How nice: Elizabeth Gilbert explains all

The woman who wrote Eat, Pray, Love raised the bar for all writers. But you need not feel that faint twinge of jealousy. Turns it took Elizabeth Gilbert a looooong time to be accepted:

After more than five years of sending out work for publication and collecting only rejection letters, she finally broke onto the literary scene in 1993, when one of her short stories was pulled from the slush pile at Esquire magazine and published under the heading “The Debut of an American Writer.” (excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert's bio).


Click here for a wonderful essay sharing her thoughts on the writing life.

So, let's spend the summer writing well. As Elizabeth Gilbert says, "PUT IT OUT THERE."

Helen Gallagher
Release Your Writing

Award winner: "Release Your Writing"

I'm shamelessly following the Doris Lessing post with my own award news:

Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way is a Nonfiction-General award winner in the 2008 IWPA Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. My client and colleague, Francine Friedman also won in the Non-fiction Autobiography category for her memoir Match Dot Bomb.

Enter contests. You never know if you may win, and the ability to have your work judged by professionals is always rewarding. For Release Your Writing, the judge said:

"A fabulous work and a must for anyone trying to understand the complexities and options for publishing in the early 21st century. The organization is grand and the explanations clear and concise."

Doesn't that make you want to run out and buy a copy? Click here for purchasing options.

Attention writers: "Don't imagine you'll have it forever"

Let's get that mojo moving writers, as Doris Lessing says: "Don't imagine you'll have it forever."

Lessing: Nobel win a 'disaster'

The increased media interest in her has meant that writing a full novel was next to impossible, she told Radio 4's Front Row.

Lessing, 88, also said she would probably now be giving up writing novels altogether.

Her latest book is the partly fictional memoir entitled Alfred and Emily.

Since her Nobel win she has been constantly in demand, she said.

"All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed."

Speaking about her writing, she said: "It has stopped, I don't have any energy any more.

This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don't imagine you'll have it forever.

Use it while you've got it because it'll go, it's sliding away like water down a plughole."

Lessing is the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature in its 106-year history.

Her best known work, of course, is The Golden Notebook.

Whether she means energy or time, we all know its fleeting. Read the full article at BBC.com here

The time to write!

While taking time to devote to writing is not exclusively a woman's problem, there are rather urgent reasons why we need to consciously support women in the arts. Consider these facts, from A Room Of Her Own Foundation:

• Only 9 out of 52 winners of the National Book Award for Fiction are women.
• Only 11 out of 48 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction have been women.
• Generations of students studied art history with a text that did not include one woman artist—Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Nevelson and Lee Krasner were all excluded.
• Women writers won 63 percent of the awards but less than 30 percent of the money in awards and grants reported by Poets & Writers. (January/February 2003 issue)
• In 2002 all but one of the Pulitzer Prize finalists for Fiction and Poetry were male.
• 94 percent of all the writing awards at the Oscars have gone to men.
• Of the major artists represented by major New York galleries, only 16 percent are women.
• Only 25 percent of the advisory members of the National Endowment for the Arts are women.
• A recent study by the Coalition of Women’s Arts Organizations showed that in all one-person shows for living artists in American museums, only 2 percent of the featured artists were women.
• A 1992 study showed that only 17 percent of artists in galleries nationally were women, whereas the Bureau of Labor indicated that 48 percent of professional American artists were women.
• 51 percent of all visual artists are female and women hold 53 percent of art degrees, but 80 percent of art faculty members are male.
• 68 percent of total art income in the U.S. goes to men and 73 percent of all grants and fellowships in the arts go to men.

Need a nudge? Writing resources

If you need to recharge your creativity or find places to publish your work, the web is full of great resources.

Take a look at WorldwideFreelance.com, especially their Writing section, for help when you need a little inspiration:

They have fresh articles on:

• fiction, non-fiction and blogging
• freelance writing
• writing habits
• international markets
• the writing craft
• queries, mistakes to avoid, and dealing with rejection
• publishing and book promotion

There you go - just one site out of thousands that can turn a slow day into a writing spree!

Blogger adds post-dated feature

If you blog here at blogger.com (and why wouldn't you?), you know you can trick the system by clicking Post Options and giving your post a past or future date. Blogger has now made this a bit easier, so you can create what would be daily posts, but write a batch of them all at once, and have them load per your schedule. Read on...

Scheduled post publishing, which we talked about testing on Blogger in draft last month, is now live for everyone. If you set a post’s date into the future, Blogger will wait to publish until that time comes.

Have you ever wanted to announce something on a certain date but knew you wouldn’t be at a computer to make a post? Or you wanted to keep posting regularly but knew you’d be on vacation for a few weeks? Scheduled post publishing is here to help you out.

Scheduling a post is easy to do: on the post editor page, click the “Post Options” toggle to show the “Post date and time” fields. Then, type a post date and time that’s in the future. When you click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, it will be automatically published to your blog.