What impresses me most about Save the Quiet Kitty is that these folks took the time and energy to do it right. This is a registered charity with the IRS and the State of West Virginia. President: Margaret L. Riley Vice President: William J. Riley Secretary: Tina Pavlik Treasurer: Ann Jacobs are to be commended.
Below is reprinted from their website.
Natural disasters like floods, fires, and disability often hit without warning, leaving chaos in their wake. When a crisis hits our friends, we all want to help. The Save The Quiet Kitty Fund is here to help authors in crisis.
From time to time, many of us have organized a short term pool to help an author in crisis — short term crises that called for short term solutions. The Save The Quiet Kitty Fund is designed to be a longer term solution.
(more…)
Lucynda Storey wrote this article on writing rules for her local RWA chapter newsletter. It’s been picked up by numerous other chapters and is added to our eBook Writing Tips category here at WhatWeRead.com.
In Pirates of the Caribbean Miss Elizabeth quoted the pirate code over and again only to be told “They’re more like guidelines.” So are most of our rules regarding writing. Rules have purpose and knowing when to ignore certain writing laws means having an understanding of why they exist.
If you’re like me, you probably have all sorts of novel writing “how-to” books stuffed in your bookcase or piled on your desk. A few are keepers: advice in Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, for instance; Stephen King’s On Writing; or even Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem. These tomes keep company with Webster’s Dictionary; Roget’s International Thesaurus; various Writer’s Digest books; Grun’s The Timetables of History; The Handy Space Answer Book; encyclopedias and a host of smaller reference books.
Then there are the classes: on-line classes generating hundreds of emails; workshops sponsored by various RWA organizations; conferences; seminars; the list goes on and on and generally breeds piles of unweildy paper information you must keep.
Add to your books, hand-outs and other workshop materials your private, personal paperwork and you’ve a breeding ground for all sorts of mini (or not) paper stacks. You know, the piles that replicate with the speed of lemmings and seem to be as suicidal as those Nordic varmints, diving off the carefully constructed heaps sitting perilously close to the edge of your perpetually small desk?
This isn’t an essay on resources and especially not on organization (my desk has rarely been known to have a square inch of available working space). Rather its on the “rules” those piles represent. You may remember in Pirates of the Caribbean the importance several of the main characters placed on the pirate’s code.
So, here are a five of those writing rules we inevitably come across:
1. Don’t use adverbs.
2. Don’t use the word “that”.
3. Avoid contractions.
4. Don’t start sentences with “ing” words or repetitive use of “he” or “she.”
5. Don’t end sentences in prepositions.
(more…)
Here’s more on the writing tips book Ten Steps to Creating Memorable Characters. Written by Sue Viders , Lucynda Storey, Cher Gorman and Becky Martinez. It will be published in September 2006 by Watson-Guptill / Lone Eagle.
Create characters that leap off the page!
Characters are the life force of any novel or movie. They drive the plot. They generate the conflict. They are the story. Ten Steps to Creating Memorable Characters is a one-of-a-kind step-by-step guide to developing truly great characters for any kind of fiction writing. This practical workbook is packed with suggestions, ideas, exercises, and lists to help plan every imaginable area in a character’s “life.” Writers, screenwriters, playwrights—everyone who writes fiction will be able to create their own dynamic, memorable characters with this exciting yet practical book.
- Great for screenwriters, novelists, playwrights, anyone who crafts fiction
- Practical exercises, brainstorming ideas, lists, much more
Sue Viders has written more than 20 books; her latest is The Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines.
Lucynda Storey has written six novels: science fiction, fantasy, futuristic and contemporary romance.
Cher Gorman is the author of the novels Dove Wolf, The Secret Truth, and Dove.
Becky Martinez, a former broadcast journalist, now writes romances, romantic suspense, and mysteries. All of the authors live in Colorado.
Some very exciting stories involve spies and spying. The spy’s shadowy world, unknown to most of us, provides scenarios and situations that keep us interested and make us desire to learn more.Movies like Casablanca, The Bourne Identity and Syriana while all very different, have given us stories of exciting characters in exciting circumstances.So where can you, the author, get ideas for your next novel about that hunky spy or the damsel forced to spy to save something important to her? I am a firm believer that truth is stranger than fiction and there are some very intriguing web sites that publish little known documents casting small rays of light on the world of the spy.
The National Security Archive hosted by The George Washington University has worked very hard to get our government to release documents that tell shed light on the unknown details of events we read about and wonder what the whole story might be. News stories like Cubana flight 455 and drug trafficking is deeply ensconced in the government of Colombia take on new meaning when the facts are known.
Cryptome.org is a site run by a former architect that publishes links to documents like Eyeballing the Russian Embassy, that tells about the history of U.S. and Soviet efforts to compromise each others’ embassies, an interesting explanation of how the bombing of the Hyatt Hotel in Amman fits into the scheme of things and a polygraph handbook.
A site I do not understand but am drawn to regularly is A Spy’s Notebook at tehranstation.com. From its opening image of a letter from the Soviet Embassy to the government of Iran outing a U.S. spy and through the pages and pages of observations and anecdotes accumulated over many years by an obviously well read and intelligent man, I wonder “Who was (is?) this man and why are his notebooks published here?”
I hope these sites pique your imagination and give you ideas of how you might weave elements of real life spying into your stories.
