Writing Unleashed with Laura M. Harkins

As part of my new position as Online Courses Coordinator with Pennwriters, Inc., I wanted to post information about the newest course. **********   HURRY! COURSE STARTS IN FOUR DAYS! ********** Promotional Basics: Getting The Word Out, When Your Words Come Out Online Course **********  PERMISSION TO FORWARD GRANTED  ********** Pennwriters Inc. brings you... INSTRUCTOR: Babs Mountjoy DATE: August 1 – September 2, 2011 REGISTER : http://tinyurl.com/PennwritersCourse201108      ( LIMITED CLASS SIZE. Enroll now.) COURSE DESCRIPTION: Congratulations! Your book or project has just been published. Now comes the real work: making sure your audience can find your book, purchase it, enjoy it and share it with others , bringing you fame and fortune! Most publishers want to hear about your platform, which includes a website, blog, or other publicity method to sell and promote your product or book across the world. Th...

News Source NYC Poetry Festival  Over 130 poets from all corners of the U.S. will gather on Governors Island this weekend for New York’s first poetry festival , Saturday, July 30 th -Sunday, July 31 st . Check out the official festival website here . What literary festivals have you attended? Source Going Extinct: Copy Editing  Virginia Heffernan discusses the affect of technology on the publishing industry. She says publishing houses don’t hire as many copy editors as they did in the past, which leads to typos sneaking into print . Do typos in published work turn you off or do you find them endearing?     Source YouTube Time Machine  Ever wonder what Leo Tolstoy or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would look or sound like on video? Booklicious Blog posted videos of six famous authors, including Mark Twain and Ian Fleming . What author from the past would you like to hear speak? Contests ...

Source Earlier this week, my sister visited from Pittsburgh. While I recovered from an eventful evening out with her and a few friends, I paged through Writer's Digest magazine. The article "Poetic Asides" challenged readers to experiment with the lune poem. A tercet (three-line) poem with a 5-3-5 syllable format. We collaborated on the following collection of lune poems to immortalize the craziest moments of the evening. A Night Out with My Sister Jeff Moonstruck guy stripped down, stole kisses while he felt the beat. Crazy Broad A scuffle lead to a bottle across the temple. WAWA Drunkin' giggles cause impulsive midnight fatty feast. Give the lune poem a try, and share it in the comments below. 

Source Today Summer Ross is hosting an inspirational blogfest. Check out the details and participating bloggers here . Take a moment and respond to the following writing prompt to explore your creativity. Or learn more about your main character by letting them respond to the prompt. Enjoy! Point to a word or a sentence in any text and write for 10 minutes about whatever you or your character associate to.

F irst sentences carry an enormous amount of responsibility on their shoulders, and writers need to ensure they can bear the weight. Make every word count. Source Think of the first sentence as the “host” of the story. The reader sits down. Eager hands open up the book to the first page. The first sentence greets the reader, setting the tone and voice of the story they’re about to experience. The writer must convince the reader to step over the threshold into the story. Remember, readers want instant gratification. The minute the first sentence makes them wait for something interesting or thought provoking, they get bored. A first sentence, and a good host, balances between an informative and alluring personality.  The first sentence invites a reader in and offers information in order to anchor them in the story. It should grab the reader's attention by engaging their curiosity. A reader supplied with the right questions will continue to read in search f...

News Source Romance Novels Dangerous? Alison Flood reports on author and psychologist Susan Quilliam’s statement about the affect romance novels have on her clients’ unrealistic view of love . Quilliam believes the women get wrapped up in the romantic fiction and struggle to distinguish between fantasy and reality.    Do you think a romance novel can really alter a reader’s perspective of love in the real world? Source Chatting with Beverly Clearly Rachel Brown interviews beloved author Beverly Clearly at age 95 . Clearly talks about writing children’s literature, balancing her family life with her writing career and her two published memoirs. If you could, which of your favorite author’s as a child would you like to interview?     Bringing Poetry and Painting Together Take a look at 11 slides of the art collaboration between poet Edward Mayes and painter Alberto Alfonso . The two men combined provocative first-line titl...

Source The blogosphere's collective thought waves can really help a girl out of a major rut. My writing is on the brain all the time. They just haven't made it to the page in a long time. Every time I sit down, my chest constricts and I panic. It's crap. Then I feel like crap. Once the self-deprecating thoughts suffocate my motivation, I question my goal to be a writer. Waaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah! Note to self: Get your shit together. So, I bring you a few blog posts that reinvigorated my motivation. Around of Words in 80 Days Becky Taylor talks about a writing challenge that helped her make small writing goals to get her writing  every  day. Writing Daily C. Hope Clark discusses writing daily as well. She suggests writing in a specific form every day (prompt, short story, novel, poetry, etc). Here are a few blog posts I found insightful and interesting:  "Forget Your Weaknesses; Attack Your Strengths" A Thrillerfest workshop with Mark Tavani J...

News Turning Tweets into a Novel Asmaa Elkeurti reports on the three-day (July 15-17) collaborative novel writing project to take place during Iowa City’s (1 of 4 cities worldwide designated as a City of Literature by UNESCO) July Book Festival . The project will collect entries on Twitter from anyone with a Twitter account and put them together to create a novel. Greg Prickman, a codirector of the Book Festival, says, “It’s not meant to be a random stream of tweets, it is meant to be a novel in some sense.” Do you think a Twitter-collaborative writing project will be successful? internationaloddities.com Shakespeare Gettin’ High Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, is asking to examine Shakespeare’s remains to determine if the author’s genius was drug-induced. A discovery of “cannabis residue (along with cocaine) on clay pipe fragments found in Shakespeare's garden” sparked Thacke...