Word Pirates

Every so often my Mom, who is an artist, talks about entering art contests held by, say, the National Parks Foundation or California State Parks. They are what I call literal art contests. They don’t want imagery or symbolism or abstraction–they want pictures of the parks. Half Dome in spring or a deer grazing on […]

I have a really hard time coming up with titles for things that I write, or naming things in general. After coming up with a killer first sentence, I forget that the first thing people will actually read is the damn title.
I normally end up with a boring title, erring on the safe side so […]

Short and sweet because I’m busy:
Feb 5, 2008 meeting: Word Pirates wrote for 20 minutes based on the titles of Goya’s Caprichos.
Feb 19, 2008 meeting: Word Pirates shared tales of living in the Bay Area and then wrote an essay around the “My Word” section of the San Francisco Chronicle. Guidelines here.
~ Joy

Word Pirates,
Remember that time I had us do an exercise around the Modern Love column in The New York Times. Well, dig those out and start working on them, because they could get you a book deal.
The New York Observer has an article on how many book deals have come out of that column. Apparently […]

Hmmm… What do you think? Should I install a staircase like this in my house?

More here
~ Joy

Kelly Spitzer of “SmokeLong Quarterly” and Ellen Parker of “FRiGG” ask a group of writers about money … Do you only write for publications that pay? Do you pay reading fees and contest entry fees?
They seemed to agree that pay wasn’t a concern when considering where to submit their stories.
Dave Clapper, also of “SmokeLong Quarterly,” […]

Zadie Smith refused to award a prize in a contest she was judging because no one was good enough for her.
This is a difficult thing to write. Just like everybody, we at The Willesden Herald are concerned about the state of contemporary literature. We are depressed by the cookie-cutter process of contemporary publishing, the lack […]

I am torn. The person who wrote this is one of those self-satisfied people I usually ignore, and yet I rather agree with his 101 Reasons to Stop Writing so far. Especially No. 1: You Don’t Buy Books.
One of the things I got from the Word Pirates’ experiment with NaNoWriMo: By the end of the […]