My short story, Clarice, will be published at the Gumshoe Review, on January 1. This is my first short story accepted by a paying market!
When I started this year, I wanted to submit something every month at least, hoping that would lead to publishing success, and it has. My new goal is to find a print market for my books, while there still are books in paper. To hold in my hand a book that I have written, would be the best.
Christmas Preparations.
List-making, shopping, baking, more lists. It goes on for days and the party is over in a few hours. And then there are the decorations and the tree, and the presents, and the drop-over-for-a-drinks. But our children will be home and our friends are coming, and we’ll all have a good time. Or so we hope.
Good news for me this week. My story, Jack’s Luck, has taken second place in the Wynterblue Publishing contest for November, and will be in Confabulation3 next spring.
There was bad news as well. The publishing house found that one of the contestants, who has been submitting for some time, was plagiarizing. This has resulted in many contestants pulling out all together, as well as several judges. It is disconcerting because now the firm is considering legal action, and has not publicized the name of the individual concerned. All I know for sure is that it wasn’t any of the people on November’s short list. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of writing within the parameters of the contest.
Plagiarism steals the thoughts and writing of others, and in this case also robs other writers of their chance for success.
Christmas Gifts for Writers and Readers(cont.).
Christmas gifts for Readers and Writers(cont.)
The Internet Writers Workshop has an annual catalogue of books recommended and reviewed by the writers belonging to the group. A disclaimer here, I’m part of the group and two of my reviews appear on the site. http://www.internetreviewofbooks.com/holiday09/contents.html.
Another site with gifts for writers, oddly enough suggests no books but rather stuff, such as kindle, book bags, and best of all a gift card for a bookstore. Christmas gifts for Readers and Writers(cont.)
The Internet Writers Workshop has an annual catalogue of books recommended and reviewed by the writers belonging to the group. A disclaimer here, I’m part of the group and two of my reviews appear on the site. http://www.internetreviewofbooks.com/holiday09/contents.html.
Another site with gifts for writers, oddly enough suggests no books but rather stuff, such as kindle, book bags, and best of all a gift card for a bookstore. http://www.examiner.com/x-29265-Christian-Books-Examiner~y2009m12d4-Holiday-Guide–Top-10-Christmas-gifts-for-Book-Lovers.
A site for gifts for writers at http://writingfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/shopping_guide_for_writers_gifts, has many useful books, like On Writing, by Stephen King.
Gifts for the writer, gardener, birdwatcher, reader…
Poking around here and there on the Net, I found some great gifts for the passionate writers, gardeners, readers and birdwatchers on your list. Okay, gifts for me. Gifts for writers are up first, naturally, so check out Margaret Atwood’s suggestions on her Blog. 4 and 10 are the gifts I would choose, and can recommend 1 and 2 from personal experience.( My little book is the moleskin variety.) While you’re on Margaret’s blog, read her 15 book Tour packing tips. It’s hilarious.
Ben McNally, (of McNally Robertson) has a blog on Book Lounge, with his list of gifts for readers. He’s recommending Peter Ackroyd’s Venice: Pure City, a book I would like to read, mainly because I fell in love with the city last fall, and because he did such an outstanding job on London.
Susan Reimer writes a column, On Gardening for the Baltimore Sun. Her list of gifts for gardeners includes some of my can’t do withouts, like Felco pruners and gardening gloves. Lee Valley has some that are even warm on those nasty spring mornings, which can include rain freezing rain and wind in April, in Ontario.
Our Little Acre Blogspot has some unusual gifts for gardeners. I can recommend the Velcro plant ties, also available at Lee Valley. I’ve used them for years, especially for tying climbing roses to their supports.
For the birdwatcher, check out Squidoo. The site’s a bit wonky but worth it. What about birdsongs for the iPod!
All these blogs are listed to the right. Have fun!
Winter Writing
Winter has settled in here. Snow days, wind chills in the minus teens, slippery sidewalks, and shivering robins, still hanging around in the crabapple trees when they should be in Georgia or Florida.
It should be a good time for writing, but lately I’ve been focussed on websites and search engine optimization and Google analytics and other such arcane and here-to-fore unknown subjects, all to increase traffic to my website and blog and eventually to sales of my book. Or so I hope.
There appear to be as many people trying to make a dollar from exploitation of a writer’s work online as there are in the print world. I see sites with books by agents and marketers, ezines, selling the surest route to a best seller, if only the author would take an eight hundred dollar course, and oh, bye the way sign up three friends to get fifty per cent off, and others offering to rewrite the opus, and then it would sell millions of copies and be the next Harry Potter.
As I struggle through SEO for Dummies, and Blogging ditto, I wonder what would be wrong with writing just for me. But then I would just have to think, and remember and never write at all. Writing only has value and purpose, to my way of thinking, if shared.
Se’nnight
Se’nnight, a word from Middle English that means a week, seven nights. It was derived from Old English, seafon nihta, and has relatives in many languages including Italian(settimana), French(semaine) and Catalan(setimana).
I first met it in a Rex Stout short story, used, not by the erudite Nero Wolfe, Stout’s polymath main character, but by a low level hood. “Where did you pick that up?” he is asked.
“Oh some wag started it around last summer.”
The Oxford English revised says it is archaic, Middle English(1150-1500), but there are references to its use later than that period.
Dr. Donald Straughan, in directing the transcribers of the Bath Chronicle(1760-1800) for the Georgian Newspaper Project, instructs them that the word is se’nnight, sometimes fe’nnight, and means a week, not a fortnight.
Se’nnight is included in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon for her 19th Century poems, and Virginia Woolf used it in 1928’s Orlando. The Rex Stout short story I mentioned is called Easter Parade and was published in 1957.
Perhaps the old words aren’t dead, just waiting to be rediscovered.
I’ll write again, Sunday se’nnight.
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