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Friday, April 30, 2010

Get Your 15 Minutes... and Beyond


O.K. So throwing your stuff out there is scary, but important. And I found a site that is awesome for seeing how people react to your writing. http://www.webook.com/ rocks at giving you the chance to throw your work up on the web and see what people say. With WeBook's PageToFame, you post the first page of a novel, even if the rest is nonexistent, and then people start rating it on a scale of 1 to 5. You get to see gut reactions to your work...instantly. It's awesome. It helps you revise. It helps you determine if you are ready to get serious and start sending your stuff out. It helps your ego in a BIG FAT WAY when you do well. If you get high ratings, your page goes to an agent for review and rating, and then you get to put on your first five pages. Then your first fifty. Then your entire novel. And for each step you rise in the ranks, you get two agents who look and rate. Not bad. They used to not charge, (and still charge nothing for the mini-paragraph contests they have, for which winners receive PageToFame coupons and can submit for free), but starting May 1, they will charge around $5 for the submission. But the feedback is invaluable. They are also having a contest where they are giving $1000 to those who get the best scores on PageToFame. NICE! I've had my first page promoted and am about to get the novel of my second promoted. I've also won the Paragraph-palooza contest and have gotten yet another chance to enter PageToFame for free. Try it. It costs nothing through April 30. That's TODAY. So hurry!!!! http://www.webook.com/. Great site. And TOTALLY addictive! ENJOY!

Thursday, April 29, 2010

What's Your Muse?

I have a friend who swears all his ideas for his poems and stories come to him in the shower. And another friend says he has to be on a walk with his dog for ideas to sprout in his head. If he's alone -- without a leash in his hand and his dog panting by his side -- he's empty-headed. My girlfriend says most of her ideas for her art spring from her while she's watching her giggly kids. So I guess everyone has their process.

I was trying to figure out mine. And it occurred to me that, to be creative, I need absolute silence -- a sort of creative meditation. Which is a total joke in my household with two whiny cats, an attention-craving dog, a goldfish that has somehow turned into koi and begs for food every time we get near the tank, two sweet but boisterous boys, and a husband whose latest obsession is this Plants Versus Zombies video game he downloaded to the computer directly next to mine. Needless to say, Zen rarely happens. It's especially ellusive amidst the moans of zombies. But when I do get enough silence and can slip into my creative meditation, it's magical.

So what's your process, your muse, your creative wellspring? Share, share, share! Some of the wacky things that inspire us would make for a great article, don't you think?

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Is there a fairie in it?



So no offense to those fabulous writers of werewolves, gnomes, and floating phantasms, but I'm getting a bit frustrated by the whole paranormal thing. Don't get me wrong. I love paranormal. I just don't love so much of it that I feel that I have to throw a fairy in my contemporary coming-of-age novel so I can get it published. And I get frustrated when, in order to buy a great contemporary YA romance at the bookstore, I have to wade past six or seven tables and end-caps full of books covered in amazing-looking girls drooling blood in order to find my pick buried at the bottom of a bookshelf. I can blame this lust for the unreal on the desire for escapism, the darkening of society and today's youth, or simply the money-attracting qualities of whatever is new and fresh, but truth? It doesn't seem new and fresh to me anymore. So just like I craved for the end of heavy metal ballads in the eighties, I'm waiting for the paranormal phenomenon to come to a dwindling and much-needed close. The question is - what will the new "next big thing" be?

Writing Confidence Kaput?


Yes, I'm having a very low writing morale day. Lots of rejection adds up to lots of low confidence. And sometimes the motivation to keep plugging away doesn't come. So I got online to find something that would make me feel better (since chocolate and reality TV weren't cutting it), and here is what I found. Enjoy!

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-562-Book-Examiner~y2009m3d20-20-famous-authors-who-were-rejected-repeatedly-and-sometimes-rudely-by-publishers