Tuesdays with Story

Tuesdays with Story
Writer’s Mail
October 26, 2015

“The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. Both the meaning and the beauty of writing depend on these sounds and rhythms.” – Ursala K. Le Guin (1929), fantasy and sci-fi author

Judith McNeil Smashwords Author!
Check out Judith’s new book on Smashwords. Note that you may have to open the Adult filter to see the book (a few curse words!).

My Mother Savior of Men by Judith G. McNeil
Price: $1.99 USD. Words: 33,300. Language: American English. Published: September 11, 2015. Categories: Fiction » Humor & comedy » General
The relationship between Charles and his mother becomes eroded when he decides to sabotage her decision to publish her poetry in a book that includes artistic nude pictures of her. He doesn’t realize that this is a proxy attack on her seeming inability to maintain a long term relationship.

NaNoWriMo . . .
Is here. Well, almost.
November is National Novel Writing Month, your opportunity to push yourself to write a lot in a short time . . . 50,000 words – NaNoWriMo’s definition of a novel – in 30 days.
Even if you don’t do 50,000 words, whatever you write in those 30 days puts you ahead of where you would be had you not participated.
So sign up and go for it . . . NaNoWriMo. Here’s the link: http://nanowrimo.org/

Winter Weather Planning – 1st and 3rd
Reminder for 1st and 3rd members, get your Skype address to Pat Edwards so we can test our Winter Weather contingency! http://www.skype.com

Who’s up next . . .
October 27: Rebecca Rettenmund (chapter 3, rewrite, LookOut).
November 3: Pat Edwards (???), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Judith McNeil (???), Millie Mader (poem, “Using the Pen to Heal”), and Bob Kralapp (short story, part 2, “Letters”).
November 10: ??
All of 1st/3rd December meetings will be at the Alicia Ashman Public Library. Directions linked here.

Great phrase . . .
From Word Spy Paul McFedreis:
sock puppet
Meaning: (noun) A fake persona used to discuss or comment on oneself or one’s work, particularly in an online discussion group or the comments section of a blog.
Other forms
sock puppet (adjective) – sock puppeteer (noun) – sock puppetry (noun)
Examples
“Siegel is not the only professional pundit to be caught in a sock puppet scandal. This year, Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik was stripped of his column and blog for using fake handles on his blog and those of his critics. Economist John R. Lott, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, passed himself off as his former graduate student ‘Mary Rosh’ to defend his work and attack critics.”
– Cathy Young, Journalistic ethics gone astray, The Boston Globe, September 18, 2006
“One of the joys of the Internet age is the great new lingo it is producing. To ‘flame wars’ and ‘phishing’ we can now add ‘sock puppet.’ A sock puppet, for those still boning up, is a false identity through which a member of an Internet community speaks while pretending not to, like a puppeteer manipulating a hand puppet. Recently, a senior editor at The New Republic got in trouble for some particularly colorful sock puppetry.
“When Lee Siegel began blogging for The New Republic, he found, as many others have, that Internet posters tend to be fairly outspoken – and a good number of the posters on the blog were harshly critical. An exception was ‘sprezzatura,’ who regularly offered extravagant praise. After Mr. Siegel was criticized for his writing about Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, sprezzatura wrote: ‘Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.’ A reader charged that sprezzatura was in fact Mr. Siegel, but sprezzatura denied it.
“The reader turned out to be right. …
“Sock puppetry may be rampant online, but journalists writing for their employer’s website have a greater responsibility to be honest than run-of-the-mill posters.”
– Sock Puppet Bites Man, The New York Times, September 13, 2006

Writers Mail editor . . .
Pat Edwards, is our editor for October. You have some good stuff you’d like to share with our colleagues? E-mail it to Pat.