Here's something you might be interested in.
So to follow up and expand on a previous thread, No Place For The Poet, I thought I would post a link to Poets.org, which is a free site and a good all-around resources site for poets-in-training. A note about this site: They show really high membership numbers but what isn’t disclosed, unless you ask, is that is that you can open an account, but you can’t close it. People that may have signed up years ago continue to be counted as members whether they’ve posted on the site once or never. In actuality, a fairly small number of core posters use the site to post their poems for read&critique. There are five r&c forums, 101, which is the level for beginning writers, 201, writers whose work has progressed, 301, where advanced and experienced poets, many of whom have been published, post their work (the two other workshops are specialized).
People who like to read poetry know that what we look for is that quality or moment that B.T. Shaw speaks of as “taking off the top of your head” (in the No Place thread I quote B.T. Shaw’s criteria for poems which pretty much covers the topic). I refer to it as the “a-ha” moment, and when I hung out at Poets.org, I was always opening new threads in the workshops like a kid at Christmas, hoping that I would find something really valuable and precious and new and interesting there. I must say, in all the years I hung out at the site, I probably read thousands of poems, but less than five poems stand out in my mind as something really special. I tell you why that’s interesting: Most of the time I read and critiqued poems on the 101 forum, but peeked into the other “higher” forums often, and frankly, though it was obvious that at the higher levels the poems were very well-written, more polished, better crafted, and despite the fact that many of the authors were intelligent and highly educated people who could write long explications and critiques of the posted works citing everything from the Bible to Marx, the poems still failed to really “bang the bong,” as Jack Grapes puts it in his poem about poems I Like My Own Poems. Not many of them came close, for example, to the two poems I linked to in the No Place thread. Anyway, there you go, take a look at the site if you’ve a mind to. It is an easy site to use, however, you can only see the workshops and/or use them if you register (see the gotcha above), oh, and there is one other thing I should point out. You know how on other sites, like here at the Reader, you can point out someone’s blog or post is offensive or off-topic or fake? You can’t do that there, you can only express your concerns in a private message to the forum moderators. That’s because the rules are strict re posting and the mods can be control freaks. You aren’t supposed to chat to other members except in private message, you aren’t supposed to discuss other people’s critiques, you aren’t supposed to go off-topic, you must post a set number of critiques for every one poem you post, and the mods do count, and will lock your poems down if you don’t meet the criteria, and there are other rules, written and unwritten, you have to follow. I gave up posting on the site because of the mods, frankly. However, if you like to write poems and you want to workshop them on an online forum, you may want to check out Poets.org, through the above link.
Somewhere on one of these threads I mentioned that I once considered writing a romance novel. Some years ago, I subscribed to a number of romance novel book clubs, as I recall I got in to the first one because there was a free offer plus some gifts involved and the thing just scaled up from there. I read them out of curiosity at first; there would always be some hook that got me to read the story to the end to see how it turned out. Of course they always turned out the same, and after about a year, I stopped reading them altogether. Books like that can be like Whoppers, tasty if you’re hungry, satisfying while consuming, but ultimately forgettable. In all the time I read the books, only one author impressed me with the quality of her writing. I thought, dang, she ought to be writing real books. For all I knew she may have been, and had written this under a pseudonym to make some money.
Anyway, to pursue my idea of writing one of these books, I attended a workshop (yes, I paid to attend!) on romance novel writing, an all day seminar which featured romance novel authors and agents, etc. The authors passed out worksheets which outlined the romance novel formula, they discussed the formula, they talked about the formula, they answered questions based on the formula. Basically, in case this isn’t clear, romance novel writing is formula-driven. If you’re interested in writing a romance novel, there are a number of sites on the Internet that can help you out. Even Wikipedia lays out the basic format. Unless you are a top author, it isn’t terribly lucrative work. The midrange authors don’t get much more than a few thousand (two to five were the figures as I recall) for a manuscript ,and they basically have to flog their own books any way they can and on their own dime.
Finding a good place to workshop fiction on the Internet is something I wasn’t successful at, then, though there may be better options now. I tried out this e-mail system once, where writers would send each other chapters of their work, but as everyone knows not all e-mail systems are compatible, and a lot of times the chapters would arrive in oddly broken up chunks of paragraphs, full of garbled, tangled bunches of characters that you had to get past in order to get to read the material, which by the way, was often not great, well, unless you liked reading chapter after chapter of stories minutely detailing futuristic bionic aliens’ bloody rampages, or narratives of the romantic encounters of protagonists with names like River and Hawk, or you didn’t mind struggling through work that was grammatically challenged, much misspelled, and filled with seemingly random POV and tense shifts, submitted by people who clearly hadn’t read a book since third grade, flunked every English test through their entire academic career, yet still felt deeply that they were capable of producing a novel that would dazzle the world and more importantly and not incidentally make them rich enough to quit their jobs at McDonalds. Look, I think it’s great that people have the impulse to write. The vast and constantly expanding blogosphere proves how prevalent and insistent the desire is to write, to create writing that can be shared with a community of readers; seemingly everybody has something to write and publish somewhere. Blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter pushes aside the convention that one has to be a good writer in order to be published as so much snobbery, in favor of the democracy of nearly limitless expression, regardless of quality, whether good, boring, or pain-inflicting dreck. Don’t take that wrong, as the late comedian Bill Hicks used to say.
There is a free site, Booksie.com, where you can post writing, "Share Your Poems, Short Stories, Novels, and more with the world," as the logo says. You can leave your threads open for anybody and everybody to read or limit your viewers to only those you invite to follow your work. The site is user-friendly, and has a lot, but not an overwhelming number, of easy-to-use tools available so that you can, for example, apply different colors and fonts to your title, add a story avatar, edit your work quickly and simply, etc. As with most free forums: 99% of what’s posted on Booksie isn’t great reading. Let’s say you post a draft first chapter of a novel you’re working on. A bunch of people will add comments like “Great! Please read mine, and I will read yours!” Which means they didn’t read what you posted at all, but just want views in order to keep their work on the home page; threads with the most views are featured on the site’s home page and on the story’s genre home page. As you might suspect, the number of views do not guarantee writing worth reading. Still, you can always post your work and invite people to read and/or comment.
Anyway, if you would like to share your writing with the world, those are two freebie sites that I know of that can host you, and maybe even help you work on improving your writing skills. Those of you who need improvement, that is. All you brilliant writers can just post your stuff, so that the rest of the world can be dazzled by your work. Don’t forget to post a link so that the rest of the world knows where to go to be dazzled. Oh, and if you read mine, I will read yours!
So to follow up and expand on a previous thread, No Place For The Poet, I thought I would post a link to Poets.org, which is a free site and a good all-around resources site for poets-in-training. A note about this site: They show really high membership numbers but what isn’t disclosed, unless you ask, is that is that you can open an account, but you can’t close it. People that may have signed up years ago continue to be counted as members whether they’ve posted on the site once or never. In actuality, a fairly small number of core posters use the site to post their poems for read&critique. There are five r&c forums, 101, which is the level for beginning writers, 201, writers whose work has progressed, 301, where advanced and experienced poets, many of whom have been published, post their work (the two other workshops are specialized).
People who like to read poetry know that what we look for is that quality or moment that B.T. Shaw speaks of as “taking off the top of your head” (in the No Place thread I quote B.T. Shaw’s criteria for poems which pretty much covers the topic). I refer to it as the “a-ha” moment, and when I hung out at Poets.org, I was always opening new threads in the workshops like a kid at Christmas, hoping that I would find something really valuable and precious and new and interesting there. I must say, in all the years I hung out at the site, I probably read thousands of poems, but less than five poems stand out in my mind as something really special. I tell you why that’s interesting: Most of the time I read and critiqued poems on the 101 forum, but peeked into the other “higher” forums often, and frankly, though it was obvious that at the higher levels the poems were very well-written, more polished, better crafted, and despite the fact that many of the authors were intelligent and highly educated people who could write long explications and critiques of the posted works citing everything from the Bible to Marx, the poems still failed to really “bang the bong,” as Jack Grapes puts it in his poem about poems I Like My Own Poems. Not many of them came close, for example, to the two poems I linked to in the No Place thread. Anyway, there you go, take a look at the site if you’ve a mind to. It is an easy site to use, however, you can only see the workshops and/or use them if you register (see the gotcha above), oh, and there is one other thing I should point out. You know how on other sites, like here at the Reader, you can point out someone’s blog or post is offensive or off-topic or fake? You can’t do that there, you can only express your concerns in a private message to the forum moderators. That’s because the rules are strict re posting and the mods can be control freaks. You aren’t supposed to chat to other members except in private message, you aren’t supposed to discuss other people’s critiques, you aren’t supposed to go off-topic, you must post a set number of critiques for every one poem you post, and the mods do count, and will lock your poems down if you don’t meet the criteria, and there are other rules, written and unwritten, you have to follow. I gave up posting on the site because of the mods, frankly. However, if you like to write poems and you want to workshop them on an online forum, you may want to check out Poets.org, through the above link.
Somewhere on one of these threads I mentioned that I once considered writing a romance novel. Some years ago, I subscribed to a number of romance novel book clubs, as I recall I got in to the first one because there was a free offer plus some gifts involved and the thing just scaled up from there. I read them out of curiosity at first; there would always be some hook that got me to read the story to the end to see how it turned out. Of course they always turned out the same, and after about a year, I stopped reading them altogether. Books like that can be like Whoppers, tasty if you’re hungry, satisfying while consuming, but ultimately forgettable. In all the time I read the books, only one author impressed me with the quality of her writing. I thought, dang, she ought to be writing real books. For all I knew she may have been, and had written this under a pseudonym to make some money.
Anyway, to pursue my idea of writing one of these books, I attended a workshop (yes, I paid to attend!) on romance novel writing, an all day seminar which featured romance novel authors and agents, etc. The authors passed out worksheets which outlined the romance novel formula, they discussed the formula, they talked about the formula, they answered questions based on the formula. Basically, in case this isn’t clear, romance novel writing is formula-driven. If you’re interested in writing a romance novel, there are a number of sites on the Internet that can help you out. Even Wikipedia lays out the basic format. Unless you are a top author, it isn’t terribly lucrative work. The midrange authors don’t get much more than a few thousand (two to five were the figures as I recall) for a manuscript ,and they basically have to flog their own books any way they can and on their own dime.
Finding a good place to workshop fiction on the Internet is something I wasn’t successful at, then, though there may be better options now. I tried out this e-mail system once, where writers would send each other chapters of their work, but as everyone knows not all e-mail systems are compatible, and a lot of times the chapters would arrive in oddly broken up chunks of paragraphs, full of garbled, tangled bunches of characters that you had to get past in order to get to read the material, which by the way, was often not great, well, unless you liked reading chapter after chapter of stories minutely detailing futuristic bionic aliens’ bloody rampages, or narratives of the romantic encounters of protagonists with names like River and Hawk, or you didn’t mind struggling through work that was grammatically challenged, much misspelled, and filled with seemingly random POV and tense shifts, submitted by people who clearly hadn’t read a book since third grade, flunked every English test through their entire academic career, yet still felt deeply that they were capable of producing a novel that would dazzle the world and more importantly and not incidentally make them rich enough to quit their jobs at McDonalds. Look, I think it’s great that people have the impulse to write. The vast and constantly expanding blogosphere proves how prevalent and insistent the desire is to write, to create writing that can be shared with a community of readers; seemingly everybody has something to write and publish somewhere. Blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter pushes aside the convention that one has to be a good writer in order to be published as so much snobbery, in favor of the democracy of nearly limitless expression, regardless of quality, whether good, boring, or pain-inflicting dreck. Don’t take that wrong, as the late comedian Bill Hicks used to say.
There is a free site, Booksie.com, where you can post writing, "Share Your Poems, Short Stories, Novels, and more with the world," as the logo says. You can leave your threads open for anybody and everybody to read or limit your viewers to only those you invite to follow your work. The site is user-friendly, and has a lot, but not an overwhelming number, of easy-to-use tools available so that you can, for example, apply different colors and fonts to your title, add a story avatar, edit your work quickly and simply, etc. As with most free forums: 99% of what’s posted on Booksie isn’t great reading. Let’s say you post a draft first chapter of a novel you’re working on. A bunch of people will add comments like “Great! Please read mine, and I will read yours!” Which means they didn’t read what you posted at all, but just want views in order to keep their work on the home page; threads with the most views are featured on the site’s home page and on the story’s genre home page. As you might suspect, the number of views do not guarantee writing worth reading. Still, you can always post your work and invite people to read and/or comment.
Anyway, if you would like to share your writing with the world, those are two freebie sites that I know of that can host you, and maybe even help you work on improving your writing skills. Those of you who need improvement, that is. All you brilliant writers can just post your stuff, so that the rest of the world can be dazzled by your work. Don’t forget to post a link so that the rest of the world knows where to go to be dazzled. Oh, and if you read mine, I will read yours!