Writers On The Move

The Olympics and Writing

The Olympics and Writing
by Elysabeth Eldering

What do the Olympics and writing have to do with each other? I subscribe to a newsletter from Writer's Relief and this came in my email the other day, some inspiration on how the Olympics can help you in your writing career. The Olympics are about to wrap up for this year. The next Olympics will be the winter Olympics of 2014. Set your eye on the goal, focus and persevere and maybe by 2014 you will have reached gold (publication or the next chapter in your writing).

10 Things Olympians Can Teach Creative Writers

1. Focus is everything. (stay focused on the end goal and with all your hard work, you will achieve it)

2. When you hit a wall, push off it and get some new momentum. (this really says something about writer's block; find a different way to get whatever you are writing written)

3. The writing life is like the balance beam; you WILL fall off. Olympians get back up again (and again, and again, and again). (Writers don't fall off per se but we do have to keep reinventing the box or think outside the box)

4. You can’t get to the big leagues without putting in your time. Practice, train, get confident; then trust your talent and all your hard work to carry you through. (in other words, learn your craft, believe in yourself and work hard to get to the end goal)

5. When you’re competing at a high level, even the little things matter.

6. Listen to coaches you trust: Criticism isn’t personal when it’s productive.

7. Be so dedicated that dedication becomes habit, and the habit becomes who you are. Write regularly, read regularly, SUBMIT regularly.

8. Healthy competition will help you be the best you can be.

9. If you’re going to jump, jump as high as you can. If you’re going to swim, swim as hard as you can. If you’re going to write, write as hard and as intensely as you can.

10. Olympians don’t hesitate. They do not hoard their personal courage or save it for a rainy day. Every day, they give everything they have to give. Writers can too.

Whether you are writing for contests or for publication, remember that hard work, focus and perseverance will get you where you want to be with your writing. Don't give up on yourself. Hoping you all achieve your end goals and that you never give up. Keep reaching for the stars.

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Ms. Eldering is the award winning author of the Junior Geography Detective Squad (JGDS), 50-state, mystery, trivia series. Her stories "Train of Clues", "The Proposal" (available as an ebook), "Tulip Kiss" (available as an ebook), and "Butterfly Halves", all placed first, second, or runner up in various contests to include two for Armchair Interviews and two for Echelon Press (Fast and ... themed type contests). Her story "Bride-and-Seek" (available as an ebook) was selected for the South Carolina Writers' Workshop (SCWW) anthology, the Petigru Review. Ms. Eldering makes her home in upper state South Carolina and loves to travel, read, cross stitch and crochet. When she's not busy with teenaged children still at home, working her full-time job as a medical transcriptionist or participating in virtual classroom visits, she can be found at various homeschool or book events promoting her writing.

You can find out more from Elysabeth and her writing/JGDS series at the following places:
Elysabeth's Writing Emporium blog
Elysabeth's author website
JGDS series blog
JGDS series website

Writing Habit & Tips with Maggie Lyons

I’ve been reading about the writing habits of famous authors and feeling amazingly out of it because I don’t have any extraordinary or weird practices. All I do to warm up is jump on a vine and swing across the creek outside my house while scoffing down a blood pudding. Okay, I know some may think the blood pudding a bit weird, but in Britain, where I was born, this is standard fare—well, almost. At least it’s not a drug like the Benzedrine and Seconal W. H. Auden is said to have swallowed regularly during his most productive phase, along with vodka when the drugs woke him up at night. And while we’re on this subject, the literary landscape is replete with druggie writers from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her opium to Jean-Paul Sartre and his amphetamines, which he claimed helped him to think faster. Jack Kerouac’s amphetamine binges would last for days and resulted in his famous scroll of 120 feet of taped sheets of paper that he constantly typed until he had completed On the Road.

And drugs are the least surprising of some writer’s habits. Henrik Ibsen hung a portrait of his rival August Strindberg on his wall to push himself to the limit in his writing. John Cheever admitted to writing many of his stories in his skivvies. Marcel Proust wrote in bed in a windowless room lined with cork. Capote claimed he couldn’t think unless he wrote—initially in longhand—lying down, puffing a cigarette and sipping a coffee. Vladimir Nabokov wrote most of his novels on 3 x 5-inch cards, and he stood up to do it, as did Hemingway. Gertrude Stein found poetic inspiration sitting in her parked Ford.

My writing habits can’t compete with all that weirdness—apart from my warm-ups on the hanging vine, that is. I sit at a desk in a room with windows to tap my computer keyboard as I drink ginger tea. When my prose begins to overwhelm me, I grab a handy tissue. If that doesn’t work, I go for a quiet walk down a rural lane, and if that doesn’t work, I leave the country.

Writing habits can be amazingly different for each individual, but one habit that appears to be common to all successful writers is practice. Talent is 10 percent inclination and 90 percent hard work. That goes for any skill. I taught piano for years, and told my students that daily practice was the key, even if it was for ten minutes only. For writers there’s another component to practice. You not only have to devote as much time as possible to writing, you have to feed your creative neurons by reading the best authors as often as you can. And you can make that as creative a habit as writing—sitting in your clunker waiting for the traffic to move, standing up in your skivvies in front of a portrait of your archrival … you get the idea.

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Maggie Lyons is a writer and editor who was born in Wales and crossed the pond to Virginia. With no regard for the well-being of her family and neighbors, she trained as a classical pianist. Then came a career of putting rear ends on seats—that is, orchestral management, marked by reams of marketing and fundraising writing and program note scribbling for audiences many of whose first priority was to find their names in the donors’ lists. Editing for academic publishers also brought plenty of satisfaction—she admits she has a fondness for nerds—but nothing like the magic she discovered in writing fiction and nonfiction for children. Several of her articles, poetry, and a chapter book miraculously appeared in Stories for Children Magazine and knowonder! magazine. She hopes her stories encourage reluctant young readers to turn a page or two.

A twelve-year-old boy named Vin, goes on a mission—reluctantly. He doesn’t share the optimism of the knights of old who embarked on impossible missions without a doubt they’d succeed. When magnetic compost heaps, man-eating bubble baths and other disasters erupt, Vin comes close to packing in the whole ridiculous business. He calls it Operation BS, his code name for a mission to introduce his sister to a boy she has a crush on. He doesn’t want to play matchmaker, but Meg’s promise to reward him with a David Beckham autographed soccer jersey is a decisive incentive.

Get a sneak peek of the book at http://youtu.be/Qtgtp_rnAZ4

Her middle-grade adventure story Vin and the Dorky Duet is available as an e-book at MuseItUp Publishing’s bookstore (MuseItYoung section), on Amazon at

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008AK7ALE, and as a paperback at Halo Publishing International at http://halopublishing.com/bookstore/Maggie-Lyons.

Self Publishing Your Poetry – A Brief Primer

Self-publishing is an option open to everyone and it’s becoming easier and more powerful with different software and online options becoming available all the time. Why would you want to self-publish? Here are a few reasons:

There are no entry barriers. You don’t need a list of publications or any kind of awards to be considered, and your work can be on any topic.

You retain complete control over the look, quality, and promotion of your work.

You retain a far greater profit for your book. Most traditional publishers offer 10%, which isn’t a lot!

You learn a lot and it can be quite fun if you enjoy playing around with your computer and trying out new things.

But self-publishing isn’t all roses.You’ve got to do everything yourself and it’s hard work and often involves its own learning curve. You’ll have to learn about formatting, about graphics, about designing a cover, about ‘bleeds’, about document conversions,about distribution channels, about Amazon and other online stores and the list goes on and on. If all you want to do is write, then self-publishing is probably not for you (and believe me, it will take time that you would otherwise have been spent writing).

In addition, traditional publishing provides an important curation and editing function which you aren't advised to skip if you're going to self-publish. Instead, you'll need to curate yourself. That's not easy but it can be done. You can hire a well-respected editor, and manuscript assessor to ensure that your work is up to scratch, or you can work with a mentor - something that is particularly useful for poets in need of objective and valuable input. How do you self-publish? The easiest way is to just add a cover and copyright information to your book and save as a .pdf file. Lo’ and behold you’ve now got an ebook which you can sell from a website or blog. When you do this, 100% of your sales are profits, but you may not get many sales!

Or you can send your digital book to one of the big copy houses like Snap printing, Qwikcopy, or take a file into your local Espresso Printer and have them print out what you need when you need it. The print copy is very nice indeed for the Espresso machine, with quality comparable to any high street book. You can hand print and staple your work too, although it won’t be very professional looking. You can also go with one of the print on demand companies, who will produce a professional looking product for nothing or very little, but take a cut of each sale and may also charge you for expanded distribution. Many of them will also provide you with a barcode and ISBN and make the book available for sale at a range of online shops. You probably won’t make much through direct sales, but the book will be attractive, and often you can buy copies inexpensively and hand sell, which is probably the best way to sell poetry. Some of the more well known ones include:

CreateSpace: this is Amazon’s own publishing house and to my mind, it’s one of the best. It will take you a while to learn their particular formatting requirements, but everything is .pdf based, fairly straightforward, and they’ll give you all the templates you need. The cover maker is excellent and will give you a very nice lookng cover, with custom images. The one key advantage this one has over the others is that your book will be sold on Amazon once it’s complete for no extra (most of the other self-publishers offer Amazon only with a paid distribution package). Also their prices are pretty reasonably, especially if you want your own copies to hand sell.

Lulu: Self publishing / print on demand publisher. Lulu is very popular. You can sell your book directly from their website and they offer a pretty wide range of options including spiral bound, landscape, hardcover with dustjacket etc.

Cafe Press: Self publishing / print on demand publisher.

Smashwords: ebook only, but they do have allow you to distribute your book free and do all of the format conversions for you with their "meatgrinder". They also have some excellent promotional tools and get exceptional traffic. Note that, for poetry, conversions are not perfect and need to be fully checked on every device or you may end up selling something that is substandard (This happened to me. However, Smashwords is very responsive and will often help sort out any problems quickly.).

There are plenty of others out there and new opportunities/distributors appearing all the time. For a self-publisher, the intense competition has been a very positive thing. However, and this is very important, bear in mind that none of them will edit your work (some offer editing packages, but I highly recommend hiring a professional) or go through the rigorous and often difficult process of telling you what works best and what doesn't - something that is important with a poetry collection, and of course, none of these places will promote your work for you. All of that will need to be done by you, with help and support from clued up professionals, something that is mostly par for the course in traditional publishing. That said, you'll retain control over the finished product - with formatting, images, and the overall package completely in your hands. If any errors or problems should creep in, you can usually fix them easily - something that's not the case with traditional publishing. Also the speed to market can often be significantly faster. In any case, regardless of who you use, make sure you follow their instructions to the letter, and your book will end up looking as great as the poetry within it deserves.

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of traditionally published books Repulsion Thrust, Quark Soup, Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, and the self-published books The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson,Deeper Into the Pond, Blooming Red,Cherished Pulse, She Wore Emerald Then, and Imagining the Future. Find out more about Magdalena at http://www.magdalenaball.com

Use Freewriting to Find Peace & Balance in Your Writing -- and in Your Life!

by Dallas Woodburn

Where did the summer go?? I just can’t believe it’s already August. The fall semester of teaching starts up for me again in just two weeks. It seems like I can close my eyes and it is the beginning of summer again, when the fireflies were just starting to appear and a long path of sunny days stretched out before me. What happened?? Where did it all go?

Do you ever get those same feelings? It floors me how quickly time passes! Sometimes it feels like time is a river rushing past me so fast and I’m sitting there in a little boat, struggling to get a grip on the oars, not even enjoying the beautiful scenery flowing past. It makes me feel overwhelmed and frustrated, like I’m wasting or not appreciating enough the most precious commodity we all are gifted with: time.

I am also guilty of something I’ve come to think of in myself as productivititus: trying to fit waaaaaay to much into my daily to-do list, and then feeling like a failure when I don’t accomplish everything I’ve set out to do. This is not a good habit because I don’t want my summer, or my life, to be nothing but a giant to-do list of tasks I’m checking off. As my idol John Wooden often said, the most important words in the English language are love and balance. Work is important, but so is time for play! Balance, balance, balance is so crucial.

Something that is helpful to me when I am feeling off-balance, especially by the incredibly fast-flowing river of time, is to go to a quiet corner of the room and spend a few minutes freewriting.

I always use freewriting in the creative writing courses I teach to help students break through writer’s block. However, I think freewriting is something that can benefit everyone! It is such a great tool for not just writing, but also your mental health, sense of empowerment, and overall happiness.

Here’s how freewriting works: set a timer for a certain amount of time — I’ve found 8 minutes works well because it’s not too long or too short — and start writing. The only rule is that you cannot stop until the timer dings! It is a tool to keep you from self-editing or second-guessing or worrying that what you are writing is not “good” enough. Instead, just let the writing pour out of you. You will find yourself tapping into your subconscious, which can help you unlock all sorts of dreams and ideas and even solve problems that are nagging you. For me, freewriting is a way to re-find my center of balance. It unclutters my mind and makes me feel at peace.

You don’t need a fancy journal or expensive pen to freewrite. All you need is a blank piece of paper — even scrap paper works! Some people like to freewrite on the computer, which is certainly all right. I personally enjoy using a pen and paper because it makes the writing feel more open and less intimidating somehow — more unharnessed. Something that is just for me.

Here are some freewriting topics I’ve been using lately as jumping-off points:
- My favorite memory I made this summer was …
- Three things I am grateful for in this moment are …
- I will wring out every last drop of fun from my last couple weeks of summer by …

What are your plans for these final weeks of summer? Does anyone else use freewriting as a way to alleviate stress and find balance? Any other tips or suggestions for slowing down the pace of life and savoring the time we are blessed with?

Dallas Woodburn is the author of two award-winning collections of short stories and editor of Dancing With The Pen: a collection of today's best youth writing. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three years in a row and her nonfiction has appeared in a variety of national publications including Family Circle, Writer's Digest, The Writer, and The Los Angeles Times. She is the founder of Write On! For Literacy and Write On! Books Youth Publishing Company and is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Fiction Writing at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate writing courses and serves as Fiction Editor of Sycamore Review. Many of her short stories are compiled online here.

How Do I Procrastinate?

I hereby dub myself “Queen of the Procrastinators.” How do I procrastinate? Let me count the ways.

Instead of working on my WIP:

· * Yesterday I baked bread.

· * Today I cleaned my keyboard.

· * Once I even cleaned my stove!

· * I go grocery shopping.

· * I check e-mail.

· * I have lunch.

· * I do dishes.

And on and on…

I even took a class on procrastination once. No, not how to, but how to avoid doing it. I think I need to re-read my notes!

One thing the instructor recommended was to make an appointment with yourself. Every day from 9 to 10 a.m. (or whatever time you designate) I will write. Period. Nothing should interfere with this appointment. This is creating a habit, and most likely you will end up working longer, because you’ll find you’re on a roll.

Reward yourself for doing this. Even something that seems as silly as putting a sticker on your calendar each day that you write is a huge thing. I did this a few years ago and I found that if I had a day that interfered with my writing and I couldn’t put up a sticker, I was disappointed. I became determined to fill my calendar with stickers every day (except Sunday. It’s OK to give yourself permission to take a day off).

Some writers set a daily word goal. And maybe the reward for that is to check e-mail AFTER you’ve accomplished this goal. Or to go for a walk (that results in a number of rewards, mentally and physically). Or meet someone for coffee.

How do you procrastinate? And how do you overcome it?

~~~~~
Heidi M. Thomas

Summers End

August reminds me of digging potatoes on my aunt’s farm, the smell of late peaches and swimming in the pond after farm chores were done. The weather was always hot and dry and the earth parched from the sun. By that time of year, I was also parched by the sun and ready for the cooler days of fall. August was the last month of freedom before school and long days were spent playing, playing and did I say playing. Today, with the demands of a busy schedule, teaching, writing, consulting, I think I sometimes forget to play. Life becomes so scheduled that I don’t find the moments to free my mind, engage my body and laugh; not just laugh but let loose with real belly laughs. Since preparing to write this post, I have been more intentional about adding play to my days. I hope that as you prepare for the change of seasons, you enjoy the last lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer and dance or play the night away.

Martha Swirzinski

www.MovementPlus.com