Free Rice!

Freerice.com is a vocabulary building site that fights world hunger. It's one of the best things on the web. If you love words, if you love humans, if you have ten minutes and are looking for something to pass the time, this is a great site.
The creators of the site arrange for rice to be purchased with the money paid for adspace on the main page. Players earn 'rice' each time they guess the correct definition for a word. Words become increasingly more difficult as you play.
If you look around the site, you'll find a page that show the total amount of rice they have donated by date. First, be amazed that people playing a word game have helped distribute more than 14 billion grains of rice in about 10 months. But then, notice that donations have dropped since last December. I imagine that there has not been a great publicity push for the site since then. So this post is my little publicity push for them; and if you like the site, maybe you'll push a little, too.

August Writers' Magazines

Great articles and advice abound in this month's issues of Poets & Writers, The Writer, and Writer's Digest:

My favorite living poet, Billy Collins, is on the cover of Poets & Writers' September/October issue. His new book, Ballistics, releases September 9th. P&W looks at Collins' career and life, and how he succeeds by focusing on his readers.
Even if Mr. Collins doesn't make you dive headlong into this issue, P&W is always worth a look. Besides the cover story, this issue contains articles on making your own chapbooks, getting an agent, and 100 Writing Contests with Upcoming Deadlines.

After you've made your chapbook by hand, you'll need a website to promote it, and that's what Writer's Digest promises this month: a how-to for turning a website into a wonder. They also show off the winner and finalists of their website contest, and we can all visit and learn from those sites. I have friends whose only website success so far has been to even try -- that puts them ahead of me!
Writer's Digest also offers an interview with Isabel Allende, advice from Debbie Macomber, and more get-an-agent tips.

The Writer for September drew me in with a screaming cover story on 104 Worst Cliches. This list-type article hit the heads of many a nail. But what really impressed me was the magazine's willingness to follow that story with one on exploiting the hidden power of cliches! They present possibilities positively.
There's also a good interview with Tess Gerritsen, tips for successful collaborations, and overall, the you-can-do-it push I always get from The Writer.

We have all of these magazines here at the library (although I'm going to buy P&W; Billy's really my guy, poetically) and I hope you come and enjoy them.

Good news all around

Two exciting bits of news:
Jed Allen, poet and faculty member here at PC, stopped by the library this morning to mention that Jack Evans will be reading on Thursday, August 21st, at Copper Star Coffee. Should be good times; hope you can come by. There's nothing about it on the Copper Star site, but I imagine the evening will get going about 7:30. If anyone out there hears a more definitive time, let me know!
The second bit of news is less exciting to the general world, but I did want to say that I got the CRW Distribution List up and running. Hooray!

Technology blues

I've been trying to update the Creative Writing Distribution list for the English Department here at PC. The list was a long running success that in the last year or so just stopped working. We looked into it last year and Tech support said that there were duplications and misspellings that were causing the creature to crash. Just this week Marty transferred 'ownership' of the list to me and I took the list apart, emailing each name on the list, removing the names that bounced back, and inviting people to let me know if they wanted to be removed or preferred another email address, etc. Made all those corrections, tested the list again, and bang! Failed. I've emailed the tech people for help.
For people who think that writers just sit around scribbling and dreaming: it may be that that's all we're fit for. No, I don't mean that. But technology -- yecchh!

A Live Literary Magazine?

Monsoon Voices is a live literary magazine. You might be scratching your head, wondering how that works -- the answer is, wonderfully! Two crazy Phoenix writers met in a coffee house, confessed their love of literature, fell in love with each other, and started Monsoon Voices. Most evenings end up as a cross between a Paris Salon and a hootenany. Readers, singers and audience members meld into a creative riot. Such madness needs time to simmer, however, so events occur only every six weeks or so. Here is a link to Patrick and Traci's nascent blog: http://monsoonvoices.blogspot.com/
I hope you'll visit the blog, and try to come to a reading. I hope I see you there.

To Blog Anew

It's been 11 months since the last post. I'd started the blog with the idea of featuring Phoenix College's writing classes and events, but several things went wrong: due to money issues, the college cut back on classes and strictly enforced minimum class sizes, so that few of the classes I wanted to take actually occurred; the Microburst Writers' conference here on campus coincided with a diabetes complication, so I didn't get much out of it; and generally, I felt a bit of disappointment with all things PC/writing for the past year.
So on returning to the blog I'm going to focus on writing in general, family in small, and people I know and like, specifically. There are several writers I'd like to talk to and then tell you about. Some friends of mine have a 'live literary magazine' that makes me very happy. And my husband and kids have some news that, while not literary, makes me want to write. And so I will.
Soon.