Whether to use Your or You’re

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Your: is the possessive form of you; something belonging to you. ‘Can I have your autograph, Barbara Streisand?’ 

You’re: contraction for you are. ‘You’re a fool if you think I’m giving anything to you.’

Essential Writers Website Reviewed

Essential Writers, a website run by Judy Darley, has a professional but welcoming feel about it. It carries a startling amount and variety of information, advice and related experience, all relevant to those writers who are serious about their craft.

The ‘News’ heading lists stories that are topical at the time of posting and these are kept current, maintaining a steady stream of interesting and pertinent topics.

Under ‘Jobs Etc’, you’ll find actual employment opportunities interspersed with current requirements from publishers of all types. As I write this, the first 3 items on this page are a job for a Deputy Editor to work on a magazine in Abu Dhabi, and invitation to submit monologues to an online literary journal and a job offer for a sub-editor for in-flight publications. There is a lot more on this page, so if you’re looking for employment or a place to send your latest creation, I suggest you visit this one frequently.

The ‘Resources’ Tab opens a drop-down menu listing Books, Courses, Films, Magazines, Websites, Publishers and Literary Agents. Under each heading, you’ll find expert opinion, insider tips and advice, reviews and details. There is so much under this main heading that I don’t have the space to give full details. I can only urge you to visit and have a look for yourself at this treasure trove of essential information.

The ‘Essential Words’ tab opens to display the words of published professionals from the writing world, relaying experiences and providing advice for all who want to succeed in their writing. An excellent resource.

Under ‘Genres’ you’ll find a series of 20 separate in depth articles by well known writers on many different genres.

‘How to...’ leads to 21 different topics dealing with subjects as diverse as how to Benefit from Rejection, through how to Manage Your Time to Writing for Online Magazines. Full of nuts and bolts advice and information.

The ‘Competitions’ tab reveals details of many writing contests, giving insight and background instead of the usual bare facts. This just might give you a head start in that competition you want to enter.

‘Forums’ will take you to a long list of forums, both current and historic. Many topics are discussed here and involvement is invited.

‘Blogs’ are posted by members, so they vary in frequency, topic and length. This is a page you might visit for inspiration, news or simply entertainment.

The final tab is ‘Welcome’, which is the page that will open if you click on the title to this blog. It outlines the purpose of the site and explains how to become involved. It also has links to the relevant Twitter location

http://twitter.com/EssentialWriter and the Facebook Group http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=77952782648

This is a really well-thought out and produced site, covering a multitude of topics and providing a great deal of information, advice and news for writers who are serious about their craft. It’s one of my favourites and I happily recommend it.

 Word of the Day is divorced from the post that precedes it and produced in response to a request from a follower to provide just such a service.

Word of the Day; bombast – empty, inflated, language that is puffed up, high-sounding rhetoric. ‘As a politician, Percival was incapable of plain speaking and couldn’t call a spade a spade but must refer to it as a hand manipulated vertically employed earth moving device, which, of course, pissed off most people.’

The Joys and Perils of Peer Review Sites.

Do you belong to, or have you thought about joining, a peer review site? I’ve dabbled with Authonomy, YouWriteOn (publishers of my novel, Breaking Faith), The Word Cloud, Critters and a few others. There are a number of negative aspects to these sites and some positives, which are dependent on the attitude and efforts of the user. The following is in no way a judgement on any of these sites, simply an explanation for those who have no experience of them. I have deliberately included information only on sites that offer free membership and of which I have personal experience.

Some of these sites offer to bring your work to the attention of Agents and/or Publishers. I capitalize these simply to echo the importance the sites place on this contact. However, in order to reach this lofty perch, authors are sometimes required to climb very slippery poles and to spend hours cultivating the positive reviews of their peers. Others, however, have a more sophisticated approach to the idea and merely require that the author reviews as many of his peer’s works as he can. Both have the disadvantage that numbers are the mainstay of success. This basically means that a writer has to be prepared to devote a great deal of valuable time to activity that is only tangentially connected to their writing.

The actual process of criticising the work of fellow writers, however, has a benefit that many writers seem not to appreciate. By properly analysing the works of others, a writer can identify common errors, banalities, excesses and clichés. Lessons he can then apply to his own writing, improving it and making it more marketable. So, this can be not only an altruistic activity but one which benefits the critic.

Sites like Authonomy, where the outcome of the race toward the top of the league table is down to an open public voting system, have the disadvantage that they demand a huge amount of time and effort from individual authors in acquiring votes. Because they rely on the number of positive votes cast by other users of the site, the danger is that those who have most friends willing to support them and/or those who are willing to give reciprocal votes to other writers regardless of quality, the outcome is not dependent on quality of writing but on popularity. This does nothing to improve quality, wastes a great deal of time, and provides sometimes unworthy writers with a prize they don’t deserve. After personal experience of this negative system, I avoid such sites. Sound like sour grapes? It might. But my experience was a short one and I was saved the waste of too much time when I realised what was actually happening. It was a game I was not prepared to play.

The advantage of sites like YouWriteOn is that critics work both anonymously (as far as the author of the critiqued work is concerned) and that critics don’t choose which works they analyse. The selection is done by the site and on a one-to-one reciprocal basis. The critic gets one review of their own submission for every critique they do of someone else’s work. Of course, this means that the more critiques you do, the more reviews you receive. Again, success in the league tables involves a lot of non-writing time. But, at least the selection process has nothing to do with popularity of the author, or deals done between site members.

The rewards of success on such sites are very real for the winners. Whether or not you want to involve yourself in such competition, however, is down to personal judgement.

Word Cloud has no such rewards on offer and simply offers new writers the opportunity to have their work examined and reviewed by other writers. That some of the writers will be inexperienced must be accepted. But, it is worth remembering that inexperienced writers may also approach your writing in much the same way as potential readers would. This site also runs a social networking forum, which many will find helpful and supportive.

Critters is devoted to stories in the genres of horror, science fiction and fantasy only. It has a huge membership and is run on strict lines to avoid the worst excesses of the jealous and the crass. Because a number of members are youngsters, there is a policy of rating work so that overtly sexual and/or violent pieces don’t get into the hands of those not mature enough to deal with them. The site operator also offers other services to members, including a recent offer of free advertising for members books. There is no contest here, other than for who produces the most crits each week, but there are rules. In order to have your own work reviewed, you must do a minimum number of crits in a given period. In practice, if you do one a week you’ll be able to have your own work ‘critted’ about every five weeks or so. The quality of writing varies enormously as there are children offering pieces alongside professional writers. But it is the very variety that attracts me, plus the opportunity to help and guide youngsters early in their writing careers. It’s great to think you might prevent some young writer spending years making the same mistakes you’ve learned to avoid.

This post has necessarily only scraped the surface of what is a huge topic, but I hope it has helped give a flavour of this activity to those who have never tried it.

So, whether you participate or not, at least you’ll have some understanding of what’s involved. I can give only a personal and limited idea of the benefits and disadvantages, but I hope I’ve given some food for thought and helped some writers to avoid the pitfalls of what can be a very time-consuming but ultimately rewarding activity.

Word of the Day is divorced from the post that precedes it and produced in response to a request from a follower to provide just such a service.

Word of the Day; xenial – concerning friendly and/or positive relationships to foreign people or lands. ‘After years living abroad, Valerie developed an open and xenial attitude to foreign visitors to her home, welcoming contact with other lands.’

Writers Services Website; a review.

Writers’ Services has over 2000 pages of advice, information and tips for writers. Most of the resource on this website is free, with some professional services offered at a charge. (As is my habit, I’ll concentrate on the free stuff; it’s up to the website to market anything they want you to pay for). There is a monthly online magazine, packed full of news and comment and columns from well established figures in the writing world. An up to the minute News section details all things writerly, as they happen. The Comment section holds information listed under a great variety of headings and has links to the archives so you can find items published in previous years. Under ‘What’s New?’ you’ll find diverse articles; e.g. 26 July 2010 headings are: John Jenkins’ July Column – dealing with dialogue; News Review, looking at Amazon; The English Language, publishing world; Comment, looking at translations; Latest changes in the book world, where Chris Holifield looks at Creative Commons; and more.

Writers’ Web holds information and articles on everything to do with the web as it applies to writers, including links to free software, quantity versus quality, inexpensive printing, security, etc.

But it is the Resources pages that really make this site stand out from the crowd. Here you’ll find reviews of books and software, listings of agents, self-publishing facts, educational matters, health and safety advice, and there’s a new feature, reviewing writing magazines.

You’ll see there is a great deal of information on this site. It’s well presented and easily navigated, which is as well, considering the number of pages. It’s a site I browse often and I think you’ll benefit from a good look at this one.

Word of the Day is divorced from the blog that precedes it and produced in response to a request from a follower to provide just such a service.

Word of the Day; utopia – From the title of a book by Sir Thomas More (1477-1535) – an imagined place where everything is ideal; an impossible state of social perfection. ‘Julie stumbled out of her daydream into a world of everlasting blue skies, gentle people with friendly dispositions, and a complete absence of commerce and thought she had found her utopia.’

Review of Writing Calendar website.

Sally Quilford’s Writing Calendar is a must for those who like entering writing contests, and for those who are unsure whether they should. Those to whom this world is a closed book will find a great deal of useful information here. I like the site because Sally takes the trouble to filter out those contests where the prizes offered are not really prizes at all but inducements to buy something.

She itemizes competitions in a number of different ways but the calendar theme is expanded by her way of prioritising those contests that are soon to close. She lists the contests by month, with the current month at the top of the long list.

Monthly, quarterly, semi annual and annual competitions are also given their own spots.

Her Competition Tips is worth a read, especially by the uninitiated and by those who think the rules don’t apply to them (you know who you are).

Ask Sally is a compilation of appropriate questions and answers on the topic of contests and full of sound advice.

As a bonus, she includes some of the articles she has written for the excellent Writers’ Forum Magazine – more great advice.

And, generous soul that she is, she includes a page listing other websites that list other writing contests. All in all an excellent resource and one I turn to frequently.

Word of the Day is divorced from the blog that precedes it and produced in response to a request from a follower to provide just such a service.

Word of the Day; vainglorious – excessively vain, boastful, proud of own abilities etc. ‘Gregory, a small man with a smaller mind but a reputation for his vainglorious expositions, constantly boasted of his achievements until everyone stopped listening due to boredom.’

Review of website, Duotrope.

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Duotrope is a wonderful site that lists 2950 fiction and poetry markets. The listings are updated very regularly and they include such vital information as whether or not any given magazine, anthology etc, is open to submissions at the time of your search. You can search by word count, genre, sub-genre, payscale, theme and a number of other factors. The site allows you to build your own set of favourite markets and those you wish to ignore. It offers a sophisticated, yet easy to use, submission tracker. And all this is free. There are two dedicated weekly newsletters available, one for poetry and another for fiction. They publish the names of successful submitters in these as well.

There’s a deadlines calendar, giving the dates of upcoming anthology and other deadlines, to keep you on track.

And in their ‘Curious?’ feature, you’ll find details of such things as the top 25 responding markets, the slowest, those most likely to accept and those more likely to reject.

That all this comes absolutely free (though, they do quietly ask for donations from time to time) is amazing. I have used the site for years and continue to do so. It’s a great resource with links to all the magazines and publishers it features. Really worth having a look at this one.

Word of the Day; malapropism – the silly misuse of words; using one word in place of  another that sounds similar but has an entirely different meaning. ‘Like, if you grab hold of a broken plug you’ll suffer from elocution but if you mend it with erudite you’ll be safe, see?’

Interviews on how to write successfully.

A really good set of interviews given by Mike Herberts with Philip Martin (of Doctor Who fame). You just have to sign up, and it's all free and without obligation. Definitely worth the time to listen to these.

http://howtowritesuccessfully.com/