Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
April 15, 2015

She said it . . .

“Imagine the sounds of nails scraping along a chalkboard. Sometimes writing a first draft feels a lot like that. You look at the drivel you’ve plopped on the page and your teeth hurt because it’s so bad. That’s okay. It’s allowed to be bad. I had to learn to give myself  permission to be downright awful no matter how badly I wanted to get things right on the first try. Revision is your friend. Revision will save you. But it can’t if you never finish the first draft.” – Melissa Grey, debut novel, The Girl at Midnight, out this month from Delacorte Press

Who’s up next . . .

April 21: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Amber Boudreau (chapter 3, Stone), Mo Bebow-Reinhard (chapter 1, Dinner at Marshall Field’s), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 18, Coastie Girl), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), and Judith McNeil (???).

April 28: ???

May 5: Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 19, Coastie Girl), Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Mike Rickey (poems), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Millie Mader (chapter 62, Life on Hold), and Andy Brown (chapters, The Last Library).

Our April editor . . .

Amit Trivedi is our Writers Mail editor for this month. Send your good stuff to him.

Migrating to Wiggio . . .

First-and-third group will now join our second-and-fourthers, using Wiggio’s TWS group to post chapters, poems, flash fiction, and essays for critiquing. Until everyone gets used to our Wiggio home, first-and-thirders also will post to our TWS Yahoo group.

First-and-thirders, instructions from Pat Edwards on how to use Wiggio and in your email in-box.

Also from Pat…

What is Writing 101?

Who else is really building their writing habit?… I wake up multiple times each night to check the time and see if it’s time to get up and write because I’m so excited. I’ve never felt this way before! I think I’m in lurve.
Molly, Knocked Up Knocked Over

Writing 101 is a four-week course that runs from Monday, April 6, to Friday, May 1, 2015. Each weekday, you’ll get an assignment that includes a writing prompt and an optional “twist”; prompts are your topic inspiration for the day, while twists push you to experiment with writing techniques and tools.

You can mix assignments however you like: Respond to the prompt, and ignore the twist. Try the twist, but write on your own topic. Use both the prompt and the twist. Publish what you write on your blog, or use it as private writing practice. It’s up to you! The only mandate is that you write every weekday.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/blogging-u-april-last-call/

And more from Pat…do you know what an Interfector is?

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/04/03/in-a-word-319/

http://boingboing.net/2015/04/01/listen-poet-doppelgangers.html

Kashmira Sheth a featured author at SWAF . . .

TWS colleague Kashmira Sheth is one of 10 children’s book and YA authors who will be talking with readers and selling their books at the Southern Wisconsin Authors Fair, Sunday in Milton.

Kashmira now has nine books out. Her newest, Sona and the Wedding Game, was released by Peachtree Publishers this month. The Madison book launch for Sona is set for July 11 at Mystery To Me Bookstore.

Good book for your personal library . . .

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, by Mary Norris, retired New Yorker copy editor. The book is just out from Norton.

Here’s the description as posted on Amazon:
The most irreverent and helpful book on language since the #1 New York Times bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.

Between You & Me features Norris’s laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage – comma faults, danglers, “who” vs. “whom,” “that” vs. “which,” compound words, gender-neutral language – and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord’s Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster’s groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world’s only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.

Readers – and writers – will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, “The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can’t let it push you around.”

Great word . . .

From Wordsmith Anu Garg:

jovial

PRONUNCIATION: (JOH-vee-uhl)

MEANING: (adjective) Cheerful; good-humored.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin jovialis (of Jupiter), from Jov- (Jupiter). The word Jupiter is from Latin Jovis pater (father Jove). The planet Jupiter is named after the Roman god Jupiter and those born under the influence of this planet were supposed to be good-humored. Ultimately from the Indo-European root dyeu- (to shine) that is also the source of diva, divine, Jupiter, Jove, July, Zeus, and Sanskrit deva (god). Earliest documented use: 1590.

USAGE:
“The mood on the tour had gone from jovial and light to brutal inside an hour.”
– Brad Lavigne; From Jovial to Brutal; Maclean’s (Toronto, Canada); Nov 25, 2013.

The last word . . .

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams (1952-2001), English writer, humorist, and dramatist . . . best known as the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”