Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
March 4, 2016

 

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” – William Wordsworth

Middle School Novelists

Richard Hamel is a Madison School teacher who sponsors a writing program for middle school students. Students across the district are writing novels through the NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month) website (They wrote drafts last November, then revised through subsequent months). They will have a culminating workshop at the public library downtown in April to celebrate their accomplishment and to connect them to local writers. They are looking for writing volunteers for the workshop.

Are you interested?  You can contact Pat for Richard’s contact info.

 

A Place to Find Our Words: Bloggers and Their Writing Spaces

Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Yann Martel once described how “totally dull” the space he uses to write is: “It’s a table with a computer, that’s it,” he said. “I have little pieces of paper next to me that are my little notes, and that’s it. Otherwise, I could be an accountant for, you know, as far as my desk, you couldn’t tell that I’m a writer.” Like Martel, I prefer writing at a sparse desk so I can focus on the words in front of me. I was curious if others felt the same, so I asked five bloggers to take photos of their writing spaces and describe how they work in them.

Check out the full post and photos at https://discover.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/bloggers-and-writing-spaces/

 

Don’t Have a Cool Space for Writing?

Try ambience tools like:

Coffitivity. Coffitivity recreates the ambient sounds of a cafe to boost your creativity and help you work better.  The only thing missing is a warm scone.

Noisli.  Improve focus and boost your productivity. Mix different sounds and create your perfect environment.  You can mix and multiply white noise and ambient sounds.  I created a thunderstorm on a train with extra wind. Perfect for a mystery!

 

Who’s up next . . .

March 8: ?

March 15: Lisa McDougal (chapters ???, Tebow Family Secret), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Hannah Marshall (poems), Kashmira Sheth (???), Judith McNeil (???), and Millie Mader (poem).

March 22: ?

March 29: Fifth Tuesday

April 5: Liam Wilbur (???), Pat Edwards (???), Lisa McDougal (McPederson . . . ???),

Eva Mays (chapter 3, Dhuoda), Bob Kralapp (???), Randy Slagel (???), and Jerry Peterson (chapter 27-30, Killing Ham).

 

Fifth Tuesday coming . . .

This is the month of FIFTH TUESDAY.

Yes, March 29 our two groups will come together for an evening of good food and good times at Ella’s Deli, 2902 East Washington Avenue. Plug that in your GPS and you’ll get there. First-and-third group hosts.

TWS alumni and published sci-fi author Pat Tomlinson will be with us to talk about how he got a book contract.

Here’s our Fifth Tuesday writing challenge: Write a story, essay, or poem using this as your writing prompt: “I’m a curious person. No, I’m a nosy person. No, I’m a snoop, and it’s finally gotten me into trouble.”

Do not, repeat, do not use the prompt as the first sentences of your short short story, essay, or poem.

Max length: 500 words.

Deadline for getting your mini-masterpieces to Jerry Peterson is March 24.

 

Editing for March . . .

Pat Edwards, our Writers Mail February editor, continues on this month. Send your good stuff for our e-newsletter to her.

 

Great word . . .

From Word Spy Paul McFedreis:

workfarce

Meaning: (noun) n. A workplace or workforce that is ridiculous or worthy of mockery.

Etymology: workplace + farce; cf. workforce

Examples

“So on to a different world, that of Sydney and the public sector. More suburbanites. A few tolerable people, sure, but the social scene was still at Genitalia R Us level. In my mid-20s, I was now meeting ‘the workforce’, or ‘workfarce’ as I continue to think of many of them.”

– Paul Wallis, The problem with being raised to be a real person, Sydney Media Jam, May 17, 2015

“A cartoonist should come to all my conference calls. There’s nothing but comic material here. #workfarce:”

– Liza Morse, A cartoonist should…, Twitter, December 10, 2014

“If you have been in the workfArce [sic] of this nation for 30 plus years, then the ‘world of shirk’ has probably reduced you to a state of controlled rage and near apoplexy. Quite frankly, most people who have been a party to the tidal wave of nonsense that has engulfed the workplace these last few decades is now probably unemployable.”

– Nick R, Age and employment: The grey army grows mightier every day, The Telegraph (London), June 18, 2008

Earliest

“For example, in California, on July 4, they started to train 600 people, and on August 1 flew all 600 into the Verizon territory. So even as we are here today, they are afraid to send these people away because we can still strike, there are 20,000 on stand-by – and I call it instead of ‘workforce,’ I call it ‘workfarce.’

– Morton Bahr, Proceedings and Index of the 65th Annual Convention – 2003 (PDF), Communications Workers of America, August 25, 2003

Notes

Another sense of this word has been used as an insulting reference to workfare, a welfare program that requires recipients to work or receive training. Workfare dates to 1968 and this mocking sense of workfarce appeared just a couple of years later:

“A report prepared for the House Ways and Means Committee sees even worse results from Workfare than from WIN. It forecasts that the administration’s plan ‘may actually encourage desertion (by the father) rather than discourage it,’ putting more people on welfare. ‘Workfare’ might turn out to be ‘Workfarce.’

– Nixon’s ‘Workfarce’, The Piqua Daily Call (Piqua, Ohio), March 4, 1970

Thanks, Jerry!!