Women on Writing - WOW and WOW!
Women On Writing is an online magazine and community for women writers. Among major topics are novel writing, indie publishing, author platform, blogging, screenwriting, and more. Lots of contests and general jocularity sans frittering on the part of Earth's most powerful humans.
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Recently another writing friend put a wannabe novelist (WN) in touch with me. It's not that I'm an expert in writing, by any means. This individual was looking for writing feedback, and I'm part of a couple of critique groups. We met at a local coffeehouse. WN wanted to meet me before sharing her writing. I get it. The writers in my feedback groups are supportive and encouraging. However, I've visited a couple of groups which had a few problematic members. Writing something and sharing it--especially something like a novel--is scary. You don't want to just hand over your baby to a complete stranger. Also, what if the person you're handing over your manuscript to is a …
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I’ve been reading quite a few headlines lately about celebrity parents and their lack of hygiene when it comes to their kids (and themselves). And of course, it’s none of my business if these folks want to walk around till they (and their young’uns) smell to high heaven. But every time I see these articles, I think of the same expression. Technically, I see this image in my head, of a baby being thrown out with the bathwater. Because if you go around for who knows how long, skipping baths, you’re going to have some pretty dirty bathwater. At least, that’s where the expression came from, back in the day, when people bathed on the not-so-regular. Honestly, I cringe thinki…
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Today I'm excited to interview Karen Ingram, one of the runner-ups for the Spring 2021 Flash Fiction writing contest. Be sure to read her story IED first, and then come on back to read our interview. First, more about Karen: Karen Sarita Ingram is half Kentuckian, half German, and proudly 100% Army Brat. Her first published story, “The Suicide Artist,” was featured in Touchstone Literary Magazine’s Spring 2012 issue and won the Best Undergraduate Writing Award at Kansas State University’s English Department the same year. When she’s not demanding to speak to your manager, Karen enjoys science fiction and video games. Against her better judgment, she currently resides in T…
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Welcome to Michelle Walshe who is one of our creative nonfiction essay winners for her essay, "The Shape of Loneliness," which you can check out here. Michelle lives in Dublin, Ireland. She began writing in 2017. Her work has been published in newspapers, magazines and two anthologies: Teachers Who Write and A Page from My Life, which was number one on Irish bestseller lists in 2020. Her work is online at Writing.ie, Skelligmichael.com, Athensinsider.com, IrishExaminer.com, CabinetofHeed.com, and IrishTimes.com. Her short stories, memoir, and flash fiction have been shortlisted and won prizes in literary competitions. She has won residencies to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre …
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TBR: Book love is highly personal. Rejection letters are not personal. I know you’ve heard that before. We tell each other that because rejection letters sometimes feel personal. After all, we’ve poured time and soul into the manuscript. Telling us you don’t want it, or worse yet that you hated it, feels deeply personal. I’m not going to stick up for editors or agents who say that they hated something. Or that you should stop writing or whatever. I think we just have to assume they didn’t have a West Texas grandma with a broom. They’d have learned not to be hateful. Recently, I learned just how rejection letters are personal. The book club I’m in just read a myste…
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My daughter has discovered Percy Jackson. This is after she discovered Harry Potter in early 2020, and then Hunger Games once we made our way through all seven books of Harry, and we were still in the middle of a pandemic. And for each one, she was in love with the books--couldn't get enough of them or the characters or the authors. She's in fifth grade this year, and when she discovers something, it consumes her. She's now planning her Percy Jackson Halloween costume and using her allowance to buy a PJ Camp Halfblood shirt. She made a PJ necklace, and she's constantly asking her grandparents and me trivia questions about the plot of Percy Jackson book one, even though w…
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Myna Chang writes flash and micro. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Fractured Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, and The Citron Review, among others. She has been nominated for Best Microfiction, longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50, and named a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Award. She is the winner of the 2020 Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Myna lives in Potomac, Maryland with her family. Read more at MynaChang.com or @MynaChang. interview by Marcia Peterson WOW: Congratulations on winning first place in our Spring 2021 Flash Fiction competition! Can you tell us what encouraged the idea behind your story, “An Alternate Theory Regarding Natural Disa…
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So - here goes - let's talk about friendships, shall we? This isn't me telling you what to do or not to do - it's just a conversation and hopefully it will offer each of us a little something. Grab your favorite beverage (I'll fill my coffee mug) and we can chat a bit. If you're wondering, today's photo headline is me and my best friend on our wedding day - I still say marrying your best friend is a most fabulous idea! Take a moment to remember a friend who meant a lot to you - someone who is no longer part of your circle. They walked away, you walked away, etc... Take a moment to remember a book character you felt close to; someone you were sad to part with at the end o…
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Originally from Colorado, Krista Beucler received a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. She was the Editor-in-Chief for Issue 7.2 of the Rappahannock Review, the literary journal published by the University of Mary Washington. Krista is a winner of the Julia Peterkin award for flash fiction, and her creative work has been published in From Whispers To Roars, and South 85 Journal, and Under the Sun. She can be found online on her website and on Instagram. interview by Marcia Peterson WOW: Congratulations on your top ten win in our Q3 2021 Creative Nonfiction essay competition! What prompted you to enter the contest? Kr…
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I like to keep a list of national “days” handy because it can be helpful when planning content for magazines, podcast episodes, and blog posts. For September, I noticed we have “National Courtesy Month” to celebrate. Here’s what the website has to say about the holiday: There are so many ways to show kindness to people through courtesy. Hold the door open for the people behind you! Mow your elderly neighbor’s lawn! Compliment that shy person you see every day on the subway! Above all, SMILE at everyone you meet! Because this is a blog for writers, I thought I’d talk to about the importance of being courteous to one another. If you’re anything like me, you have highs a…
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Nothing like a worldwide pandemic to make even reading feel impossible. I don't know about you, but somehow over the last couple of years, I lost my love of reading. Like a former relationship, I knew the love had been there once upon a time, but somehow I wasn't feeling that same passion anymore. Luckily, I wasn't alone. I came across countless articles written by my fellow bookworms, bemoaning their loss of reading. (Here's one.) Instead of fighting it, I accepted it. It wasn't like I didn't try to find the right book for me, but I didn't beat myself over it. Jump ahead to 2021. Oh look, the pandemic is still here. Then came a heatwave. Several days of humid 90s, and i…
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I've gotten hard nos--lots of them. Over two hundred (no exagggeration or stretching of the truth) of 'em. When I was trying to get an agent or publisher interested in my book, I submitted it over 140 times. Some replied with "no thanks." Mostly, I got no response at all. No response--in the publication world--means no. Sometimes the agent or press has a long response time, but after a couple of years, I got the message from the majority of the people I queried. They were not interested clueless about how totally brilliant and soon-to-be award-winning my manuscript was. (I mean this jokingly--at least semi-jokingly.) Once, I received a rejection email less than twent…
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Last Saturday, my cell phone rang at 8:10 AM. When I picked it up it read “Nancy Next Door.” Uh-oh. Nancy Next Door only calls when there’s something wrong. A coyote jumping into my yard. A fallen tree on our shared fence. A broken gate…that sort of thing. Naturally, I thought a tree had fallen since A. there are lots of trees in the woods and in my yard that are leaning in a bad way and B. after over a year, I’d finally fixed the fence from the last fallen tree. “Are you home?” asked my neighbor. I was not. I was five hours away, at the beach. “There’s an alarm going off in your house,” she said. “I don’t see smoke but it’s been going off for about 15 minutes.” No …
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Congratulations to Jeanie Ransom and How to Write a Perfect Sentence and all the winners of our 2021 Quarter 3 Creative Non-Fiction Essay Contest! Jeanie's Bio: Jeanie Ransom sold her first story to Seventeen magazine when she was seventeen. She’s written for numerous national and regional magazines and newspapers since, was an associate editor at a bed-and-breakfast magazine, worked as an advertising copywriter, and is the author of nine traditionally-published children’s books. In addition, Jeanie has been an elementary school counselor, a licensed professional counselor, and a Starbucks barista and Coffee Master. She’s participated in workshops at the Iowa Summer…
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As I look up various agents online, I get this strange feeling that I’m playing duck-duck-goose. Here’s an agent that might be suitable – duck. Here’s another one that could work - duck. This one looks like a great match – goose! In kindergarten the goose always gave chase. With agents it is much less certain, but you can improve your odds by putting your best foot forward with your query. Here are three things to remember when crafting your query letter. Out of All the Others, I Chose You Writers approach agents every single day. Some will have done no research beyond finding an e-mail address. These are the people who query an agent who only represents children’s …
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So - here goes - let's talk about friendships, shall we? This isn't me telling you what to do or not to do - it's just a conversation and hopefully it will offer each of us a little something. Grab your favorite beverage (I'll fill my coffee mug) and we can chat a bit. Stop back in a few weeks for part three publishing on the 6th of September!. If you're wondering, today's photo headline is me and my best friend celebrating our engagement over a decade ago - he still makes me smile like this! Let's start with a quote by English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) Isn't that an interesting concept (and clearly not a new one)? I think about this as I start a new book. I'…
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School is back in person for my daughter who is in 5th grade, and we live about a mile from the school. However, you have to cross a very busy street, and it does take about 25 minutes for a kid to walk a mile (this is a distracted kid who will want to stop and smell the roses). Right now, there are not enough bus drivers for kids who live even much farther than we do, and so this makes us car riders instead of bus riders. Many, many more families are car riders this year because of the bus driver shortage. As you can imagine, on the first day of school, this was a logistical nightmare, and I waited in line for about 30 minutes to drop my daughter off. Then, I prepared my…
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Time for some real talk. I’m almost 45 years old and have been working as a freelance writer and editor for a long time. Because the flow of my various projects, gigs and responsibilities has always fallen into that “feast or famine” category, it has taken me almost all those 20 years to come to a realization—I really suck at organization and project management. I’m not complaining, but I’m at a point in my career where I have plenty of writing and editing work, but my organizational skills are abysmal, and people are starting to get irritated that e-mails to me are going unread and I’m tired of apologizing for being overwhelmed. This is not a good trait for a freelance …
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Over the last few months, I lost my writing motivation. I blame the summer along with some difficult job changes. The truth is I just couldn't get back into writing, and when these things happen, sometimes it's hard for me to get back on track. To get into a better place, I have a usual starting point - reading back over previous work. I have a stack of notebooks I'll grab and read through a bunch of old stories that I've handwritten. They aren't perfect by any means - far from it actually - but it gets me back in touch with my writing self. Sometimes getting back into my writing routine usually means I go in two different directions - I write new stories or I go back t…
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Annie Eacy studied writing in Burlington, Vermont. She has since been selling books (new, used, and otherwise) for five years, while working on her own. She traded one city on a lake for another, and now lives in Ithaca, New York with her partner in a tiny apartment that sits among the treetops. She writes poetry, fiction, and essays. Read Annie's essay here and then return for an interview with the author. ----------Interview by Renee Roberson WOW: Welcome, Annie, and congratulations! When did you first know you wanted to be a writer? Annie: I don't know! I was the kid that was always writing -- even before I knew how. I still have notebooks filled from front cover …
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Dream big. Dream a big dream and it might will come true. This idea of seemingly impossible dreams coming true has been swirling in my head for the past week or so. Three things formed a huge confluence in my brain and--more importantly--in my heart. One: I spoke to a friend who told me about the major league game that was played on the Field of Dreams field. I know. Technically, they had to create a new field that met the MLB's specifications, but it was on the same plot of land and since my friend taped it, I got to see the beginning. Seeing the players emerge from the cornfields, I got chills. If you build it, he will come. That was the mantra of the movie. If th…
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I’m writing this post as a reminder to myself as much as to you. Because yesterday I got a rejection email. The day before, I got three. One day last month I got six in one day. This year? I stopped counting after I reached 100. And each was as hard as the last. Isaac Asimov called rejection letters “lacerations of the soul.” Me? I don’t feel lacerated as much as hit in the gut. Rejection makes me feel terrible, & terrible about myself. Jealousy, loneliness, self-doubt: to my lizard brain, a simple rejection is a threat to my human need to belong. But rejection is also a constant, immovable companion: Alexander Chee calls it “the other medium of writing.” I have p…
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Whenever I ask the Oldest Junior Hall how work is going, he always says, “I’m a Busy Bee!” So I’m deep into my pre-writing (all that stuff I shared last time!) and buzzing around myself. But I want to circle back, as the news people love to say, to a part of my pre-writing. Namely, the reading part. Which isn’t writing at all but just as important in the pre-writing process. If you’ve ever used mentor texts, it’s mostly that concept. It’s hugely beneficial for me to read up in what I’m planning to write. Take, for example, a new market that I’ve come across and have an idea I figure will fit. First, I’ll read a bit of the market to get a feel for the style they like. B…
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I feel a bit shocked that it's August already - nearing the end of third quarter for our business and time to go school shopping for most of our littles. We are just wrapping up third crop hay on our farm and getting ready for corn harvest. This is one of my favorite months of the year in my little corner of the cornfield. The corn is taller than I am, and I can't see the road from my patio. We have a long driveway, but this time of year, I have a cornfield as a privacy fence. It's all very fancy if you ask me - my allergies however are a different story. We all have well established farmer tans and freckles and we've cut most of the sleeves off our t-shirts. As much as w…
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Jennifer’s Bio: Jennifer L. Theoret has a wide range of interests—archaeology, paleontology, history, and more, and is involved in her local community. She is an occasional contributor to local newspapers and magazines, and would like to offer an apology to her professors at Johnson State College for taking so long to get back to writing seriously. (It’s been a long “five years”!) Jennifer lives in Vermont with her three dozen orchids and her rather menacing-looking cactus, Mr. Grimm. If you haven't done so already, check out Jennifer's award-winning story "The Care of Orchids" and then return here for a chat with the author. WOW: Congratulations on placing in the Q3 2…
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