Writers Unbound

Opportunity: Ready and waiting for you

http://writersinthesky.com/writing-newsletter.html

This will be short and sweet. Yvonne Perry’s Writers In the Sky Blog is widely read. Here’s a fun opportunity to share some work for many to see. Have fun…read on…and share!

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imagination circles and rocks

It’s hard to beat these 2 videos. As writers want to expand their words from text to video or radio (audio) may switch around whaat you might want to say. The old bards found an easier transition, both my memorizing verse or old texts, and then by using song to tell their story.

Your well crafted script may lose its power when tranlated to audio. Sometimes you must imagine how the audience will hear what you want to say. Words then must create conversation and pictoral scenarios. Yes the audience must be able to immediately visualize what is transpiring.

Video provides more challenges. Will the person be comfortable relating verbal iniformation with image? Can the dialogue hold the viewers attention? Will the message empower the viewer?

Given these elements of text, the writer becomes consumed with the multiple inputs necessary to capture the audience’s imagine in very concise clips. How will you arrange image and audio to enhance your work?

If you are confident about procedures to address these issues, please feel free to comment her and we can start a dialogue.
Feel free to copy and share these thoughts. Also feel free to contact me about stories you would like to sahre.

Lydia Gil
News writing workshop
This workshop will address the basics of cultural news reporting and book reviewing for
print and digital media. We will discuss how to find stories, identify markets, conduct
interviews, and get paid for your work.
Lydia Gil teaches Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Denver.
She reports on cultural and literary news for the Hispanic News Services of EFE, and is
the author of Mimí’s Parranda/La parranda de Mimí, a bilingual children’s book (Arte
Público 2007).
Reyna Grande
Novel Workshop: The Nuts and Bolts of Novel Writing
Do you have a novel inside you waiting to emerge, but the idea of writing it seems
daunting? In this workshop, you will receive tips on how to start your novel and how to
keep the momentum going until the end. You will also learn the key craft points of novel
writing (plot, structure, point-of-view, setting, character, voice, etc.). There will be an
in-class writing exercise if time allows.
10

Hopefully this is not a repeat. If it is, my apologies. The National Latino Writing COnference has many talented writers and faculty prepared to discuss important information and issues regarding publishing and writing for Latinos. I hope many educators also attend to learn more about their potential students. True writers never attend school and learn along the way to find their voice and style.

Don’t miss this packed full of information event. If you can’t attend, connect with faculty to see if videos and transcripts will be available.

Look where others pass by, and riches will be yours

This fine video can provide much insight for you as a writer. Actually as I love Canada, someday I may even read this mystery. Writing always challenges the writer. Penney mentions that sometimes imagination provides greater results than the research. I prefer knowing the landscape, cultures, so that I might visualize the richness of place as a landscape painter might. At that point my questions gallop forth to the adventture that emerges from place and feeling.

Everyone has their own method to get the work started. Once begun the process unfolds as mystically as the historical elements you seek to capture. Perhaps writing also creates a game of hide and seek. The characters give you glimpses of who they are and what will unravel as you move into their territory and mindset.

Characters too can take on a life of their own helping you can experience about their relationships to nature, otehr people, and even props. Your success rests on their development and believeability. Unfortunately the writer has greater competition than ever with all the elctronic media that makes a story easy to consume.

Alas sculpting with words provides better for exercise for each brain willing to engage in the adventure. May your words compel the reader to walk alongside you and drink of the magical word…

Judith Ann (J. A.) Jance (born October 27, 1944) is an award-winning[citation needed] American author of mystery and horror novels. She writes at least three series of novels, centering on retired Seattle Police Department officer J. P. Beaumont, Arizona small-town sheriff Joanna Brady, and Diana Ladd Walker. The Beaumont and Brady series intersect in the novel Partner in Crime, which is both the 16th Beaumount mystery and the 10th Brady mystery.

Jance was born in South Dakota and raised in Bisbee, Arizona (the setting for her Joanna Brady series of novels). She is a graduate of the University of Arizona. Before becoming an author, she worked as a school librarian on a Native American reservation, as a teacher, and selling insurance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._A._Jance

Ah, the details of what happens after selling life insurance! I used to sell insurances. Your homework assignment is to find 20 helpful clues to how to expand your expertise from what you learn about J.A. Jance.

Ever been to Bisbee AZ? How big is it? How many writers live there? My real point is that no matter where you start, you can create a fantastic journey as a writer. Also could you learn skills to produce as many books as JA Jance? This takes a real love of writing and true discipline to get the job completed!

Let’s go explore another writer.

Open to your visions photo by: Mary MacIntyre

These videos are fantastic. If you can come to the booksigning, you can share the inspiration provided from this multi-talented performer.
Make sure to go to the end of this blog to see another video. Read more too from the previous blog.

If you cannot attend the opening, then get some of his music and books! They bothe are powerful! Enjoy.

Booksigning at: Thursday May 21st
Clear Light Book Gallery
Featuring
Cookbooks, Children’s, Native American, Hispanic, Southwest & Holistic Books,
Special Order Desk, Discount Books & Posters, Southwest Gift Items & Art, Holiday and Note Cards, Hispanic Retablos & Handmade Straw-Inland Crosses, CDs from Local Musicians & More
FREE COFFEE & COOKIES

My buffalo day

Wow! These are fine stories. I really like the illustrations too. Did you watch the videos. Stop here and go back and watch. Especially if you are a parent or teacher. I wish every town had such a contest to nutre the young writers all around us. Imagine such work from children 3rd grade and under.!

Also question what happens to our imaginations by 5th grade? What do we lose as we get older. If your children can tell grand tales now, tape or video them. Encourgage them for our future generations. Where do writers come from when they have no support, encouragement or time to write? (Hmmm, many of would be hard pressed to a nswer that question).

Also this is a terrific time to enjoy children’s books. They are beautiful, awaken curiousity, a nd are just plain old fashioned fun. No age limits are required. Need a break fro adult responsibility? Read 10 kids books or even, I’ll whisper this, 10 comic books. You don’t have to hide them anymore. Imagine what would happen if you sat down in the lliving room and started reading your fav comic book. Think the kids might gather round, tease you, and want to read along?

If your children are older, get an age appropiate book and take turns reading to one another. After a few chapters, encourgage them to make up a short story. Or interview (pretend) the author. Being silly is allowed. Make books, communications, and imagination fun and permisable in your home. Life will get better.

Fiction appeals to many of us. Afterall, a good story and a great escape fills many needs. Reading also provides some restful time alone. Here too lies some truths, some insights, and hope for everyone’s imagination.

Included in this video, is some non-fiction reviews too. I love discovering new stories, even when half the reading world may already know them. I love journals and tales from past times, because the provoke our ability to challenge ourselves. These women have stood beyond expectaions and forged lives that created opportunity and accomplishment. Perhaps these interviews and readings will provide you entertainment and plant seeds for your futurue embellsihments.

Or if you like many of my friends, you will enjoy the luxory of resting and reading. Style and structure may not lure you into creating new works. The story is what matters, and escape creates fine entertainment.

If you like these review blogs, if learning more about a book or author intrigues you, let me know. Let reading fill your days with vivid images. May your imagination blossom and brain excercise. Share your books with friends, Share ideas with friends. Encourage your kids to learn to love reading as well. Reading is good for the soul, our culture, and our faith. Expand your life everyday by reading something.

I harp on reading often. Writing and reading are like cooking and eating. You can’t be a great cook if you don’t enjoy the flip-side pleasure of savoring a well-prepared meal. The two are one, and often it is a love for reading that leads you to a love for writing. But then you take the step into “being a writer,” and in all the writing, editing, critiquing, submitting, you lose the hunger for a good book.

Or you think you do. I theorize that the book-hunger never dies. It idles, while your energy is spent on creating. It rests while you produce. When you feel your freelance bones beginning to dry up, though, it’s time. Open your mouth. Eat up.

There’s a difference between eating to survive and eating to be satisfied, and there is the same difference between reading what you must and reading to be refreshed. A loaf of bread and a cup of water might do you for the former, but you need a thoughtfully prepared and seasoned array for the latter. A few dry, non-fiction articles, bullet-pointed tip lists, and a lengthy blog selection will get you through the day and get your pieces produced, but you need a real book, an eat-it-up book for those writing bones to be rejuvenated.

Don’t skimp on your reading. You may think you have no time for a novel or a thick biography or a volume of poems. You do. You must find it. You must make it. Your writing, in a way, does depend on it.

You need the food of words and stories to fill you up, unconsciously, as you delight in the sheer experience of them. There are too many times when you must read simply to accumulate information. Be sure that those are not the only times you read.

Check these sites for reading recommendations:
The Book Stacks
Genre Fiction
Blue Archipelago
Book Reviews for Real People
One-Minute Book Reviews

Make it a good day.

Image Credit: kygp.

Emma Brown begins with Charlotte Bronte’s manuscript, then continues with Boylan’s novel. The transition is seamless, which tells you how well Boylan picks up on Bronte’s style and tone. I didn’t know where the shift occurred when reading the book; The Reader’s Guide at the end of the book explains Boylan’s method.

“Keeping close to Charlotte’s superbly individual style was, of course, another challenge. She is absolutely the only writer I know who can combine irony and melodrama and there is a very distinct rhythm to her sentences. …The other distinctive feature of her writing is a sort of maternal storytelling, “gather-in-reader” sort of feel, which is very attractive…”

Boylan’s adaptation of her own style to Bronte’s is done well and allows the story to flow with a feeling of the same kind of dialogue, description, and self-inspecting vulnerability that makes Jane Eyre timeless. I do think, however, that Boylan allows the plot itself to slip into pile after pile of lurid scenes, amoral villains, and some “aha!” connections that don’t quite fit. They’re not necessarily antithetical to Bronte’s style, they’re just an exaggerated version, without quite enough of the deep character development and subtle foundation that we find in Bronte’s work. Boylan addresses this difference:

“As [Bronte] began to explore social conditions in London, she could not have avoided coming across the wicked exploitation of children and would have felt the need to write about it. I don’t suppose she could have been explicit as I was, although she would have undoubtedly found some ingenious way of saying what needed to be said.”

True. The book would have been more satisfying if Boylan had pushed herself a bit harder to find her own ‘ingenious way of saying what needed to be said’ rather than relying on the modern technique of explicit description. Still, her style is praiseworthy and the book itself is an enjoyable weekend read.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

I would stay up until (10pm, 12am, 2am, all night long): until 12 am to read this book.

Have you read it? What did you think?
Have you written a review? Let me know and I will link to it.

Make it a good day.