Revision, revision: Save those drafts

A witty post on RedRoom.com today, by Ashira Goddard mentions something of note: "saving the edits."

I always save drafts and revisions, sometimes labeling them as "Draft3 1876 words," or "Draft4 cut," etc. When you feel you really can't let go of your work, whether good or bad, it makes sense to save your article or manuscript under another name and keep the old drafts until you're really done.

It paid off recently when an editor requested a short article, and I over-wrote, as usual. After lots of good reader feedback, she wanted a longer piece with a broader slant. Right from the start, I was halfway done, because of all the excess material I'd saved.

If you need a bit of inspiration to do the same, read Ashira's June 3rd post on RedRoom.com today.

Atlantic's take on Google

Make yourself read this lengthy article at The Atlantic web site, if you're not a subscriber or don't want to go to the library and read it:

Is Google Making Us Stupid

If you fret over your inability to concentrate when reading, if you are tired of being busy but not getting anything done, then multi-tasking and a world of sound bites may be to blame.

This Atlantic article, by Nicholas Carr, is the perfect antidote for writers, Luddites, and everyone in betweeen, who's wondering what technology has done to the written word, and our comprehension of same.

Go ahead - read it now: Is Google Making Us Stupid

"Release Your Writing" now available on Amazon Kindle

Take me with you! Release Your Writing is now available as an Amazon Kindle book. So if you have a Kindle ebook reader, you can download my book for $7.99.

Then what? Well, you can read it on planes and trains, refer to it when you're in a high-powered agent meeting, or take it to the beach. Now you can practice my "Pajama Marketing" techniques when you wake up in the middle of the night, and bookmark your favorite passages without turning the entire book into yellow highlighter!

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.

New York Times essay today on authors & self-publishing

This will especially interest members of the BWW workshop held yesterday. Today's New York Times has an essay here
and its as though the writer was sitting right there with us. She mentions so many of the same things we discussed.

Log in at the NYTimes or email me if you want a text-only version of the essay:
The title is "You're an Author? Me Too!" by Rachel Donadio.

The 7th point on a PowerPoint slide

Well, what good is a PowerPoint slide show if you cut off the last item? An astute observer in a workshop this morning noted my slide entitled Seven ways to find an agent, actually had only six points.

Here are all seven in their entirety:
1. Check the acknowledgments in similar books. You'll generally see a “thank you” to the author's agent.
2. Subscribe to writersmarket.com, read agentquery.com, Publisherslunch, Mediabistro.
3. Ask a fellow author for a referral to his/her agent.
4. Explore writing organizations and databases: ASJA.org, or Literary Market Place (LMP) at your library.
5. Attend workshops and establish connections.
6. Do a web search for the agent type most specific to your book/ non-fiction, literary fiction, memoir, etc.
7. Use your platform to help agents find you.

And a platform basically includes some combination of these resources to provide a viable audience for your book:Image (c) Helen Gallagher, please do not distribute without permission.

Good reviews need only a few well-chosen words

Here's an excerpt from a review of Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way. t's posted on Boomer Women Speak and circulated in their worldwide newsletter. For you, here are my two favorite passages:

"Release Your Writing is written in a direct, no-nonsense fashion and is a valuable tool for anyone striving to publish their work. Topics are indexed in this small hand-held guide that fits neatly in a purse, a laptop carrier or alongside your desktop PC."

Reviewed By: Melinda Cianos
http://www.nabbw.com/list_bookreview.php?book_id=73

April 23 is Unesco's World Book & Copyright Day

From Unesco:
"23 April: a symbolic date for world literature for on this date and in the same year of 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent authors such as Maurice Druon, K.Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo. It was a natural choice for UNESCO's General Conference to pay a world-wide tribute to books and authors on this date, encouraging everyone, and in particular young people, to discover the pleasure of reading and gain a renewed respect for the irreplaceable contributions of those who have furthered the social and cultural progress of humanity."

So, read something profound on April 23rd, or even better, write something!

Full Unesco report

Antitrust matters over Amazon

I was pleased to receive an after-hours email message tonight from the Washington Attorney General's Antitrust Division office. Her comments are posted below, (see March 29 entry) and she kindly suggested we visit this link where the current status is posted:

www.atg.wa.gov/amazonpod.aspx