All the kids came over for Father’s Day with the exception of Zach. We are going to be in Port Charlotte this week for a dentist appointment so we’ll be celebrating Father’s Day with him then. Justin cooked burgers for us that consisted of Pork Belly fried in Duck Fat and served over ground beef and caramelized onions. It was DELICIOUS! Sssshhh! Don’t tell our cardiologist!
Ah, the large POD publishers will say just about anything to get your money, including offering ridiculous sales that look like good deals…until you do the math.
Letters will return next week.
Without being cheesy or over-the-top, you can tactfully use current events to sell your story. In fact, many authors get their book ideas by reading the paper.
A (local) man decided to do an anthology with the proceeds going to a charity. I submitted a poem and it was accepted with a small, simple contract offered. Everything was fine until the anthology came out and the man had listed himself and his wife as the authors of the book. Now, individual poems were listed by author but the cover / title page and back of title page showed the couple as authors.
One of the reasons I am employed as a writer is because I talk to people — in the check-out line, the doctor’s office, the vet, the post office, the nail salon, to name a few — because I want people to know who I am and what I do, just in case they’re ever in need of one. How often have you been at a party to hear someone bellow, “Is there a writer in the house?” How about never? Gab, and you shall be rewarded. It doesn’t pay to be shy under any circumstances.
We had a humdinger of a storm last weekend. We were first alerted when the news flashed a warning that there was a waterspout offshore and that the front of the storm would arrive in exactly 17 minutes. After chuckling about our first waterspout, we put made sure everything was secure outside and then I put helmets on Max and Mason and gave one to Frank (age 19) in case he needed one, too. Laugh all you want but I keep their bike helmets handy after reading THIS STORY.
For the past six weeks, we’ve spent every spare moment judging the hundreds of entries submitted for the Spring, 2012 24-Hour Short Story Contest. In case you’re not familiar with our quarterly contest, this is how it works. On the date of the contest, at start-time, we send out the topic for that specific contest to all registered entrants, while also posting it online. Entrants then have 24 hours to write and submit their stories. The stories “must deal with the topic in some way to qualify” and they must not exceed the pre-assigned word count.
After reading the entries for each contest, we can see how difficult it is to come up with a unique plot when working with an assigned topic. But, inevitably, a few writers do manage to successfully break away from the pack.
So, today, taste the salt on your lips and feel the sun baking your skin…
I am not a rock star. And yet, when Examiner.com hired me in their first wave a few years back, that’s what they promised. What I was, I think, was a shill. After a couple of years, and with no way to even review horrific ad hominem attacks before they were appended to one’s columns–and hard on the heels of an Examiner.com editor bowing to pressure from a single reader who didn’t like something I had written and telling me to write otherwise–I quit. I was writing on ethics, by the way, and the editor in question was acting, in my opinion, highly unethically, especially for a so-called news outlet.
Two years ago, I quit my full-time job as a marketing professional to follow my dream and become a freelance writer. Eager to escape the gray cubicle walls that confined me, I conjured images of myself lounging on the sofa in my pajamas, my laptop resting on my knees as I methodically tapped out story after story. I enjoyed my new wardrobe – happy to have ditched the high-heels and pencil skirts – and relished the freedom to make my own schedule, but was shocked to find that I missed the office. Well, not the office exactly, but the daily jaunts to the coffee shop downstairs, chatting with co-workers in the office kitchen and team meetings that I’d previously found tedious and futile that now seemed welcome distractions to the loneliness I faced in my new life as a writer.
