Here is the somewhat overdue update on the fabulous Word Pirates writing group.  Thanks to the potential new members who came to check out the group. We hope to see you again. If you have any questions, please feel free ask.

1. As mentioned before, the regularly scheduled July 5 meeting is canceled. Instead, we will be meeting on July 12. Steve has generously offered to hold this meeting at his house as a cookout. Directions to his house and a sign-up list of things to bring to follow. We agreed to start the meeting at 6:30 since eating is involved. (But if you can’t make it until 7, we understand and will make sure you still get to eat some, too) Please tell us if you plan to attend this meeting so we can plan accordingly.

2. There will be no second meeting in July. However! The rest of July will not be devoid of Word Piratey goodness. We have planned the August 2 meeting as a critique meeting. We decided the piece to be critiqued shall be an essay (on any topic). Feel free to work on one from one of the prompts, one from a contest you may have found, or one of your own design that you’ve been itching to get feedback on. Please send your essay to the Word Pirates by July 23, no matter what state it is in. Feel free to ask us all questions to get our thoughts on your essay before the critique meeting. We will send another e-mail closer to the due date with an e-mail list and thoughts about what we have found makes for a good critique session.

3. Last meeting, we met new potential members Ross, Jennifer and Diane. After a round of introductions, we read some pieces from previous meetings and dove into the new prompt. For those of you who weren’t there, the prompt was to write a travel piece — fiction or non-fiction, about a real or imagined place. The room was split about 50/50 between real travel experiences and fictional ones. Next meeting we will bring these to read. Feel free to bring along something else to read if you weren’t there for the prompt.

See you soon!
-Marcia

Word Pirates is looking for a new member. The North Bay-based group meets twice a month to focus on creative non-fiction and short fiction. Our goal is to inspire and support each other as we get our work ready for publication. A typical meeting splits time between reading our older work and starting new pieces through writing prompts. We also put on events like our annual reading to expose our work to an audience and participate in the local arts community.

We are looking for someone who is serious about writing and getting his or her work published–or better yet, a working writer who wants to meet with other professional writers for inspiration/fun/etc. The group doesn’t focus on genre fiction, screenplays, or poetry. If you’re interested, please e-mail us a short bio at wordpirates@gmail.com.

Thanks,

Joy Lanzendorfer

Stephanie sent us an article on piracy but I just want to look at the dog dressed up like a pirate.

New mascot?

Perhaps we should dress my new kitten Quill up as such!

~ Joy

I was wondering how they could afford all that fancy packaging! Thought I would share this e-mail from McSweeney’s:

As you may know, it’s been tough going for many independent publishers, McSweeney’s included, since our distributor filed for bankruptcy last December 29. We lost about $130,000 — actual earnings that were simply erased. Due to the intricacies of the settlement, the real hurt didn’t hit right away, but it’s hitting now. Like most small publishers, our business is basically a break-even proposition in the best of times, so there’s really no way to absorb a loss that big.

We are committed to getting through and past this difficult time, and we’re hoping you, the readers who have from the start made McSweeney’s possible, will help us.

Over the next week or so, we’ll be holding an inventory sell-off and rare-item auction, which we hope will make a dent in the losses we sustained. A few years ago, the indispensible comics publisher Fantagraphics, in similarly dire straits, held a similar sale, and it helped them greatly. We’re hoping to do the same.

So if you’ve had your eye on anything we’ve produced, now would be a great time to take the plunge. For the next week or so, subscriptions are $5 off, new books are 30 percent off, and all backlist is 50 percent off. Please check out the store and enjoy the astounding savings, while knowing every purchase will help dig us out of a big hole.

Many of our contributors have stepped up and given us original artwork and limited editions to auction off. We’ve got original artwork from Chris Ware, Marcel Dzama, David Byrne, and Tony Millionaire; a limited-edition music mix from Nick Hornby; rare early issues of the quarterly, direct from Sean Wilsey’s closet; and more. We’re even auctioning off Dave Eggers’s painting of George Bush as a double-amputee, from the cover of Issue 14.

This is the bulk of our groundbreaking business-saving plan: to continue to sell the things we’ve made, albeit at a greatly accelerated pace for a brief period of time. We are not business masterminds, but we are optimistic that this will work. If you’ve liked what we’ve done up to now, this is the time to ensure we’ll be able to keep on doing more.

Plenty of excellent presses are in similar straits these days; two top-notch peers of ours, Soft Skull and Counterpoint, were just acquired by Winton, Shoemaker & Co. in the last few weeks. It’s an unsteady time for everybody, and we know we don’t have any special claim to your book-buying budget. We owe all of you a lot for everything you’ve allowed us to do over the last nine years, for all the time and freedom we’ve been given.

Once this calamity is averted, we’ll get back to our bread and butter — the now-legendary Believer music issue is already creeping into mailboxes everywhere; Issue 24 of our quarterly is in the midst of a really pretty silkscreening process; and in July the fourth issue of Wholphin, our DVD magazine, will slip over the border from Canada, bringing with it some very good footage of Maggie Gyllenhaal and a Moroccan drummer who messes up a wedding in an entertaining way. And then a couple of months after that, we’ll publish a debut novel from a writer named Millard Kaufman. This book is exactly the kind of thing McSweeney’s was created to do: The novel came through the mail, without an agent’s imprimatur, and it was written by a first-time novelist. This first-time novelist is ninety years old. It was pulled from the submissions pile and it knocked the socks off of everyone who read it. Millard may well be the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation, and he stands at equal height with the best of several generations since.

Whatever you can do to help in the coming days, we thank you a thousand times. We’ll keep updating everybody on how this is going over the next few weeks; for now, pick up a few things for yourself, your friends, for Barack Obama. More news soon — thanks for reading.

Yours warmly,
The folks at McSweeney’s

There are musicians who take their turn at being bad writers. (I’m talking to you Madonna!) Apparently, there are also writers who take their turn at being (presumably bad) musicians.

The Rock Bottom Remainders is a band that includes Amy Tan, Stephen King and Dave Barry, among other well-known writers. The article about them in the New York Times wouldn’t go so far as to say they suck, but I’d be terribly surprised if they didn’t. I mean, do we really need to hear Frank McCourt sing “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to”?

I’d like to think this is some elaborate statement about people using their fame in one field to create a vanity project in another field they would otherwise be too unskilled to break into. But I sometimes make things too complicated.
Then again, maybe they would blow my mind. Maybe I need to hear Maya Angelou  cover “Smoke on the Water.”
-Marcia