We Like to Rock the Party
Posted by David Duhr in 
Our local lovable literary journal American Short Fiction is holding its next launch party right here at WriteByNight HQ, and your presence is expected. Nay, required! Not that any local WBNer in his/her right mind would want to miss a night of music, readings, and beer. And beer. And beer.
And shorts. No shorts, no service.
Below is ASF‘s press release for the event. Don’t let us down, WriteByNighters; we expect you all to show up in full force and represent!
We also expect you to tell all your friends (real and Facebook), all your Twitter followers, everyone in your address book, and everyone in the phone book. read more
Pretty Lady on Delta Flight Mw4
Today we offer a guest post from Rebecca Beckum, who thinks more SEO writers should take after Craigslist Missed Connections.
I enjoy spending my mornings with a good cup of coffee (all right several) and the Craigslist Missed Connections. It is a guilty pleasure, but everyone has their lame rituals and reading about people searching for someone is mine. I like the idea that some of these connections never spoke to each other but rather just exchanged brief glances and felt a protracted longing to see this person again. I scan the lists from various cities and open the posts with the most captivating headlines, as there are hundreds posted daily from people that missed connections at nondescript venues across the globe.
I relate this idea to one of the key points of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We read and listen to headlines in countless sessions all day long. Through the dying media we see this in newspapers, news on TV, commercials, billboards, magazine headlines at the checkout of the grocery store and so forth; but predominantly we are briefed and thus influenced by the Internet where innumerable headlines encourage us to hit their site and read further. Not unlike one-liners from great movies that we will never disregard; when writing for the Internet and in general, a writer has to choose his words wisely. read more
Hell is Other People — And Adverbs
In our latest PsycheTruth video, I cover Stephen King’s On Writing, which is quite possibly our favorite writing guide. Say what you will about King–but the dude can flat-out write, and this book is both entertaining and useful.
The first half of the book covers the struggle-filled early years of his career, before he started selling millions and millions (and millions) of books, many of which then became horrible, horrible (horrible) movies.
The second half is where you’ll find all the writing-related goodies, including King’s ideas of what should go into a writer’s “toolbox.” read more
Publishing Short Works
In 1984 as I read The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach, I was astonished by one passage. The author recounted how he took a creative writing class in high school; the teacher declared he would only award a grade of A if a student published a piece they had written during the semester. Bach was elated when he presented the teacher a copy of the Sunday supplement to the newspaper which included an article he had written.
I’ve carried that concept in mind for years, and it seems to be a valid benchmark. The acid test for a writer is publication–if I have writing talent, it is to be shared. There is a declarative quality about having your writing appear in print. However, for a long work such as a novel or memoir, there is a much longer process involved in reaching publication. But shorter pieces can be published much more quickly, there are significant advantages to doing so–and several ways to get there. read more
How to Write a Research Paper
We only received one Dear WBN question this week, and it was a query we’d already kinda answered. Is that it, guys? A few weeks’ worth of posts and we’ve covered every topic you’re curious about? I hope not, because it’s been a fun feature for us. Email me your questions, and hopefully we’ll bring it back next week.
[Insert incredibly smooth transition here.]
In one of our recent videos, posted to our YouTube channel, Justine laid down some easy-to-follow strategies for writing research papers. And she should know–I’ve never met someone who has written or edited as many research papers as our fearless leader.
The advice is pretty simple: read more
Write Your Own Damn Words
So you want to quote song lyrics in your book?
If you were a friend, this conversation would go differently, but I believe the outcome would remain the same as if you were my worst enemy: You would ignore everything I write here.
First, a little known fact (apparently): If you quote any recognizable portion of a copyrighted composition, then you need to obtain permission from the copyright owners or their representatives (not the songwriters themselves and absolutely not the performers). Even if that recognizable portion is just a part of a single line.
Before you even think of uttering the words “fair use,” read more
How to Beat Writer’s Block Like Austin Kleon
A few months ago I met Austin Kleon at the Good Knight, across from WBN HQ, and asked him a few questions about his book, Newspaper Blackout. The interview turned into this feature on Fringe.
It was an enjoyable chat, even though I had to condense the 11,000-word discussion into a 2,000-word Q&A. What most caught my attention was that Kleon stumbled upon his form while horsing around during a bout of writer’s block. He was sitting at the kitchen table one morning trying to work on some short fiction, but the words just would not come; so instead, he grabbed a recent New York Times and a Sharpie and started blacking out words, sentences, and then entire paragraphs. Soon enough, he began to envision poetry in these blacked-out articles.
The result? read more
On Writing … By Someone Who Doesn’t
Image courtesy of Jonno Witts.
Instead of actually writing on my blog today, I’m going to Write Here (see what I did there?) about how hard it is to write on my blog. See, I have it pretty easy. <— These two lines have been sitting here alone for 10 minutes. During that time I’ve stared at the screen, eaten half a pint of ice cream (Chocolate Fudge Brownie), and answered a few tweets. This is why it’s hard to write on my blog, I guess. Because it’s hard for me to write anything, anywhere. read more
Radio Publicity For an Author
In August 2008 I published my first memoir, Freedom’s Just Another Word, and it was time to get the word out about my book. I did what I usually do – I went to the library and did some homework on publicity. Sure, we’d all love to be on Oprah, and we’d all love to win the lottery, and the odds on both are about the same. My research confirmed that TV was hard to get and came along rarely.
So I looked at radio. There were a lot of advantages to it. You could do an interview from home, and there was potential for a lot of exposure. How to get a radio interview? As I studied, there were a lot of options suggested. You could take out an ad in a magazine read by the industry, or you could hire a service to book interviews for you. I gave them all a serious look.
Then my first radio interview happened by surprise. read more
Literary Agents and Online Workshops
Dear WBN:
How important is it to have an agent if I want to publish a book? What does an agent do I can’t do myself?
Alice H.
Bastrop, TX
JG: It’s important and it’s not. (Don’t you just love these wishy-washy answers? I know I do.) It’s important to have an agent if you are hell-bent on selling your book to a well-known publishing house. Some examples of publishing giants include HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, Little, Brown—that’s “Little, Brown,” not “Little” [comma] “Brown.” Glad we cleared that up. The reason is that most of the biggies don’t accept unsolicited submissions, meaning that any manuscripts that reach them from an author directly rather than an agent on behalf of an author will be thrown in the garbage immediately, no questions asked. In short, agents can get you in the door.
Running From Rejection
As I talked about on Monday and Tuesday, the submission process has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years. Very few publications accept hard copy submissions anymore, and even fewer send rejection slips through the mail. All this talk (“talk?” Let’s face it; internal monologue barfed into a series of blog posts) about rejection slips has reminded me about a piece from my archives, which I wrote shortly after moving to Florida from Boston; so sometime around June/July of the year 1 P.W.B.N. (Pre-WBN). It’s a silly, now-mostly obsolete little essay which was originally posted on The Review Review, but has since disappeared. I’ve made a minor edit or two where necessary.
Running From Rejection
We’re all well-versed in how to obtain rejection slips—submit story, attach SASE, wait anywhere between one and infinity months. Sometimes they feel like email auto-responders, sent the moment a magazine receives your work. Other times it seems like they’ll never come … days, weeks, months pass, you hit the one-year mark, and you’re certain that the editors are giving your piece heavy consideration, championing it in meetings, paving its way for a Pushcart Prize or inclusion in Best American. Then your slip comes, bearing no personalized marks whatsoever, and you realize that you were just fooling yourself, that the journal probably just has one mother of a slush pile, and that the mother likely gave birth to a gaggle of baby slush piles, and in one of these your manuscript has been buried for the past 12+ months, gasping for air, desperate for its turn to suckle at the teat of rejection.
The Meet of My Thighs Book Launch Party
On May 14th, Austin poet Harmony Eichsteadt will be holding a launch party for her new collection, The Meet of My Thighs. WBN friend David Kassin Fried will be among the readers at the party (details of which can be seen here or here), and recently reviewed the book on his blog, The Writer’s Review. With David’s permission, I am reprinting his review below, followed by a poem from the book, which Harmony was kind enough to let us reprint.
The Meet of My Thighs
Harmony Eichsteadt is the kind of woman most men dream of. Or at least most men like me.
A self-described sex-positive feminist, she’s a fan of Neil Strauss, is writing a book–from the woman’s perspective–on how to be an effective pick up artist, and in a few weeks will be performing a strip-tease at her book-launch party as punishment for failing, on one particularly day, to write for an hour. (You can thank yours truly for suggesting the punishment.)
Top 5 Reasons Why I Miss Submitting By Mail
Yesterday I listed five reasons I miss getting rejection slips in the mail. For today I promised five reasons why I miss submitting hard copies of manuscripts, or five reasons why I miss the TV show Hard Copy; and the very last thing in the world I would want to be considered is a breaker of blogged promises.
Hard Copy has been off the air for over ten years now, and Gmail and Submishmash have almost totally replaced mailing addresses in submission guidelines. Saves trees, saves stamps, saves time. But does it save our souls? (What?!)
Here are the top five reasons why I miss submitting hard copies of my writing, and why I miss the TV show Hard Copy:
read more
Top 5 Reasons Why I Miss Rejection Slips
Rejection Slip Collage
Last week I had the following Twitter conversation (if one back-and-forth can equal a conversation) with Steve Himmer, author of The Bee-Loud Glade:
Write_By_Night: Does anyone else miss getting rejection slips in the mail, instead of over email?
SteveHimmer: No, because with email I can delete and move on. Paper stares me down until the next trash day.
Write_By_Night: True enough. But I always felt a tingle seeing that envelope in the mail. Never has an email given me a tingle. I like tingles.
These days, fewer and fewer publications accept hard-copy submissions, and even fewer send rejection slips via mail. Remember rejection slips, writers? How your 5,000 words of sparkling narrative prose was reduced to 5″ x 3″ pieces of stern rebuke? I’ve thought about it some more since that silly Tweet (redundant?), and you know what? I actually do miss getting rejection slips in the mail. And I do miss mailing hard copies of stories.
More Twitter, YouTube, and a Minor Complaint
Dear WBN:
Your post on who to follow on Twitter was okay, but in a future post can you tell us why it’s important for a writer to have a Twitter page? Because I hear all sorts of good and bad about Twitter, and it seems like maybe it’s a waste of time.
Alice F.
Enid, OK
DD: Thanks for writing, Alice. I’m glad you found my post to be so adequate (insert smiley-face emoticon here to show that I’m being sarcastic, but in a cute, pleasant way).
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