Whew! NaNoWriMo ends
I emerge after a month of clacking computer keys and realize that, while I wrote 50,000 words, I still haven’t finished my novel draft. No matter—I’m “over the hump” and am confident that I’ll finish by the end of December. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but if I hadn’t leveraged NaNoWriMo in November, I’d be […]
Writing En Masse
Talk about writing alone in a group—that’s NaNoWriMo. We’re 9 days into the process and people’s fingers are flying. For fun, I signed up both in my current geographic region and in the region where I was born. Of course, I won’t join them in person—I’m basically a “lurker”—but it’s interesting to see how another region […]
Revision
While NaNoWriMo is the 10% process of spilling your words on the page, revision is the 90% that comes after. If we spend November on our first drafts, (optimistically finishing the first drafts of our novels) we will be confronted in December with the end results, and this means revision, revision, revision. I read somewhere (forgive […]
Poetry Contests
For years, I’ve submitted to contests, fully aware of how serendipitous the results may be. Hope, however, springs eternal, and I’ve had success over the years, even as competition increases. Recently, I’ve been involved on the judging side of a number of poetry contests, both for adults and also for young people. It has been a privilege […]
How to be a "Successful" Poet from a former UK Poet Laureate
I recently came across a BBC article that shares Sir Andrew Motion’s “Top Ten Tips for being a Successful Poet” (11 October, 2014). While this article came out a while ago, what I most like about the article is Motion’s assumption that success relates to the quality of the poem, not to one’s “success” […]