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MWN Blog Archive Paid Publishing Opportunities for July 19th, 2016
Publishers looking for your story or article…
Paid Publishing Opportunities For Writers
7 Magazines that Pay $250 Per Article
These magazines are seeking submissions from freelance writers.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: $200 Per Story or Poem
5 books need submissions now. The deadline is July 31st.
A big list of magazines that pay writrs, organized by category.
Sincerely,
Jacob Jans
PS: Have you recently been published in a magazine, newspaper, blog, etc? If so, please report a payment on Litworth.
PPS: The Poetry Marathon is coming! Learn more here.
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Intro to Poetry: Day 4–Journey and Simile
Today’s prompt for Intro to Poetry is journey. As an extra feature, include a simile.
Struggling…struggling… Maybe this will work. (By the way, this is not autobiographical.)
A Journey Damaged
The flight to the isle of St. Martin
was like a long ride in a carton
from FedEx delivery service
to a place that was making me nervous.
He left no room for discussion.
A different job? No, not an option.
He wanted prestige in his old age,
didn’t care that, to me, this cage
left me without any job choice,
destroyed any freedom and real voice
in this wicked old sham of a marriage
without a good car–or a carriage!
Two decades that I can remember
flew past as a leaf in September.
No choices to life are allowed me;
his close-minded stubbornness stymie
all chance at examining courses
of action, as though they were horses
at auction for “minimum bid” price.
A chance to discuss–it would be nice.
But discussion to him is a lecture
with no questions, but maybe conjecture.
The decision is his, in his thinking.
And I am too old to be sinking
into a life all alone now,
with no one to care or ask me how
I ever got into this marriage
with barely a car or a carriage
(he can’t drive!). I am his chauffeur .
But now I have made him my go-fer.
My mind once was keen and decisive.
Today it is fearful, submissive,
a state that my father would hate if
he knew, when he died, what I’d give
for freedom from shackles of my mind
that this man used to conquer my pride
and choices in life left to others.
If only I had any brothers
to help me regain my ambition–
to change my old fate and position
Of hating to be in this marriage
(without either car or damned carriage!).
For now my life’s journey is damaged.
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Guest Writer Slot
Want to share your writing a bit more widely? Check out this site to see if you can be a guest writer.
If you’d like to see your work in my Guest Writer Spot, please contact me here or by e-mail: esthernewton@virginmedia.com. I accept stories, poems, articles – in fact, anything and everything. All you have to do is make sure your prose is no longer than 2000 words and your poems no more than 40 lines.
This week’s guest writer is Suzy Sharman. Here’s a little bit about her, in her own words:
“I’ve written three novels, all unpublished, but I’ve just started writing short stories. I love how tight the writing has to be and how you can gradually build the story before revealing all. This is the shortest story I’ve written. I hope you enjoy it. I thought I’d go for the holiday theme as my children have just broken up for the summer.”
Holiday Heaven
By
Suzy Sharman
“Where do you fancy going on holiday this…
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The message behind the blog name
Want to increase your blog’s following? Branding is the key. Think about your blog’s name…
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Intro to Poetry: Day 3
Today’s topic is Friend. And the poetry form to try, if I like, is an acrostic.
After dozens of false starts, I finally settled on this taunting acrostic…
…although it seems to have little to do with “friend.” I should have made that more clear. Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.
Joseph
Just heard thunder and then rain.
One extraordinary brain
Sits at his desk, focused in;
Evening sets on this sin.
Perhaps in my dreams I’ll remember
His birthday’s the eighth of September.
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Intro to Poetry: Day 2
Poetry is hard work. I’ve successfully avoided writing poems most of my life. But to improve my writing, I need to paint word pictures. No one in the world does so better than a true poet. I don’t expect to get good at it, but I would like poetry to work for me as I continue to tackle prose.
The Day 2 assignment is to write a poem about a face. As an enhancement, alliteration is encouraged. Both of these are, to my mind, major challenges to my abilities, meager as they are. It is possible for me to tackle one or the other, but I doubt that I can put both together into a single poem, especially one on faces. But all I have to do is sneak one little alliteration into my poem…
So here is what I did. I played around with alliterative phrases–one for each letter of the alphabet. By my rules, they didn’t have to make sense so long as these phrases had words that started with the same letter or sound. I came up with things like “icy ink on night’s indigo canvas,” “another ancillary axiom,” and “puckered pouches of purple blooms.” And those are just for three letters. There are at least 23 more to which I won’t subject you. Then I wrote a short poem–not about faces– that I share below.
Next, I went to work on the subject of faces. I could probably do a decent description of someone’s face in prose, but we can all do that. Writing a poem about a single face was not coming to me, so I finally decided to skirt the issue.
*
The Face
To write about another’s face
Escapes my pen; and yet I trace
Mere words to conjure up the place
From which to pluck from random space
The one face.
*
The tangled mess of memory–
Twined, twisted bits of sensory
Pieces of my hidden thought–
Yields the key which I ne’er sought
Of that face.
*
And so I cobble, portrait-wise,
Some words to muddle and disguise
My weakness, set to floundering lies,
That I have buried all the ties
To one loved face.
**
And here is the result of playing with alliteration.
*
Scarlet Sunset
Light-rimmed rings of wrinkled waves
Meld with shallow crab-filled caves
On creamy, colored coast-bound planes
As scarlet Sunset’s shimmer wanes.
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Before tomorrow, I want to tackle the html coding modifications to control space between lines within a poem’s stanza. I don’t like all the space between regular lines. I put in asterisks to delineate stanzas and the end of a section, but that looks dumb and the spacing between lines looks even worse.
On to tomorrow!
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Intro to Poetry: Day 1
Poetry is a writing form I avoid. I don’t paint word portraits or scenes. I fail at rhyming. But I am taking the Intro to Poetry tutorial offered by Bloggers U. The “why” of it is too complex. Call it a learning thing.
Day 1 topic is water. Form suggestion is haiku.
I live on a rather circular island roughly 17 miles in diameter. Water surrounds me. And yet, drinking water is not very plentiful. Most of us purchase it imported in bottles–multi-liter ones, personal-sized ones, every measure in between. Water serves as a partial gratuity for workers, a social nicety similar to an offer of coffe or tea, and a highly conserved natural resource. Plants get watered with recycled wash water, showers are turned off during soaping and scrubbing. It is better conserved here among full-time residents here than it is in California during fraught season. Just as in California, we don’t get much rain here, and the mid-day sun sucks up what water it can so clouds can drop it elsewhere.
And so, having set the background, here is my attempt at a haiku to water.
Drip, drip into bowls / ecologists and the dog / rejoice in small sips.
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Blogger’s U Courses
Today was the final day of my 14-day review of Blogging Fundamentals. I have taken courses through Blogger’s U on many occasions. Before the new independent study format, the courses were delimited by specific dates, with limits to the number of participants. They were always a great way to meet other bloggers and exchange information on a real-time (well, asynchronous time) basis. The demand for these free classes was so great that WordPress went to an independent study format within the past year. Using the class’s tag, you can find others just starting as well as posts from previous course takers.
Whether on a formal schedule or in the independent study format, the facilitators are constantly making updates to the offerings. You can take as many courses as you like, as many times as you like, all for free. Each day’s assignment is emailed to you so that you can start the moment you receive it. The courses vary in length depending on the contents and level of expertise associated with the topic. The best part about these tutorials is that you get to “meet” other bloggers and you get to learn from each other. It is not unusual to encounter the same people in a subsequent session that you met in another class, and you get to start building blogging relationships with people who share your interests more closely than you might have imagined.
Whether you are taking a new offering or reviewing a class you have already taken several times, there is always something new to learn, as well as tips on using new WordPress features. The courses are constantly updated to keep you current on the latest enhancements. In the year since I took this course last, a number of new features appeared in the lessons, some of which I was simply not prepared to take on at the moment. But that’s OK, because I was working more or less on my own (although help is never far away when it is needed), and could advance to the next lesson knowing that I can come back to the skipped topic when I am ready for it. All I need to do is keep the link to the course, or hold on to the email message.
Take a moment to browse the offerings and register for a class today. Click here to get to Bloggers U.
As I move on to another class,
Happy Blogging!
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Posted in About Blogging, Blogging Fundamentals
Tagged Bloggers U, Blogging U, bloggingfundamentals, day 14, educ_dr, WordPress Courses
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Just Another Plea for Blogging Help
This blog really needs your help and input.
Today’s Blogging Fundamentals (Day 14) assignment is to create a regular feature, like Freaky Friday Fotos or Mundane Monday Musings. OK. I made those titles up, but the point is that I need ideas for a regular feature (daily, weekly, monthly) that would encourage you to read and interact with my posts.
When I was sharing Zentanges and Zentangle Inspired Art, more people began to visit my site. Interestingly, although reaction was to the art, I was actually experimenting more with writing and writing style, as I don’t think I have yet found my writing voice. I simply forgot to address the writing in most of the posts. Also, in the earlier days of this strand, I was sharing my musings as I created the tangles. As I became frustrated with some of the lessons in the book I was following, I moved away from the pondering–in actuality as well as in my blogging. So maybe the earlier type of blog is more interesting to readers?
Also interesting to me is that I seem to lean toward critiquing rather than just presenting. The problem for me with critiquing is that I have a tendency to speak to the dark side, even though my intent is to highlight the positive aspects of a subject. That is definitely something to work on, but not the intent of today’s post.
Over the past few weeks since better internet service was finally installed in our home, I have seen dozens of posts in which blogger’s are asking for help from their readers. Very few of them seem to get responses. Most of the time, the authors are new to blogging or taking one of the WordPress tutorials (likely Blogging Fundamentals, or one of the other introductory courses such as writing, photography, or poetry). Since I generally can’t figure out what the site aims for when asking for suggestions (because the site is so new), I am as guilty as anyone else when it comes to offering suggestions. But this site has been around for a while, and the topics are diverse enough yet clustered enough by content type that I hope you can help me with some ideas you think might work here.
One blog I follow is a photography blog with an original poem added. Another photo blogger does a similar combination. Maybe if I share a Zentangle and related story?
Another blogger I follow posts astrological forecasts on one site but reblogs posts on writing and on photography on other sites.
Another WordPress suggestion is to offer a weekly or monthly challenge of some sort–a writing or photography challenge, for example. But there are so many such challenges that I feel another one would simply be lost among the many. On the other hand, challenges are something a lot of people seem to enjoy, no matter have many there are to choose from.
Maybe my biggest problem is that I am eclectic in my personal interests and in my posts over time. Rather than stick continuously to one topic, I tend to blog on one area for a month, then jump to another subject which may or may not be related. Clearly, I need to narrow my focus.
Are you more interested in one of my content areas more than in others? Which one(s)? Can you add a suggestion for a feature for this area? Any and all helpful comments are appreciated.
Happy blogging!
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Posted in Blogging Fundamentals, Writing process
Tagged bloggingfundamentals, challenges, day 14, Help
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Write of Passage 