a week of working on my latest novel, as I did last week, I will shrug it off and hit the delete key with more abandon. After all, I love writing my books so much so that it does not feel like work at all. This seems to be a problem for me, if it does not feel like work. That is sad. I mean I keep up with all of the email for the time when I am going to need the marketing avenues, when my next book comes out. The problem is there has to be a book in existence before it “comes out.” I have to write that book first, yes?

I have 1 ½ hours left before the children come home. The phone is ringing, but unless it is my husband or the school, it is going to be ignored, so don’t call me.

Don’t forget to enjoy the journey. I won’t either.