NaNoWriMo Pep Talk with Raina Anatra
Ah, November. The month that brought you right to NaNoWriMo’s shores. By now, you’ve probably started your novel — maybe you tested the water with your big toe, maybe you dove straight into the surf. You deserve a big medal for showing up and starting, whether you’re a few dozen words into the challenge or several thousand. Starting is one of a writer’s most useful muscles. It’s what puts us in the flow of momentum. It’s what gets us from “Once Upon a Time” to “Happily Ever After.” And starting is what keeps us going in between. See if you can notice all the times you start writing. You start fresh each day. Start after an annoying interruption. Start after lunch. Start when you don’t want to. Start when you can’t wait to strew words on a page. Start at the beginning of a timed writing session. Start after you walk the dog. Start again even when you have no clue where the story will take you. Talk about flexing your muscles! Take credit for each and every start you can find. And if you’d like, move beyond awareness and appreciation of your awesome starting abilities and let each start become a celebration. Starting is a beautiful expression of trust. In yourself, in your story, in the benevolent Gods of NaNoWriMo, in the massive waves of creativity always moving inside you whether you know they’re there or not. Bravo to you, brave writer. Now start writing. Bravo to you for that as well. ~ Raina Anatra (aka Barbara...
Read MoreVirtual Writers: NaNoWriMo 2020 Event Schedule
NANOWRIMO AT MILK WOOD We are excited to announce that we’ll be hosting a selection of online workshops again this year. Click on the links below to participate at the specific time. These workshops are held in Second Life®. All scheduled events take place online at the Milk Wood Writing Group area (unless otherwise stated) or in the writing room at Book Island (Sundays at 12 noon PT). All are welcome to join us. ══════════════════════════ Writing Workshops & Write-Ins══════════════════════════ Creating Workshops for Second Life®: Writer’s EditionHosted by Mossy Symbiosis Monday 19th October, 20201pm PT / 4pm ET / 9pm GMT Mossy will take you through the process of making a workshop come to life in Second Life®. She’s hosted many circle talks, made worksheets for her own creative purposes, and led people through feedback exercises for their work. She combines the knowledge and skill she’s gained in an easy to tackle format. About Mossy An artist, poet, pagan, philosopher, wounded healer, and dilettante. Mossy hosts open talks on spirituality and open mics for poetry gatherings; she’s led pagan ceremonies and classes on Wicca from a Religious Studies perspective, and has been involved in various Second Life® installations, expos, and exhibits, including showcases of RL photography, poetry, Second Life® photos, drawings, digital art, and mixed media. Mossy is also an amateur builder, novice scripter, and aspiring sound sensation. Feel free to keep up to date with her projects, side quests and intermission missions, by joining her Second Life® group “Mossy’s Glorious Shenanigans“ Click here to be taken to the online event. ——– Writing Through Covid-19 ConstrictionsHosted by Barbara Jacksha (aka Raina Anatra) Friday 23rd October, 2020 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm GMT Feeling uninspired, cramped or constrained by Covid-19 restrictions? If so, you’re not alone. Many writers have found it difficult to focus on their writing projects during the upheaval and uncertainty that the coronavirus has caused during 2020. In this workshop, we’re going to turn the tables. You’re going to learn how to use some of the restrictions you’ve been experiencing to jump-start your writing. You’ll receive writing prompts and some tips designed to get you and your writing process moving again — and keep you moving. No matter what new manner of craziness pops up in the world. The hand’s-on workshop will run for 90 minutes. Be prepared to write! All writers are welcome, no matter which genre or form you write in. You can interpret the prompts however you wish. Wild creativity is always welcome. About Barbara Barbara Jacksha is the author/creator of the Vision Pages series, which includes “Vision Pages for Creative Writers with Daring Dreams: a vision journal for imagining your dreams to life.” Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Smokelong Quarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Summerset Review, Per Contra, Mad Hatter’s Review, and the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward. Barbara has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She was also a co-founder/co-editor of the literary journal...
Read MoreVirtual Writers’ Poem-A-Day (PAD) Competition Winners 2019
First Prize — ‘Morphos’ by Patricia Averbach My sister never flew to Costa Rica, so she never saw the great blue morphos glide and fall on iridescent wings through cloud forests, like magic lanterns glowing beneath dark canopies of leaves. If she’d been with me then, the way she’s always with me now, we would have followed those blue lights through trees glistening with rain to a clearing where we’d watch them rise and vanish into a vast expanse of sky. She would have made up names for flowers – Fallen Lady, Coral Ladder, Cloudy Skies and I would have smiled and not replied Passiflora, Lobelia, Heliconia, like the smart ass that I am oblivious to the pain a word can cause. Here’s what really happened. A call came late at night to say they’d found her comotose, she’d overdosed on Percocet and Tylenol. We flew, hoping to catch her still alive but arrived to find a placard with blue butterflies already hanging on her door. Patricia Averbach, a native Clevelander, is the former director of The Chautauqua Writers Center in Chautauqua, New York. Her debut novel, Painting Bridges, (Bottom Dog Press, 2013) was praised by Michelle Ross, book critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as “an introspective, intelligent and moving novel.” Her second novel, Resurrecting Rain (Golden Antelope Press, 2020) won a Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association and was a semi-finalist for a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award under the title New Moon Rising. Her poetry chapbook, Missing Persons, (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013) won the London based Lumen/Camden prize and was cited by Times of London Literary Supplement (November, 2014) as one of the best small collections of the year. Poet’s Website | Amazon Author Page Judge’s Note Our hearts were beckoned by the lush invitation of nature; then broken by the triple blows of raw honesty in self-examination, pain of regret, and depth of love: heartbreak that in some way, all humans share. Patricia has connected the personal to the universal, in powerful poetry. — Second Prize — ‘Self Portrait’ by Blitz I am: a brown snail with moon white shell on a dry mustard stalk, a red orange draped on bending branches by the receding sun, a silhouette in almond fluttering like cut paper in the ochre breeze, dropped fedora on the yellow leaves, large gloves hung by the yard rake, black bun loosened at nightfall, umber voice amid the trees. Blitz (AutumnBlitz Xenobuilder) was born to teachers of language, and is a child of immigrant culture. He studied fine arts (painting, drawing, sculpture), and has exhibited locally in the US and abroad, notably in Spain where he traveled via an Artist In Residence stipend in his search for Lorca’s duende. Blitz came to poetry later in his life on discovering open mics and workshops in Second Life®. He lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Judge’s Note We could read...
Read MoreNaNoWriMo: Closing Pep Talk with Doyle Slen
“Oh here it comes, that funny feeling inside, Winding me up again, Every time we touch,” Why can’t this be love? (Musical accompaniment by Van Halen) Why? Because it’s NaNoWriMo. Love has nothing to do with it. Or does it? Would you do this just for giggles? If so you’re sicker than a sausage straightener trying to figure out American slang. Seriously, there are 320 million of us, and we have regional slang the rest of the country can’t figure out. What does that have to do with NaNoWriMo? Here in America we’ve just enjoyed Fangsgiving. Watched the kind of football that people really get injured in (3 games scheduled for Fangsgiving Day; how great is that?), not the kind where they just fall over holding their shins when the wind blows past them. And our most beloved bloodsport, politics, is roaring ahead unabated with knives drawn and brandished. And we’re pounding out 50,000 words this month. It has to be love. “No, no,” you might say, “Love is just a second hand emotion. Love has nothing to do with it.” With Love to Tina Turner It better. I wake up at all manner of stupid hours to scribble. I sit here until my eyes bug out of my head searching for just the right word. Those tiny icepacks to keep the fingers from swelling with the salt mine like labors are starting to wear thin. I have that crazed look on my face like Ozzy Osbourne on the cover of that great album ‘Diary of a Madman.’ I have a spreadsheet to keep track of my snippets and poppets and do-wangers and do-whatses and all those Seussisms that have escaped through the holes in my head. My coffee pot has raised a white flag and my pod brewer, yes I have a combo machine that brews both, wants a well-deserved vacation. In order to manage what we’re attempting you have to have some sort of love for it. Now this isn’t my first rodeo or whatever you have in your part of the world that uses that same ‘slang term,’ (see how I worked that back in?). I keep several projects handy so I don’t burn out on just one. Had that happen my first NaNo, and come January, I didn’t love writing. It’s the story. Your story. The story only you can tell. It keeps gnawing at you. Won’t let you think about anything else. Talks to you while you’re driving. People in the cars next to you give you stares and make faces at you. You may order NaNo at the drive-through of the Taco Burger Barn and then have to sheepishly apologize while slapping yourself in the face. You better have some love for it, to go through this. We’re closing on the finish line, whether you’re not there yet or you’ve already finished and are enjoying the well-earned fruits of your labor. Just a few more days. The craziness will be over...
Read MoreNaNoWriMo Pep Talk with Lizzie Gudkov
Look. Right there… See? That’s where you’ll be at the end of November, smiling, happy with everything you’ve accomplished. Whether you’ve written 50,000 words or not, whether you have reached your rebel goals or not, you’ll be there, smiling. Do you know why? Because you’ve worked hard. And that’s reason enough to smile. If you’re ahead of the game, congratulations. You are doing a great job. You’ve managed not only to keep up with the amount of words needed for each day, but you’ve also succeeded in going beyond what was expected of you. If you are behind, don’t panic. You still have five days left and I’ll give you a few ideas on how to survive the rest of the month. So, did you know Milk Wood keeps a lot of hidden secrets that will help you boost your word count? You didn’t know?! Oh, yes, it does. Come closer. Listen. On the main table, there are four books, neatly piled up. Floral Therapy, All About Roses, Women’s Power and Fashion. They look like pretty regular books, right? Well, in fact, they are code books for highly sensitive documents. Ssh. It’s a secret. Also, someone is Storing Memories in a scrapbook. Oak and chestnut. A heart and a branch. Next to that scrapbook, there’s a recipe on a notebook. I can’t read it though. The notebook has a few markers sticking out. What’s so special about that one marker with an arrow? I feel tempted to open the notebook and snoop, but the table is packed with people. Perhaps you can come over and check it out yourself. Oh, oh… And look at the planner: 584 Linden Lane SL, 90210 They are sending something to this address, a mail package. Deadline at 3:30pm. What could that be? And who is this “they”? Perhaps it’s a “she”. Why does she have a deadline? Tricky. And did you know there are some people in the Chapel? They are whispering something. Can you hear them? I wonder what they are talking about. I think it’s something about the old cemetery. Farther away, a lonely sailor is drinking too much by an old wooden boat. Who is he waiting for? Is he sad? I wonder… And why is he sad? At the beach, the picnic blanket is set. A fruit board, croissant sandwiches, and a cooler packed with drinks. Everything is ready for… Lovers perhaps? Oh, but wait! A thief! A thief is stealing the hot dogs. I can see a chase coming. In the meantime, the radio plays a soft tune. At Last. Is that Etta James? Walk around Milk Wood and you’ll be surprised with the number of ideas you can get just from taking a stroll through the sim. People, objects, colors and sounds, these are only a few examples that might trigger questions. Questions trigger ideas. Ideas trigger words and words boost your word count. Look. Right there. See? That’s where you’ll be at the end of November,...
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