Random November Info

So, hopeful all of us are surviving our Novembers, and occasionally finding some time to sit down and write a bit (or more than a bit in some cases). I just wanted to do a quick post with the website that Varley O’Connor suggested for finding venues for writing:

www.newpages.com

I would also suggest checking out various genre organizations. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have information about legitimate venues for their genres at:

http://www.sfwa.org/

That’s it for now. I still have Marybeth’s list of places for Creative Non-Fiction venues and I will try to post some of those tonight or tomorrow.

Write!

A Challenge!

Just a quick note here. More updates to follow, I promise.

We have a challenge for the Writer’s Bloc next week: Write something you would not normally write. It can be short, a couple paragraphs or a poem, but use a tone, theme, character that is as out of your normal writing comfort zone as possible.

If you usually write rhymed poetry, go unrhymed. Switch out your concreteness for the abstract or vice-versa. Never written about the undead? Give it a shot. No happy endings? Now is the time. Have fun with it.

Work on your November goals.

Write and continue awesome!

Reminders, More Speakers and November Madness

We are going to have people sign up for spots for the Crash Course in Play Writing Workshop. We will have a sign up sheet posted in the Undergraduate Office (where we met). We will hopefully have a more specific itinerary for that Workshop soon.

Next week Club English will have a visitor coming to talk about applying to grad school; I think most of our members are also part of Club English, but just in case…

On October 27th, during the regular meeting time, Professor O’Connor and Professor Seguin will be coming to talk to us about publishing. Both of them are published authors.

We are starting to compile a list of places that accept submissions for various kinds of prose and poetry. Keep looking around, and bring any new venues you find to the meeting. Right now it looks like we will be producing a digital and a hardcopy version of this.

For the next meeting, please bring any new places that accept submissions! We will be doing another writing exercise, and hopefully brain storming about November projects. See you all next Tuesday! Thanks to everyone who keeps showing up!

Coming soon: publication listings and the results of exquiste corpse.

Write!

Speakers, Playwriting, Submissions

We are going to be having some speakers in the next few weeks. Hopefully an advertising professional, a script writer (separate from our playwriting workshop), a published author and professor and high school English teachers (in conjunction with Club English). Below is partly a recap, partly new. Check out the next two paragraphs for what is going on next week, and the fourth down for writing contest. Down at the very end is a secret :) ...

Thanks to everyone who showed up last meeting and double to anyone who read poetry! For the next meeting (October 6th, 6pm in 204 Satterfield) I am hoping to do some writing exercises, so that we start producing some new material. If you want to bring something you have already written, please make it short (twitter fiction, weird tales, six word stories, poetry, etc…).

For this meeting and the next one (October 13th, same time, same place) we will also be discussing places to publish, so start looking now for venues that publish whatever it is you write. If you are having trouble take a look at the Writer’s Market (a large book found in the library).

Nanoism (a site that publishes twitter fiction) is taking submissions for serials (five twitter fictions, that each stand alone, but also form a coherent story). Nanoism publishes at professional rates and they take all genres. It is a great place to test the water - my rejection letter was very nice :)

Here is the site with rules for serials.
And here is the site (again) for anyone who just wants to take a look.

We are also planning a CRASH WORKSHOP IN PLAYWRITING. This is for people who do not normally write plays. It is meant to be an introduction, so if it is a new genre to you, come and explore it! (yes, I know that is corny, but hopefully you get the idea). For anyone who already does write plays, come and help the rest of us! This Workshop will be on November 7th (a Saturday) on the 4th floor of the library in the Writing Commons from 10am-1pm. Please shoot me an email if you are interested -- the gentleman who is going to run this workshop is excited about it, so I would like to give him an idea of how many people will be there. (or, it would be nice if there were people there). So far I have one response.

Finally I hope that a few people got a submission into the national writing gallery. If not I think it is time we started talking about submissions, as well as our November projects. Hopefully the next two meetings will get us geared up for both.

The secret word is 'quixotic'.

Hope to see some of you in Cleveland tomorrow for the Gaiman talk and the rest of you on Tuesday. Remember: bring paper, pencil and publication research.

Write!

Poetry for you and me!

Our next meeting will be on September 29th at 6pm and we'll be focusing on poetry. Bring in one poem by a published writer that you especially like. Also, bring in a poem that you've written. It can be an older poem, if you don't feel like writing something new. If you'd like to write something this week, here are two different prompts:

- Write your poem with the aim of imitating an aspect of a published poem (hopefully the one you'll bring with you) that you particularly like. You can choose to imitate the structure, diction, rhyme scheme, subject matter, whatever you like. You can do either an indirect take off on the poem or a copy change.

- Write a poem that focuses on some aspect of popular culture. Movies, TV, celebrity culture, video games, magazines, genre or cult media, the Internet... seriously, anything. Here is an example: Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!] by Frank O'Hara. (There's no need to imitate this example, I just wanted to show you one direction this sort of thing could take.)

Some good websites for poetry are:

Poets.org
Plagiarist.com
Poetry 180

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment here or email either of us!

Also a reminder: if you are interested in seeing Neil Gaiman in Cleveland on October 4th at 2 pm, let either Hanna or myself know a.s.a.p.!

Really Short Fiction Links

Okay, I hope everyone is excited for our first ever Writing Workshop (10:00 am on the 4^th floor of the Library (the Writing Commons) on Saturday, September 19^th). Bring food if you can. Bring writing (a short story, a chapter, 5-6 poems), and try to bring copies (around 10 should work). I’ll work on doing this through the department in the future. If you need me to print them send them to me by no later than Friday night; everyone should have my email.

Here are the links that I said I would put up:

Weird Tales – a magazine, which is sponsoring a very specific kind of short story: One minute Weird Tales. Look under latest videos on their home page.

http://www.weirdtales.net

Nanoed – A Twitter-zine (fiction up to 140 characters)

http://twitter.com/nanoed

This one is their submissions page:

http://nanoism.net/

Thaumatrope – Another Twitter-zine (see above)

http://twitter.com/thaumatrope

Flash Fiction Online – Short stories of any genre in under 1,000 words

http://www.flashfictiononline.com

Brain Harvest – Weird Science Fiction and Fantasy in under 750 words.

http://www.brainharvestmag.com

For the next meeting, Tuesday September 22^nd at 6:00 in Satterfield 204, bring a Twitter fiction (a short story in under 140 characters). Examples can be found at two of the links above. Takes some time to look around these sites. All except Weird Tales are fairly new venues, they all have their submission guidelines and all of them have very short fiction, so it won’t take too much time.

I am also going to include a link to the writing podcast I listen to. It’s done by three successful authors and while they write genre fiction, I think it could be very useful to everyone. Here is Writing Excuses:

http://www.writingexcuses.com

Let me know if I have forgotten anything. Hope to see all of you Saturday!

Some online resources.

I'm sure everyone is getting busier as classes start to pick up, but one of the goals of the Writer's Bloc is to get you to turn out some new writing even though things may be busy.

The thing is that oftentimes it's not just writing that's difficult--it's getting an idea in the first place. Even with a prompt, an idea may not immediately present itself to you. One of the solutions the Internet has given us is: the generator.

There are lots of generators to be found out there, and some are better than others. You can have plot, character, name, and setting generators, as well as those that serve even more specialized needs. Seventh Sanctum is an extensive collection of generators focusing on a number of different genres and media. Their writing generators are probably where you'll want to start if you're looking for inspiration, but the entire site is fun to play around with. Don't forget to check out the list of "other generators" on the right hand side, since they are links to other useful generators that are listed off-site.

Another generator I'm fond of is the Random Name Generator, which is a handy tool for when you need a name for a character.

A bit of a different resource you might want to peruse is the list of Common Errors in English. Even English majors who think they know it all will find something they do on this list, and it's alphabetized for easy searching.

Finally, for people who like to write about crime, there's The Writer's Medical and Forensic Lab. I have yet to actually give this site more than a cursory browse, so I'd be interested to see what other people thought of it. It certainly looks helpful, at least.

So as always, happy writing and hope to see you at the meeting tomorrow!

Genre Graph

Okay, so one more thing. Here is the beginning of our genre graph. It is far from extensive, so put comments up on what you would like added and I will attempt to update it (assuming my computer and I agree).

While no story will fit perfectly into one of these boxes, it is important to have an idea of the vocabulary so that we can describe our writing. Cheers.

Workshops, Writing Gallery and More

Thanks to everyone who showed up last night! We have a wide range of topics and styles in writing, and we proved by running a little long that we can all talk about writing. For those of you who couldn’t be there we did some workshopping and talked about genre.

Yesterday I received more information on the Writing Center’s plans to contribute to the National Gallery and the National Day of Writing. Below is what I received:

The Kent State University Writing Commons is please to be the official host of the local gallery of the National Gallery of Writing (http://galleryofwriting.org/). The National Gallery of Writing’s purpose is to feature compositions from across the country and abroad starting on the National Day on Writing (October 20, 2009) through June 2010. Composition is defined as those documents people compose (writing, photography, videos, etc). The gallery will showcase what is meaningful to the individuals who submit their work.

To prepare our local gallery for the national launch, we are hosting a “1 Month to Win” contest where students and faculty can submit a composition to the “Kent State University Gallery of Literacy” gallery between now and October 1, 2009. Those who submit a composition will automatically be entered to win a “Mid-Semester Survival Kit.” The kit, a $75 value, feature items for energy, entertainment, studying, and even hygiene. The kit is on display near the elevators on the first floor of the library.

So start looking through your writing for something you would like to submit.

We also discussed hosting a Saturday Workshop and decided that sooner rather than later was good. So our first Workshop will be on Saturday September 19th at 10:00am in the Writing Commons in the Library on the 4th floor. Bring a longer piece of writing (not too long – remember that everyone else wants to read too) and perhaps something to munch on? Here are a list of suggestions, use the comments to claim what you would like to bring:

· Orange juice
· Coffee
· Paper cups
· Any other random breakfast food

I’ll bring donuts.

For everyone who is just scanning this I repeat:

SATURDAY WRITING WORKSHOP!!!
SEPT. 19th , 10:00am at the Writing Commons on the 4th Floor of the Library!

For the next meeting, Tuesday September 15th at 6:00pm in 204 Satterfield, try to write something new. Remember what I said about flash fiction – write a story that is 1000 words long or go with twitter fiction – 140 characters. Write the beginning of a story. Write something.

If you would like to work from a prompt, then here you go:

If you want to write fiction, take inspiration from a favorite line from a poem or song. If you want to write a poem, take inspiration from a piece of fiction.

If everyone is having trouble finding the time to write, then we may focus on brainstorming and taking some time during the meeting to write. I know everyone is busy, but part of the point of this is cultivating the habit of writing.

Right. I have rambled long enough. Good day Comrades. Write!

Hello everyone! Welcome to the Writer’s Bloc Blog!

I wanted to post a couple of links to some of the projects we talked about at the meeting:

• The National Writing Gallery – http://www.galleryofwriting.org/
  
• National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) – http://www.nanowrimo.org/
  
• The Cleveland Library Reader’s and Writers Series (or “Yay! Neil Gaiman is coming to Cleveland!”) - http://writersandreaders.cpl.org/schedule.html
  

And here again is what you will want to bring to the next meeting:

For the next meeting please bring a couple pages of writing. These can be excerpts from longer pieces or stand alone flash fiction. Try to bring something you have worked on recently (over the summer or last semester); also try to keep in mind what you are trying to do with the piece. The purpose will be to get to know everyone’s style and genre. Keep it around 1000 words max.

If you have not been writing recently (or don’t have anything at hand that you think is appropriate) then write 500-1000 words about a city. It can be any city, real or imagined, in any time, somewhere you’ve lived or only seen in pictures. Give it characters or just describe it.

If you decide to use the writing prompt try using the comments section below to bounce ideas around.

Finally here are the next two meeting times, both at 204 Satterfield:

Wednesday September 9th at 6:30pm
Tuesday September 15th at 6:00pm

Have a good week! Write!