Postal Poetry

Looking for a new poetry project?  Visit Postal Poetry and learn how you can submit your postcard poem as a individual or collaboartive work.

Editors Dana Guthrie Martin and Dave Bonta created Postal Poetry as a new grassroots art project.  Be sure to take some time to peruse the current select works and introduce yourself to some new artists.

Call for Submissions: The Penn Writer

You are a writer with something to share: Pennwriters members are invited to submit articles for the upcoming issue of The Penn Writer newsletter on the theme Improving Your Dialogue and Description.

Pennwriters members can send submissions to Newsletter Editor Lori Morris.  Submission deadline is October 1, 2008.

To learn more, visit the Pennwriters website, or contact me with any questions.

Tell Your Tree Story

Flame Tree, Santa Barbara 2008

Attention writers (and blogging writers): take a side step from your usual writing routine and flex your writing muscles to tell us a tree story.  Regardless of whether you are a published author, an aspiring-to-be-published author, or a simple lover of the writing craft, blogging is an excellent way to promote your work.

The Festival of the Trees is a monthly blog carnival featuring trees and forests which has been published every month for over two years at a variety of host blogs.  The Festival of the Trees 28 will be hosted at Arboreality  on October 1, and I would like to share a little “art and arboreality”.

Many of us have specific, personal stories about a tree or forest from our lives. Blogging is a great medium for short story-telling, so that’s what I encourage this month: photoblog, videoblog, break out the crayons, sing a song, write a poem, whatever moves you: tell us a story about a tree or forest from your life. Or make one up. Or do something even cooler. (And then send me the link.)

Submission deadline is Saturday, September 27, 2008.  Submit your blog posts to me via email at jadeblackwater [at] brainripples [dot] com, or use the blog carnival submission form.

If you are a writer without a blog, you are welcome to email me your submission and I can include it with my post.

Happy writing, and spread the word: please feel welcome to invite others to participate!

To volunteer to host an upcoming issue, visit The Festival of the Trees coordinating blog.

The Penn Writer September-October 2008 is Now Online

Attention Pennwriters: the latest issue of The Penn Writer newsletter is now available online at the new Pennwriters website.

The September-October 2008 issue features articles on the theme of “getting and staying motivated.”  Visit the new Pennwriters website today: 1) create your account, 2) log on, and 3) download the newsletter as a .pdf.

Pennwriters members are encouraged to submit articles for each bimonthly newsletter.  The next newsletter’s theme is Improving Your Dialog and Description.  Send your articles to our Newsletter Editor Lori Morris.

Happy Reading & Writing!

Will steampunk save the science fiction writer?

For a long time now fantasy has been outselling science fiction. Fantasy fans are legion while the ranks of Trekkies dwindle. Fans of sf seem to prefer movies and tv to fiction. Has it always been like this? Why are more people turned on by magic, mysticism, superstition, and the accoutrements of the past rather than the possibilities of the future? Perhaps it’s the potential for interaction with the genre that attracts fans. While science fiction cons have always been a place for fans to dress up as their favorite Clingon or other extra-terrestrial, involving yourself in tarot, wicca, or other aspects of fantasy can actually become part of your lifestyle. The clothes aren’t nearly as outlandish as a space suit.

Is it possible that steampunk will so the same thing for science fiction?

If you’re a science fiction writer, you might want to jump on the band wagon while it’s still rolling.

Sue (scusteister) Lange

Feature Pennwriters Member: Sue Lange

Today our Feature Pennwriters Member is Sue Lange of Area 6.  Sue Lange is the author of We, Robots, and Tritcheon Hash.  She’s also a regular contributor here at the Pennwriters Area 6 HQ blog.

Sue, thank you for joining us today and sharing a little about yourself!  After reading your bio, I have to start ask: how does the “litany of low-level, mundane, mind-numbing day jobs” contribute to your writing interests?  (More to the point – tell us about the disco dance instructor role, and whether you’re still teaching.)

I’m always glad when people read that bio. It’s so much more interesting than listings of where to buy my books or read my stuff. Thanks for doing your homework!

I think the answer to your question is obvious. Experience provides depth to writing. What kind of interesting stuff can you come up with facing your messy office and your cranky computer every day? Especially considering the disconnected way you feel in the writer’s chair. How inspirational can that be? But go back to your college life, your high school days, Van Houten’s potato field, and the edgy world of extension coursework and you’ll find all kinds of deep-well experience. As to your final query: No I don’t still teach dance. Do people still do disco dancing? I could do a column about my experience as an instructor. Not much more than one 500 word column, though, because there isn’t much to tell. In short, I wasn’t a disco dancer, but the extension course program has never been very picky in who they hire, so there you go.

You’ve mentioned before that you like to write because “[you] just keep getting ideas.”  What are your key sources of inspiration?  What are your favorite ways to get “unstuck” if you hit a block when you write?

Much of my inspiration comes in my dreams. I have vivid dreams, colorful and frightening sometimes. I love it. When I wake up I rethink my dreams. What’s the plot? What’s the theme? I can usually come up with something. I’m also inspired with current events, which is probably the same thing as being inspired by my dreams. I mean, where do the dreams come from? They’re a mishmash of personal experience and prime time TV probably. Current political events provide a lot of material for someone who writes satirical science fiction. There’s just so much going on. And a lot of it is just plain silly. I’m not even talking about the political process in the U.S. You could have two or three careers lampooning that.

I don’t usually get stuck, mostly because I don’t make my living as a writer. I don’t have deadlines when it comes to being creative. Right now I’m working on a project where I’m reworking a very long and detailed science fiction novel that never got published. It was terribly over written and painful to slog through. I’m turning it into a soap opera type Internet only book and adding multimedia content as I go. Working on this has been the closest I’ve gotten to getting stuck. There’s a lot of non-writing stuff that I have to do and so my usual inspiration tap has not been flowing. I think it’s just that I don’t have time to follow through on any ideas I come up with so my brain is not working on anything like that. When I’m finally done with all the kookiness that goes with this project, I suspect I’ll be flooded with ideas again. We’ll see. If I truly got stuck, I would simply not write. No one has to write, but it does feel better psychologically to do it. But I wouldn’t panic or feel like I was losing part of myself. I’d just go do something else. There’s tons in the world to do.

I understand that you enjoy writing sci-fi.  Tell us a little about what you write, and why.

My first book Tritcheon Hash is considered feminist science fiction. I hesitated calling it that because at the time I had not studied feminist theory. But enough reviewers considered it feminist science fiction so that now I can actually cop to it. Mostly what I satirize in that book are the stereotypes we labor under in regards to gender. The biggest theme I worked with was this blame game that men seem to have towards women. Our culture developed from the belief that womankind caused the fall of man. We never stop to realize that the story of Adam & Eve is allegorical and written by men without women’s input (as far as I know, anyway, but who knows what Miriam and Moses discussed in the wee). As a result much of our culture is permeated by the underlying belief that women are naturally evil.

My second book, We, Robots, is about our obsession with technology and how an undying faith in progress will lead us somewhere we may not want to go. It has nothing to do with robots taking over the world, but it does allude to that theme that one finds in a lot of science fiction. I got bored with that theme so I wrote an anti-robots-taking-over-the-world story. We writers need to mix it up once in a while.

Most of my writing is along those lines: preaching on subjects I don’t know a whole lot about, laughing at stuff that I do.

Who/what are your greatest literary influences?

John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Fay Weldon, Joanna Russ, Joyce Carol Oates, Douglas Adams, the billions of bloggers out there that have a sense of humor, and all the self-effacing, honest people I’ve ever met.

What are your goals as a writer?

I’d like to finish this god damn Textile Planet project. I’d like to have a bimonthly column in the local rag. I’d like to be able to call up a bookstore and have them recognize my name so I don’t have to continuously reassure them that, yes, I am an actual author and someone has edited my books so they are not full of bad grammar and, no, you won’t be embarrassed if you put them on your shelves.

Give us the sound bites for your books, We, Robots, and Tritcheon Hash.

Uh oh, I already over wrote the sound bites up above.

We, Robots: A lot can happen on the way to The Singularity.
Tritcheon Hash: What would Earth be like if there were no women living there?

I’d like to hear more about The Textile Planet… what’s this work about, and when will it be available?

It is about an obsessive employee of a textile mill on the Textile Planet. She has too much to do at her day job and too little time to do it. On one particularly fateful day she loses it and winds up in a strange psychiatric hospital. She uncovers a plot to perpetrate a weird-ass type of mind control on the workers at the Mill she works at. The Mill discovers her discovery and she barely escapes from the Planet with her life and sanity. Running from her pursuers takes her to the very edge of the galaxy to an uninhabited planet. Her days in the desert there change her. She grows confident knowledgeable about her role in life. She also has enormous guilt about her unfinished business on the Textile Planet. She could save the others at the Mill if she only faced her tormentors. She returns home to set things right. Everyone lives happily ever after.

In the book I make fun of our-over-the top paranoia and our habit of assigning good and evil to just about everything.

Besides fiction, what other kinds of writing do you enjoy, or want to try?

I’d like to write a bimonthly column for the local rag on any topic that has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet. I’d like to do research for this column by tramping all over the world to follow up on the strange things I’ve read or heard about throughout my life. For instance, I’ve never seen a manatee. I’ve never seen a truffle in the wild. How do they make microfiber? What is Oktoberfest in Germany like? What’s it like at high tide at the Bay of Fundy? Where do spaceships in Russia take off from? That sort of thing.

We’re glad to have you as a Pennwriters member.  Could you tell us, why did you join, and what are some of your favorite benefits from the organization?

I joined because I was spending too much time networking with people over the Internet. I wanted to network with people that I could actually go and have a beer with without having to board a plane. The main benefit of Pennwriters is the discount for the Conference. But I’ve also found a good many Pennwriters have a lot of energy when it comes to doing promotion and setting up things. Carol Haile and Jack Hillman come to mind but there are a lot more. I’ve been able to participate in a number of events already and I’ve only been a member for about a year. Lots of stuff going on and a lot of resources.

And now, the words of wisdom: what advice would you give other writers?

1. Read.
2. Read what you like.
3. Read authors that write the way you’d like to write and steal their riffs.
4. Buy my books (Tritcheon Hash, We, Robots, and coming soon The Textile Planet)

Thank you again for joining us Sue, we wish you the very best in all your writing endeavors!

Thanks, Jade, for just being you! Don’t go changing!

 

* * * * *

To contribute articles and resources to the Area 6 blog, or to be interviewed as a Feature Pennwriters Member, please contact us.

Copyediting Resources from Melanie Gold

Are you a writer trying to edit your work, or a copyeditor looking for ideas and resources?  Perhaps you’re simply a grammar geek who is always open to “one more book” to add to the shelf.

Regardless of your background, Pennwriters member Melanie Gold offers an excellent collection of resources for writers and editors drawn from her years of experience.  Check out her two part series of articles:

• The Copyeditor’s Bookshelf – Melanie’s Top 5
• The Copyeditor’s Transcript

 

Your turn: what / who / where are your favorite copyediting resources and tools?  Share in the comments!

Beta Readers needed

Hey fellow writers,

I’m experimenting with the new Internet model of publishing. In September I’ll be launching my first interactive project under a larger author’s cooperative. Because this is a totally new thing, I’m having as many people as possible take a look at a short excerpt of the project and let me know what they think. If any of you can spare about ten minutes of your time to take a look, the URL is:

http://www.suelangetheauthor.com/textileplanet/TextilePlanetwithcss.html

Send comments to me at suelange1@verizon.net

Thanks!

Sue Lange

Inspiration and Dedication: Creative Resources

For our post on Writing Well, Pennwriter Sue Lange comments, “[W]hat keeps me writing is that I keep getting ideas.”  Fortunately, this is true for most artists.  However, at some point we all could likely use a hand with inspiration and dedication in the pursuit of our creative work.

Below are a few resources to help keep your ideas flowing.  Please feel welcome to share your favorite sources of inspiration in the comments!

Inspiration

I personally agree with the concept that “art begets art.”  We artists are perpetually inspired by our contemporaries and predecessors; we are inspired by the same surroundings, situations, and human conditions.  Collaboration and exposure to the works of others is always a great way to spark inspiration.  Here are few places online to do just that:

Soul Food Café is a great, thriving community where writers and artists can gather to get inspired and get connected.  According to their website:

“The Soul Food Café is a portal for artists and writers alike. It is a safe haven where creativity flourishes. Soul Food Café aims to promote creative pursuits as a daily practice.”

Words of wisdom can also be a helpful source of inspiration.  One of our Area 6 members shared the Air Equation and Willpower Equation websites as a resource for quotes from the greats.  (You can also find these quotes syndicated each week in the Pennwriters discussion forum).

If you’re stuck with a piece of your writing, you may want to try a tool like Mark McElroy’s Bright Idea Deck.  This colorful deck of cards features a variety of images and a helpful workbook for problem solving.  You can use these exercises to help you get your stories and projects back on track.  Don’t know what your character should do next?  Draw a card and see what comes to you!

Finally, why neglect the obvious?  Your local museum, library, park, or forest are endless sources of inspiration.  Online there is a whole world of blogs, artist portfolios, and creative organizations positively brimming with fresh ideas.  Take a look around your world!

Dedication

Part of ensuring artistic growth is staying dedicated to your craft.  This can be a challenge when inspiration, time, and energy wane.  It can be helpful to take a little time to remind yourself of why you create, what makes it important to you, and what goals you set for your work.  Below are a few places to help you rededicate yourself to your creative activities:

Pennwriter Gretchen Lockwood recently shared the activity of “Finding and Naming Your Muse” with the Valley Forge critique group.  She had tried this exercise at another writers’ group with great success.  The idea resonated well for me (I seemed to blurt out a name as soon as she mentioned ‘name your muse’), so I performed a quick google today and found a couple links to get you started.  Whether you choose to follow these suggestions step-by-step, or find that your muse just “comes to you,” a muse can be a helpful tool for visualization.

Dr. Leslie Owen Wilson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, offers a massive collection of creativity resources.  Included among them is a series of articles on “Finding and Caring for Your Muse.”

For those of you who don’t read Lorelle on WordPress, she is an excellent resource for blogging tips, tricks, and ideas (and that goes for writing too).  Check out the article “7 Ways to Find Your Blogging Muse”  by engtech of Internet Duct Tape (There are ideas in there for more than just bloggers.)

About ten years ago a dear friend gave me a copy of Affirmations for Artists by Eric Maisel.  This was my first introduction to the formal idea of “affirmations,” and I continue to find this book to be extremely helpful.  This is the kind of book you pick up and set down at various times throughout your career.

Finally, setting and reviewing goals is an obvious way to help you stay dedicated to your work.  Create manageable goals which stretch you a little.  Don’t kick yourself when you don’t reach a goal: periodically revise your list and start fresh each time.  If the goals were all easy to complete, they wouldn’t offer much of a challenge!

Your turn: where do you go to renew inspiration and dedication for your creative work?  Tell us in the comments!

Writing Well

Last week I read a post by BlogLily entitled On Not Writing.  BlogLily describes some of the challenges that all writers face in putting one word in front of the other to compose our thoughts into meaningful, complete sentences (or stanzas, depending upon your medium of choice).

What I really appreciate about BlogLily’s post is the description of her relationship with her writing.  Her discussion got me thinking about all the different things that motivate us writers to do what we do.  Granted it’s an assumption, but I’m going to extend the possibility that most of us don’t just want to write – we want to write WELL.  Writing well is not just a matter of will – it’s a matter of practice, patience, and persistence, among other things.

In the absence of affirmation, meaningful feedback, noticeable improvement, or consistent confidence, what is it that keeps us all writing?  When you get stuck with your work, what is it that brings you back?  A deadline?  A goal?  An intangible force?  Something else?

We’ve heard from BlogLily, now let’s hear from you.