Listen to your favorite writer give advice on writing

I came across this site some of the best writers ever offer their advice on Creative Writing.  
Writers like Toni Morrison, Nora Ephron, John Updike, Carlos Fuentes, Norman Mailer, Wallace Stegner, and,many others.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/toni_morrison_nora_ephron_offer_advice_in_free_creative_writingclass.html

Book Blogger helps sell your book

http://bookbloggerlist.com/ This site will post your blog and books that you have published in exchange for reviews. But you have to stay active on their site.

How to sell your book on Amazon.

One idea of how to sell your book on Amazon.

Give your book in exchange for a review.Not only will that stack up your reviews but will help with publicity.

Into the Woods/mcnally musical

Audiobooks help with the commute

voices.com helps with getting your audio book up and running

free book

   I wanted to help a friend get some publicity on his book that he posted for free to the website smashwords.com

 https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/601708  

"The type" of woman

Great poem for any woman who has ever been hurt   

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYAiYMlOCI4 

When Love Arrives a poem

A very beautiful poem spoken by Sarah Kay and  Phil Kaye

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdJ6aUB2K4g

Pursue Poetry

http://www.kaysarahsera.com/project-voice/ 

great site for youth who want to pursue spoken poetry  

Listen to poetry

http://www.rattle.com/poetry/bearer-of-the-light-by-ariane-branigan/ 

This is a great site for contemporary poetry postings.  It even has audio for some poems.

Another writers' critique site

https://duotrope.com/

Find a place to publish your work

Here is a couple of places that help you find a place to publish your work.  Although I'm sure there's a thousand more where these few came from.

http://www.lightenup-online.co.uk/

https://duotrope.com/

http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

Podcasts I need to listen to

 strange stories and how our minds work

http://www.lorepodcast.com/

and 

Criminal, short twenty minute stories .

http://thisiscriminal.com/

and finally -

LoveandRadio 

http://loveandradio.org/

food geek show - 

http://www.sporkful.com/

welcome to night vale-name of podcast series at

http://www.commonplacebooks.com/

crime stories podcast

http://thisiscriminal.com/

Read any book

I like this readanybook.com site. Its not exactly a kindle book where you could thumb easily through the book but it does give you a personal library without having to login or check out.

Awesome site if you are writing a query letter for publication

This is a site for writing a great query letter:  http://queryshark.blogspot.com/

What are writer's critique websites?

Here are some other  writing sites for getting critique:

wattpad.com

writing.com

what mistakes writers make in submission of novel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-jXu88C51w

Are you writing a paper for school?

This site can help with novel writing or even if your writing a paper for school.  There's tons of writers on this site that can help critique your writing.

scribophile.com

Publish your writing

A place for where Writers can submit their writing:contests, blogs, publications
http://www.placesforwriters.com/

If you use google docs for writing

If you use google docs for writing, you can track your word count by adding this feature called track my words.  The link is below.

This can help if you're shooting for writing that 50,000 word novel or if you just want to keep track of writing goals.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/track-my-words/cmenndbnbfkcdefgjpmdiejjhillbnlc?hl=en

Ever wondered what your writing sounds like?

This is a great site to help listen to your writing.
Maybe you have grammar errors that you can't tell from reading your writing and you want to listen to your work before publishing.  Here is a great site:
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.html

or
Google translate works even better for longer texts if you don't want to download anything.

https://translate.google.com/

Organize your writing

 I love this site I found that helps with organizing your writing by Melissa Donovan

http://www.writingforward.com/writing-tips/writing-tips-getting-and-staying-organized#more-48
I’ve struggled with how to organize my electronic writing folder. For some reason, printed materials are easier to group and label. By using subfolders, I’ve been able to create navigable directories that make it easy to find anything and everything I’ve written.
Here are the sub-directories I’ve created in my “Writing” folder:

• Notes and Ideas: Notes on the craft of writing and random ideas that don’t fit anywhere else.
• Templates and worksheets: Blank character sketches or world-building worksheets as well as story-writing guides, like the Hero’s Journey.
• Completed Works: Pieces that are ready to be sent out or published.
• In Progress: anything that is not polished, with the following sub-folders:
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Non-fiction
  • Scripts
• Journals and Freewrites: pretty self-explanatory.
• Feedback: feedback and critiques that I have given and received.
• Submissions: copies of work that I’ve submitted along with a spreadsheet for tracking submissions.
• Research for Writing Projects: information that I’ve found online and have saved because I think it might come in handy someday for one of my projects. Now that I use Evernote to clip material from the web, this folder has become an archive.

I reorganize this whole mess about once a year. I just went through it a couple of weeks ago and did a little clean-up, and I found that this system works well for keeping files where I can find them quickly and easily.
Tell me, how do you keep your writing files organized? Share your organizational writing tips in the comments!

I was thinking apricot-y

This is chit chat I overheard from three women talking to one another.

Well hello! A younger woman said  enthusiastically, I thought she was the witch from the Wizard of OZ.  She approached an older woman selling crafts at a coffee shop.  (They clearly knew each other.)

Well, Hi Sarah!

“This is Deena.”  The younger woman said, “The woman I told you about. She does everything, ain’t that right Deena?”

Yes.  I work at Northwest, I am a publicist and a writer, and I am a small business owner.

What else am I? Said the older woman to the younger.

You’re a cancer survivor.

Yes, then there’s that. 

By the way I love your hair Deena.  And it’s Curly. 

What color would you say it is?

I was thinking apricot-y.

“Oh, and did I tell you?   I’m getting married this year!”  Exclaimed the older women, “We’re going to have a shin-dig across the border in Mexico.”

Oh really, my son’s seeing a girl, and they met in Mexico.  They live outside Montreal, can‘t think of the name. Cornwell, I think it is.

The two women stood, not able to sit, not sure when the older woman was going to finish the introduction portion of the conversation; the time when most people would take theirs seats.  The woman not related to the soon to be married individual began looking around anxiously, no doubt wandering if it was time to sit or move on to the business of buying crafts.    

Writer's Tips

 

Writer’s tips

1. Say the “Writers dance” when you want to describe how the writer uses good word play.
2. Is there enough emotion in your piece?  Highlight emotion with a highlighter.  Also, it's good to know what the character’s pain is; for each character, and what their struggling against.
3. Be careful with characters delving out money from out of no where, especially if its cash.
4. Note why a writer recollects on another character over and over again like their mother, question whether this is necessary.
5. Be careful if something is supposed to be secret, if it’s secret it’s secret, there’s no gray area as far as who knows and who does not.  For example  If there in a cubicle and their mindful of who is listening, and then later in the scene their not mindful it doesn’t make sense.

6. A call came in from someone who claimed they witnessed it- a line like this brings you farther way from the narrator when you don’t indicate who, exactly, the call was from.

7. Going back and forth between characters needs to be real tight.

8. The writer Checkov, is good at having his characters do exchanges, and one person is not really listening as another character says some pretty random things.  Note that its not always important in dialogue to have a character understand exactly what the other character is saying.

9. He was no where near tickled about the precipitation. This sentence doesn’t show the emotion of the character. Be careful with difficulty with negatives like the word NO.

10. Prepositions are relationships between objects, too many prepositions are too many relationships that the reader has to keep track of, and too many prepostions indicate a run-on sentence.

11. Parenthesis listed after a real long aside can have readers lose track of what the parathensis are used for.

12. The beginning gets us to ask a question in short story, and the ending should answer that question.  Choose one theme and run with it, like the sea, or a song, that has to run throughout the course of the story, don’t have too many themes.

13. Be careful of professions and hobbies and what those individuals can do.  Scuba divers can’t dive far, so if you’re talking about diving to the bottom of the ocean you might use  but a deep sea can.

14. For generalizations, careful how you phrase things in dialogue, to make it seem that this is what the character thinks and not the writer.

15. Good to use reflections.  Especially when your characters feel guilt.

16. Think about the significance of a scene, and how much you lead into it.