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WRITERS' Journal

Table of Contents
January/February 2009
Volume 30, Number 1

      .....Editor's Note, by Leon Ogroske 

     It is the time of year when we make New Year’s resolutions. Janet Elaine Smith wants us to join a writers’ group if we don’t already belong to one. Whew, that is one resolution I don’t have to make—neither does Janet. But for those of you who aren’t members of a group, Janet tells you on page 6 why you need to belong to one.

     You know that book inside of you that you believe everyone would enjoy reading? When you get your manuscript to the point where you need to look for a publisher, the information on page 23 that Wallace Wyss offers will show you how to entice a publisher to accept your work. A word of caution when you use pictures from the Internet for a mock-up book cover: be sure you don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright.

     A chore you might want to start is tax preparation. On page 41, Felice Prager shares a method she uses to keep track of her writing income. Everyone should have such a technique. No one best method exists, but Prager’s ideas should encourage you to develop one that will work for you.

     Stefanie Freele’s article about first lines, on page 20, touched home with me. It is inevitable that some contest stories have a slow beginning and maybe after a paragraph or two, will finally hook my attention and invite me into the story. Boring is the only word that can describe such starts. Stefanie offers excellent advice on how you can grab an audience into reading a story or an article. As she points out: turn the reader’s head; get them to look at what you are writing. If you can’t do that, they may never finish the story.

     Taking the idea of crafting a unique story to another level, Jared Doden challenges us on page 48 to create different yet familiar worlds that readers can relate to and in which they are interested.

     I have to plug the book Top Self-Publishing Firms by Stacie Vander Pol, featured on page 1. If you are considering the world of self-publishing, this is a book you must peruse.

     The Write to Win! and Romance contest winning stories all have a similar aura about them. Settle in for a good read.

Leon Ogroske, editor

Columns

  4       .....Readers' P.O.V.

  5       .....Massaging the Muse, Lynne Pisano
           Snapshot

  6       .....Marketing Helps, Janet Elaine Smith
           I Hereby Resolve...

  7       .....Effective Screenwriting, by Christina Hamlett
           What Chekhov Knew About Sitcoms
           His heyday was long before the advent of prime-time comedy, but I often paraphrase Anton Chekhov whenever an aspiring screenwriter suddenly throws a contrivance into the third act that had nary a passing reference in the first or second....

 10      .....Computer Business, by Angela Render
           Tips and Tricks for Better Blogging—Part Two of Three
           Now that you've set up a blog and made a few posts, you're ready to refine your technique and make it a great place to visit. You're also probably wondering whether anyone is reading it and why no one is commenting....

 12      .....Photography Techniques, by Ronald D. Kness
           The Ups and Downs of the Histogram
           Many of today's DSLR cameras and image-editing software programs contain a nifty little-used feature called a histogram. It sounds somewhat forbidding, but it is a great tool to check the exposure of your images....

 56      .....For Beginners Only, by Noelle Sterne
          Beat the Submission Blues
          Are you ambivalent about sending out your work? I used to submit nothing for months and then, when I got a Great New Idea, dash it off and click it out. Certain it would be accepted, I gleefully envisioned finally showing off to my parents, relatives, teachers, and all the boys who'd ever asked my best friend out instead of me....

 59      .....Words...Tools of Our Trade, by Betty Garton Ulrich
           Are They Really "New Mental Hospitals"?
           Unless you follow the British writing scene, you probably have never heard of Hanif Kureishi. I never had until his name and an article about him showed up in the BooktoBook e-mails I receive. It seems Kureishi is a famous screenwriter, novelist, and playwright. He's the one, in a BooktoBook article I received last May, who labeled university creative writing courses as "the new mental hospitals."...

 60       .....WRITERS' Journal Market Report, by Laurie Graziano
            January/February 2009 Market Report Plus, Conde' Nast Media Group
            Innovation is the trademark of any successful publication, and successful publications are always fertile ground for writers, a place where ideas can grow and develop into fascinating copy for readers. This helps boost circulation, enhances advertising revenue, and maintains a positive relationship between the publication and subscribers....

                   Markets: Glamour, The Onion, Wake Boarding Magazine, Birder's World Magazine, Memory Makers, Leading Edge, KITPLANES, Kung Fu Qigong, Family Fun, Power & Motoryacht.

Feature Articles

 15       .....Make Newspaper Reporters Your Best Friends When Promoting Your Book, by Dennis E. Hensley
            Let the Media Help You
            About a year ago a reporter for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain did a big feature story about me and the two books I have written on time management. The story hit the wire service and appeared in more than sixty newspapers nationwide, including The Detroit Free-Press, Indianapolis Star, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Minneapolis Star, and Buffalo News. Needless to say, it did wonders for the sale of those two books of mine, and it also generated numerous bookingS for me to speak at conventiOns, universities, and corporations....

 20       .....Snazzy First Lines, by Stefanie Freele
            Seven Styles to Snag the Reader
            Let's say I'm in line at the grocery store, packages in hand, tired from the workday, ready to drop from exhaustion, when I hear someone behind me say, "My neighbor killed his wife and had the audacity to bury her body in my backyard using my new shovel." what are the chances that I'd perk up my ears? I'd tune in and listen to the conversation. I might even be tempted to turn around to view who is speaking....

 23       .....How to Pitch a Book, by Wallace Wyss
            Help a Publisher Envision Your Book
            Let's say you are all fired up about a book idea, You want to write it. Boy, do you want to write it. But do you have a publisher? If the answer is no, the next thing is to find a publisher either via an agent or by going directly to a publisher....

 41       .....Be Neurotic about Your Record Keeping, by Felice Prager
            Writer Bookkeeping
             Successful writers, despite other obligations in life, get work done well and on time. These writers remember deadlines and meet them....

 42       .....Writers' Notebook
           Novcl Answer..., by Deborah Sergeant
           Query..., by Matthew Thomas, Jr.
           Cartoon, by Richard Tomasic

 44       .....A Few Kind Words about Passive Voice, by Genie Dickerson
           How to Use It to Your Advantage
           Good writers love to use passive voice, but they reserve it for rare and special occasions. Passive voice is a reversal of the normal subject-does-action sentence construction (active voice) to a subject-receives-action one. It creates the reversal by combining a linking verb (form of to be) and a past participle (modifier from a verb) to subtly enhance the writing that fills our bookstores and magazine stands....

 46       .....The Elements of Story, by Diane E. Robertson
           The Ups and Downs of Cinderella
           If you can master the four elements of story, you can write anything, a short story, a magazine article, and , yes, even a novel. The classic short story usually has one major obstacle to overcome. It involves a limited number of characters, generally occurs in one place, and covers a limited amount of time. There is one narrator or point-of-view character, and one major change that affects the life of the protagonist....

 48       .....Fabricating Reality, by Jared A. Doden
           Connect New Readers to Your World
           Only a few storytellers in the history of modern writing have been able to fabricate a masterpiece so riveting that it captured the imagination of the entire world. The nonexhaustive short list in reverse order of popularity is C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Bungie Software (Halo), and George Lucas....

Poetry

 50       .....Every Day With Poetry, by Esther M. Leiper-Estabrooks
           The "American" Sonnet—Plus Much, Much Moore
           I read the cartoon "Garfield" in the Sunday paper yesterday and promptly clipped it. Jon (the lover) is furious that his computer crashed with a nearly complete "passionate and tender" love sonnet to girlfriend Liz on the screen. Garfield (sarcastic cat) gazes at the computer and sniffs, "You didn't crash, did you?" the computer responds, "Even the Internet has its standards."...

 54       .....Esther Comments On..., by Esther M. Leiper-Estabrooks
            "The Painter and the Poet" and "I Will Always Love You"
            "The Painter and the Poet" is a clever sixteen-line lyric with three stanzas of two couplets each, adding up to twelve lines interspersed by a short four-line chorus that follows the first stanza. Interestingly, this chorus repeats the word together and couples the word belong with the word long. Does this repetition work? Yes, in this case it does, and proves and unusual device....