Feature Friday Features: "Your Plot Thickens"

Today, the Warrior Muse is featuring Lara Sterling, of Your Plot Thickens. She is a writer, who is also a story consultant, and she provides writing workshops in the L.A. area.

Lara posts a lot of interesting interviews, as well as helpful information for writers. In a recent post, she interviewed book coach Judy Cullins, an interview in which I learned a little bit about capabilities of Linked In that I had no idea existed. She often interviews other writers, but no matter who she's interviewing, it is always informative.

If you'd like to check out the Judy Cullins interview, it is entitled Tips for Marketing our Books, which I'm sure many of us our interested in. The blog post is just a synopsis of the interview with a link to where the full interview will be, but it is still worth reading, as it still has helpful information.

May you find your Muse.

[Mostly] Wordless Wednesday 7/27/11

Today we'll stay right at home for [Mostly] Wordless Wednesday. Well, in Colorado Springs, anyway. This is a photo of Helen Hunt Falls, named for Helen Hunt Jackson, a local author in the 1800's.

Helen Hunt was born in Massachusetts, but moved to Colorado after the loss of her husband and two sons. She had become very ill (some reports I find say tuberculosis, while others don't mention the disease), and Colorado Springs was known for curative and restorative powers, the dry air and mineral springs being highly recommended for tuberculosis sufferers, as well as many other illnesses. She became passionate about helping Native Americans after a lecture given by Chief Standing Bear, of the Ponca tribe, and wrote about their plight in books such as Ramona, A Century of Dishonor and The Indian's Plight. She was good friends with Emily Dickinson, and some of her poems were featured in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Parnassus. She was a dedicated activist in favor or the Native people, and traveled to learn more about the government's mistreatment of them.

The falls did not take her name until long after her death from cancer, but she spent much of her last years in North Cheyenne Canon. The area was known as a place to view some of the bounty of natural beauty of Colorado, as well as a place to cool off and hide from the sun's penetrating rays. There are several falls in the vicinity, as well as more trees than can be found in much of the rest of the city.

As far as Helen Hunt Falls these days, it is a wonderful place for an easy hike and breathtaking scenery, so one should always bring their camera along when they strap on their hiking boots.

I hope you enjoyed this peek at Colorado history.

May you find your Muse.

Teaser Tuesday 7/26/11

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

"Maybe my mother is right. Maybe it's time to stop stun-gunning men who think they're vampires, get married, and settle down."

p. 36, Smokin' Seventeen, by Janet Evanovich

(I should clarify that this is not a vampire novel/urban fantasy/horror/anything of that sort. It's an action/comedy/romance sort of deal.)

Happy Reading!

Is Any Publication a Good Publication?

Back when I was nineteen or twenty-ish, I discovered a little site called Poetry.com. I submitted a poem from my personal collection as a contest entry and was delighted to receive a letter saying they wanted to publish my poem in a hardcover anthology. Holy cow! Someone liked my writing enough to put it in a book! Of course, there was no pay (to me). Rather, I had to pay to purchase said hardcover anthology if I wanted a copy. Well, of course I had to do that, right? I even bought a copy for my parents.

A few months after I received my oh-so-wonderful anthology, I received a follow-up letter saying they enjoyed my poem soooooooooo much that they'd love for me to submit another for their Best Poets of [whatever year it happened to be]. Oh my gosh! Not only did they like my poetry, they reaaaaallllyyyy liked my poetry! (Spell checker is going to have a field day with this post).

I was ultimately contacted by an International Library of Poetry, and asked to submit a poem for publication in an anthology that would be published in the U.S., as well as the U.K. Ultimately, I sent off my check for another anthology...and never received it. When I attempted to contact them in writing, I never heard back. When I called the listed phone number, no one ever answered and there was no answering machine. My check had been promptly cashed, but I never got a book, nor did I ever receive contact from them again.

This led me to finally really think about what was going on. Were these genuine publishing credits or had I been a fool and gotten sucked into a money-making scheme?

At that time, I couldn't find anything about this being a scam. There just wasn't anything showing up. Obviously, I quit submitting poems and didn't tangle with them anymore. I decided I'd been duped and that it was a lesson learned.

Fast forward to a couple years ago. Someone on an online forum I belonged to kept posting about selling all these articles and making good money. She was doing so on a site called Helium.com. I checked it out, it sounded good, and I didn't find anything negative about them, so I signed up. I've made several hundred dollars on there via Marketplace articles, and it was nice. However, I can't find those articles I sold anywhere other than on Helium, which seems odd, because there was always a different publication name for the article I sold. So I can say I sold these articles, but since I have no proof of them showing up on another publication, I can only cite them as being sold to Helium.com. At least, this is the way it seems to me, and it's something I've been trying to figure out. I can say that, for me, it was a valid way to bring in extra money, as the money was paid out to my Paypal account each time I requested it.

There are many other websites that you can make money writing for, such as Associated Content, several different how-to sites, etc. The question is, how do you find out whether one of these sites is legitimate? Yes, you can research, but I have found people on both sides for every single site I've investigated.

The big question that comes into play, though (and thus the reason for it being the title), is whether any publication is a good and valid reference? If your name is on a website or in an anthology that has an ISBN number, does it count? Do you put it in a resume or query letter? Or will these publications make you look bad, so they should be left out, even if you aren't published anywhere else? At what point is a publication more hurtful than helpful? Anybody have opinions on these questions, these sites or any related sites? Experience? Recommendations?

For more information, these are a couple sites I came across that discussed Poetry.com, ILP and Helium (there are now tons more if you simply Google them):

Getting the Scoop on Poetry Contest Scams by Linda Alice Dewey
The Literature Network of Forums
Workathomenoscams.com (a blog--read the comments for many varying opinions)

Happy (and Safe) Writing!

Feature Friday Features: "...Then She Writes"

This is my first Feature Friday. I thought I would start by spotlighting bloggers I follow who have fewer than 100 followers.

Heidi Windmiller of ...Then She Writes is a writer of YA and Sci Fi, and her posts have to do with...writing! Didn't see that one coming, did you? She has a nice friendly voice in her blog writing and she posts some things that expand my horizons, others that entertain, and still others that simply have me rooting for her progress.

If you're looking for a good writing blog, check out Heidi's blog; her latest post is entitled Silent Time, something I've been working on myself, yet get so little of (parents will understand, and I'm sure many non-parents, too).

Happy Writing!

[Mostly] Wordless Wednesday 7/20/11

For [Mostly] Wordless Wednesday today, I figured it was only right to show a photo from my Florida vacation in June:

This photo was taken at Cocoa Beach, Florida, where we ended up not being able to swim due to a freak mass exodus of a type of jellyfish not typically seen in the area. No one was positive why they ended up there, but it was suggested that the tsunami helped make it possible. I got stung by two of the little buggers! Luckily, the kids were happy to play in the sand at the beach, so it was mostly we adults who were disappointed.

Teaser Tuesday 7/19/11

It's time for Teaser Tuesday, where I post two sentences from a book I'm reading to whet your appetite and see if it's a book you might be interested in reading.

"She knew what people said--that there were bodies buried all over the state, men who'd met their bloody end at Stella's hands. The truth was that despite beating, interrogating, threatening, and torturing her parolees; despite leaving them with scars, broken bones, burns, post-traumatic stress disorder, even the occasional missing limb--despite all of this, she hadn't killed a single parolee, no matter how blackhearted and irredeemable he was."

This is a Kindle e-book, so I don't have a page number; 33% of the way through. "A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel," by Sophie Littlefield.

This one's pretty funny!