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This has been written by Linda Jones, a former news editor on the Wolverhampton Express & Star and the Worcester Evening News. She has also worked as a senior reporter at several regional UK newspapers so she certainly knows what she is talking about!
These tips draw on Linda’s own front line experiences and will help the new and not so new writer establish a lucrative and successful freelance career.
She is offering a generous discount off the purchase price of the book for Writelink members. The book retails at £6.99 but Writelink members can purchase it for £5.50 inc. p & p if purchased direct from the publishers or you can contact Linda for more information.
Most of us use the Internet these days to send emails and access our favourite writing sites like Writelink, but are we really using it to its full potential? In this ebook, successful freelance writer and regular Writelink contributor, Louise Dop, explains how writers can get so much more from the web.
The Writer’s Secret Weapon brings together all the online tips and tricks that she has developed during her years as a writer. Including at least 50 web links to free resources that can help you achieve writing success, the direct links lets you try out some new ideas straight away. Written in a friendly, informal style, the author gives an enthusiast account of the role of the Internet in the writing life while being realistic about its drawbacks.
Subjects covered include optimising and organising your research, making the most of your online community, how to get noticed on the web and ways to unlock your creativity. If you follow all the advice given, you will start to realise the full potential of the Internet and will soon find new ways to make it work for you.
The Writer’s Secret Weapon- The Best Free Internet Resources and Strategies For Writers is available to purchase as a download for $5.99 (about £3.20) from the author’s website.
http://www.clearlywrite.co.uk
This guide comes from the pen of Moira Allen, editor of Writing-World.com It is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date collections of PAYING markets for fiction and poetry available anywhere.
It covers more than 675 periodicals, including magazines, e-zines, and international publications.
It has more than twice as many paying periodical markets as the Writers Digest "Novel and Short Story Writer's Market" (which is chock full of non-paying markets), and hundreds more than the "Poet's Market" (which has the same problem).
Plus, it's up-to-date. It's very frustrating with both online and print market guides to find that many links haven't been updated for years. This guide has had all listings checked within the last four months (and MOST of them have been checked as recently as May and June).
In the guide, you'll find:
* 596 markets for short stories
* 416 markets for poetry
* 153 international markets
* 216 literary markets
* 112 science fiction and fantasy markets
* 68 children's markets
* 46 horror markets
* 43 Christian markets
* 30 mainstream/general interest and multi-genre markets
...plus markets for romance, flash fiction, humor, mysteries,
westerns, and adult/erotica, and more than 100 nonfiction
magazines that use fiction and poetry.
It's available as an e-book for $12.95 from the Writing-World bookstore or as a hard back from www.lulu.com
At last! Someone has written a gem of guide for all writers. Alexander
Gordon Smith’s “Inspired Creative Writing” covers the whole gamut of the writing process in a way that will appeal to both beginner and more experienced writers alike.
He talks about the theme and how essential it is to any piece of writing. Theme, the author says must be established from the beginning. He comically recounts his own experience in writing poetry, how it always ended up as “bloody prose” because he couldn’t tell where to break the lines! Despite being a modern
guide his advice refers back to that ancient inspiration of antiquity, the Muse. She comes in many forms, he says, it’s a matter of learning to recognise the ideas she brings.
Its zippy manual format excites and invites both the experienced and new writer. The book is prefaced with an easy to glance at contents introduction, detailing its various chapters. The titles themselves are intriguing, yet mainly self explanatory, “Limbering up”, Second sight”, “Born slippy”. The latter deals with creating characters and how a writer deals with the strange quirks of human behaviour and uses these to build up a complex yet realistic persona. All aspects of writing can be easily located using this reference guide.
Scattered throughout are motivational tips, such as writing authentic dialogue, “tape record two or more people in conversation”, the author advises and to kick start a story, “pick” something juicy and scandalous from the tabloids.”
Dotted here and there are encouraging epithets from those who should know, i.e.successful writers. “If the doctor told me I had six months to live I’d type a little faster!” (Isaac Asimov).
As always that old saw of writers being mad is referred to, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia”. ( E.L.Doctorow).
Many are the expert and fascinating sources that Gordon Smith draws upon. These add an entertaining dimension to his work. Notwithstanding its down to earth advice for new writers, the book is also a stimulating and funny tome for the more experienced yet perhaps jaded writer.
He points out, in his chapter, “There’s no place like home,” that in order to avoid staleness writers need to play, and provides a few exercises such as, “Get your notebook out, and pretend you are a detective.” But don’t follow people around as it could get you arrested!” For the new writer he makes it clear
that there are no hard and fast rules, taking as his premise that it is the imagination of the writer which propels the work along. However he does emphasises that earnest homework is essential to make the work convincing. He also debunks that most irksome of myths, “to write only what you know.” ”It’s your world he says, keep dreaming!
In my favourite chapter “There’s no place like home”. The author points out that because we’re so familiar with our own backyard, its seeming ordinariness detracts from exotic or unusual characters and events woven into the fabric of our everyday life. In this section his recommended tip is to tease out the exotic from this apparent blandness by walking amongst our natural habitat as a virtual stranger, using a notebook record everything as if we are seeing it for the first time.
It is interesting to note, as he says that over times our brains, because of familiarity have blanked out much of what is around us. He also warns us against using foreign locations to infuse our writing with the exotic as the reader will see through our attempts and the work will appear false. Neither should we decry our own
locality and its folk. To paraphrase his quote from George Bernard Shaw, “Your own place and your own time is all people and all time.”
Inspired Creative Writing is a work which each reader/writer can dip into, and take what is pertinent to them. Jolted and startled by one of the many mind blowing exercises into a new realization of creativity, I will now zoom off and write about the erstwhile fictional being who has, hitherto unrecognised, been lingering in the wings of my mind. Thanks to Alexander Gordon Smith I will hopefully be on the best seller list next year!
Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon-Smith ISBN 1-904902-07-3 is available through Amazon at £9.09 which is 30% less than the usual list price.
