Creative Writer News Post
Happy Monday, everyone!! (Yeah, I know, it was hard for me to get out of bed this morning, too. Bleh.) This week we have a lot to talk about since last week I was in bed sick with the worst stomach flu in the world - but things are right as rain today! Here’s what’s going on!
Weekly Events Posts on Creative Writer
Creative Writer posts a daily post of some sort (see weekly events under the links) in order to hopefully help our members achieve their goals as writers. If there is something you would like to see more of, less of or different, please let us know. We’re here to help you.
Creative Writer News Letter
The Creative Writer News Letter is fairly new and currently a work in process. We will be changing the format, adding new articles and columns until we have a news letter worthy of your time. Within the next six months, you will see a specific format developed filling out the body of the newsletter. We do not know at this point if the newsletter will remain a weekly or will move to a biweekly event. If it moves to biweekly, it will open Creative Writer up for another event for Mondays. Watch us as we grow!
On Going Writer's Challenge - Why I Don't Write
Our VERY FIRST Why I Don’t Write submission comes from Lucy (serpentofwisdom)! Lucy, I can sooooo relate!! Thank you for your entry!! I hope she loses the war on your next writing effort! ~ Bethanna
This is the 1st piece I have ever submitted to anyone ever! I liked the idea of writing about why I don’t write, which is obviously because of my own self criticism - I really need to do something about that! We all have our own inner critic! Thanks for the LJ community its great! Lucy
Why I don’t Write
Everywhere I go there she is, she sits in my head yelling and moaning at me calling me an indolent this, a f**ked up that, an idle waste of space- I really am quite sick of her.
I don’t know when we met although I do remember meeting her- I looked in the mirror that day after the really bad storm and Sam had to put his car in the garage because of the hail stones and he was worrying about the paint work on his new car- anyway I digress.
I had cleaned down the walls for mold in the bathroom and then finished with wiping off the mirror and afterwards when I looked in there she was. She sat there really tiny, very small; I could see her jumping up and down throwing her arms everywhere and she looked really, really familiar. Her face was all screwed up and red and crimson from shouting and she had blue eyes that sparkled and shined when she screamed, they looked like they were going to roll and pop out of her head. She was wearing little black boots and a little black dress and she might have been putting out a cigarette but it was hard to tell because it also looked like she could have been applying lipstick, her hands were so tiny. She had this stick that she kept hitting against the inside of my head and I felt the pain starting to radiate down my neck.
She really f**king screamed this little high pitched sound and then she started yelling at me the most appalling abuse, she really let loose. Everything she said sounded like she had known me my entire life and she was just hurling abuse. She made me really look at myself- the things she said on and on she went it was insurmountable.
I fixed my hair in the mirror and applied some hand cream, rubbing it in avoiding eye contact with my eye reflection as much as I could. With a petulant flick of her hair she glared at me and started lecturing me about my school work. On and on she went, the small thing that she was, she was my very own little inner critic.
I would love to know where she came from but I do know that I have been tortuously aware of her ever since. Nothing is ever good enough for her, I try to write about her, to write anything, even in my journal and she madly kicks.
*********************************************
Creative Writer is challenging its members to write a short piece (500 words or less) on why you don't write. Each week the most interesting, most entertaining reason will be placed as part of this news letter. Let your fellow strugglers see that they are not alone!
Deadline for submission each week is Friday midnight YOUR time. You may enter as often as you wish (there are a lot of reasons why those words just cannot find their way into print!) Submissions received after 8:00 AM LONDON time will be added to the next week's submissions. Please follow community guidelines in your entry.
To submit, send email to cw_owner@anarkian.net or cw_owner@livejournal.com. Please do not send as attachment, place piece in the body of the email. Please include your LJ user name in subject line. “Why I Don’t Write” is open to creativewriter members only.
The Creative Writer Quarterly Writers Challenge is waiting for your entries!! You have until February 28, 2007 to submit you’re entry! If you are planning to participate, please reply to the current Writer's Challenge post, and let us know! We’re looking forward to see how you do!!
Membership
Wow! We added 26 new members last week! If you are not a member of Creative Writer and see this post, please realize we need to be able to determine you are not a Troll poised to strike at the members of Creative Writer. A public post on your journal will absolutely help you to receive approval for membership. If we do not have a post, then we look at the info page to see what kind of information is there. If you have a new journal with no posts, and there is no information on your info page: interests, friends added, posts made, something about yourself, then we will NOT ADD YOU. So, please, before you request membership, make sure we have something on your journal that shows you are not a threat to Creative Writer.
We have been working very hard to get the deleted, closed or abandoned journals off of our membership. The process for this is tedious, but we want to be careful not to delete any members that are either ‘read only’ or are just dealing with life and have taken a hiatus. We post a reply to every journal 24 weeks or more without a post then give ten days for response. The reply is as follows:
Creative Writer Membership Verification
Please respond to this reply to verify your membership. If reply has not been received in ten days from this date your membership will be terminated.
Thank you,
Bethanna
Creative Writer Owner
If we cannot leave a reply, or send an email to the member, the membership is terminated.
We keep a very careful record of all replies we have left on journals, who is deleted and who is maintained. Currently, we are at 80+ weeks of no posts to journals. We have a long way to go before we complete this task. Currently the post check is at six months without a post.
We found in this process, that Live Journal only allows searches for a maximum of 1000 journals. Our membership exceeds this, so getting the remaining sixty some odd journals has been a difficult task. We are still missing approximately 30 journals aged 120+ weeks or more to send replies to. To try to solve this problem, we will be contacting Live Journal to try to have a reverse look up on posting dates. This will only be a temporary fix, however, and we aren’t sure LJ can or will actually do this. They are currently in the process of updating the search engine - it looks like a reverse search is not in the agenda.
Dealing with the growth of Creative Writer is something we’ve been thinking about. Please see the Future of Creative Writer for more thoughts on this.
The Future of Creative Writer
Long Term Membership: In order to keep an accurate demographic of updated membership on Creative Writer, we will at some point need to move to a syndicated site. We will still be on Live Journal, but it will change the way membership can be updated and handled. It will also open membership to other on line journals. This will also enable us to open the site up to publishers and agents in a way that will protect your work against copyright conflict of specific pieces. This change will hopefully take place in March 2008.
Let us know what you think; we are open and anxious for feedback. We are absolutely open to any other ideas as well.
Going Non Profit, FIRST STEPS:
Ayoub and I did meet for two hours last weekend to work on the beginnings of making Creative Writer a non profit organization. Becoming nonprofit means we will be able to provide scholarships, computers, workshops, and other writing tools. Our first objective is getting a business plan written. We began a five year plan which will grow and change as we receive more demographic information and actually begin the process of writing the business plan. We are looking to become non - profit in 2008 - hopefully by June.
The need for a staff is growing daily, but until Creative Writer is funded or generating an income, or both, a staff will have to be placed on hold. It is important that the staff receive adequate compensation, (meaning a paycheck and benefits), and be within workable proximity of where Creative Writer is There are also laws governing how we can maintain a staff and still cover all the basis. There are several staffing needs to be addressed, several positions needed - and all will be detailed in the business plan. You will hear more about this in the future as we become clearer concerning the need and what is truly feasible.
Creative Writer Magazine?: We discussed the Creative Writer Magazine. This entity will be placed on a serious back burner until we can get a very CLEAR picture of what becoming non profit means. There are questions concerning the balance of a for profit magazine where we pay the writers - balancing with a nonprofit organization. I’m not sure this can be done in a way that balances both in a protected way. We’re not out to find loop holes. The Creative Writer Magazine may need to exist under the umbrella of the non profit organization of Creative Writer, and in so doing may need to remain non profit itself. For now, there is too much legality to be sorted through and scrutinized for long term and for growth. Quite simply put, it’s too early to figure out where the ball might bounce.
Internatioanl Issues:Another issue that must be addressed is Creative Writer is international. We want to be able to benefit ALL of our members, not just the members of one country. If we want to issue a scholarship for a writer in New Zealand, we want to be able to do so easily, quickly and completely according to the needs THERE in New Zealand. . . or Germany, or England, or the United States. . . we want the organization to be international, not just the writing community.
Which leads us to language barriers. One of the goals within the five year period of time is to make sure Creative Writer reaches past language barriers. It’s on the list. We don’t have enough information to know what we will truly be capable of at this point, but we want it.
The Very Long Term: There is talk long term toward a few goals, but it is too early to decide an absolute as to what the actual reality will be. One is a publishing house specifically for new and breaking writers. Another is an international school - another is staying a non profit organization to benefit writers on a funding level. The latter will always be the focus, and will not change. The publishing house and /or school are maybe’s would like to’s. So we’ll see.
Here’s to the future of Creative Writer!
Happy Writing,
Bethanna
Weekly Events Posts on Creative Writer
Creative Writer posts a daily post of some sort (see weekly events under the links) in order to hopefully help our members achieve their goals as writers. If there is something you would like to see more of, less of or different, please let us know. We’re here to help you.
Creative Writer News Letter
The Creative Writer News Letter is fairly new and currently a work in process. We will be changing the format, adding new articles and columns until we have a news letter worthy of your time. Within the next six months, you will see a specific format developed filling out the body of the newsletter. We do not know at this point if the newsletter will remain a weekly or will move to a biweekly event. If it moves to biweekly, it will open Creative Writer up for another event for Mondays. Watch us as we grow!
On Going Writer's Challenge - Why I Don't Write
Our VERY FIRST Why I Don’t Write submission comes from Lucy (serpentofwisdom)! Lucy, I can sooooo relate!! Thank you for your entry!! I hope she loses the war on your next writing effort! ~ Bethanna
This is the 1st piece I have ever submitted to anyone ever! I liked the idea of writing about why I don’t write, which is obviously because of my own self criticism - I really need to do something about that! We all have our own inner critic! Thanks for the LJ community its great! Lucy
Why I don’t Write
Everywhere I go there she is, she sits in my head yelling and moaning at me calling me an indolent this, a f**ked up that, an idle waste of space- I really am quite sick of her.
I don’t know when we met although I do remember meeting her- I looked in the mirror that day after the really bad storm and Sam had to put his car in the garage because of the hail stones and he was worrying about the paint work on his new car- anyway I digress.
I had cleaned down the walls for mold in the bathroom and then finished with wiping off the mirror and afterwards when I looked in there she was. She sat there really tiny, very small; I could see her jumping up and down throwing her arms everywhere and she looked really, really familiar. Her face was all screwed up and red and crimson from shouting and she had blue eyes that sparkled and shined when she screamed, they looked like they were going to roll and pop out of her head. She was wearing little black boots and a little black dress and she might have been putting out a cigarette but it was hard to tell because it also looked like she could have been applying lipstick, her hands were so tiny. She had this stick that she kept hitting against the inside of my head and I felt the pain starting to radiate down my neck.
She really f**king screamed this little high pitched sound and then she started yelling at me the most appalling abuse, she really let loose. Everything she said sounded like she had known me my entire life and she was just hurling abuse. She made me really look at myself- the things she said on and on she went it was insurmountable.
I fixed my hair in the mirror and applied some hand cream, rubbing it in avoiding eye contact with my eye reflection as much as I could. With a petulant flick of her hair she glared at me and started lecturing me about my school work. On and on she went, the small thing that she was, she was my very own little inner critic.
I would love to know where she came from but I do know that I have been tortuously aware of her ever since. Nothing is ever good enough for her, I try to write about her, to write anything, even in my journal and she madly kicks.
*********************************************
Creative Writer is challenging its members to write a short piece (500 words or less) on why you don't write. Each week the most interesting, most entertaining reason will be placed as part of this news letter. Let your fellow strugglers see that they are not alone!
Deadline for submission each week is Friday midnight YOUR time. You may enter as often as you wish (there are a lot of reasons why those words just cannot find their way into print!) Submissions received after 8:00 AM LONDON time will be added to the next week's submissions. Please follow community guidelines in your entry.
To submit, send email to cw_owner@anarkian.net or cw_owner@livejournal.com. Please do not send as attachment, place piece in the body of the email. Please include your LJ user name in subject line. “Why I Don’t Write” is open to creativewriter members only.
The Creative Writer Quarterly Writers Challenge is waiting for your entries!! You have until February 28, 2007 to submit you’re entry! If you are planning to participate, please reply to the current Writer's Challenge post, and let us know! We’re looking forward to see how you do!!
Membership
Wow! We added 26 new members last week! If you are not a member of Creative Writer and see this post, please realize we need to be able to determine you are not a Troll poised to strike at the members of Creative Writer. A public post on your journal will absolutely help you to receive approval for membership. If we do not have a post, then we look at the info page to see what kind of information is there. If you have a new journal with no posts, and there is no information on your info page: interests, friends added, posts made, something about yourself, then we will NOT ADD YOU. So, please, before you request membership, make sure we have something on your journal that shows you are not a threat to Creative Writer.
We have been working very hard to get the deleted, closed or abandoned journals off of our membership. The process for this is tedious, but we want to be careful not to delete any members that are either ‘read only’ or are just dealing with life and have taken a hiatus. We post a reply to every journal 24 weeks or more without a post then give ten days for response. The reply is as follows:
Creative Writer Membership Verification
Please respond to this reply to verify your membership. If reply has not been received in ten days from this date your membership will be terminated.
Thank you,
Bethanna
Creative Writer Owner
If we cannot leave a reply, or send an email to the member, the membership is terminated.
We keep a very careful record of all replies we have left on journals, who is deleted and who is maintained. Currently, we are at 80+ weeks of no posts to journals. We have a long way to go before we complete this task. Currently the post check is at six months without a post.
We found in this process, that Live Journal only allows searches for a maximum of 1000 journals. Our membership exceeds this, so getting the remaining sixty some odd journals has been a difficult task. We are still missing approximately 30 journals aged 120+ weeks or more to send replies to. To try to solve this problem, we will be contacting Live Journal to try to have a reverse look up on posting dates. This will only be a temporary fix, however, and we aren’t sure LJ can or will actually do this. They are currently in the process of updating the search engine - it looks like a reverse search is not in the agenda.
Dealing with the growth of Creative Writer is something we’ve been thinking about. Please see the Future of Creative Writer for more thoughts on this.
The Future of Creative Writer
Long Term Membership: In order to keep an accurate demographic of updated membership on Creative Writer, we will at some point need to move to a syndicated site. We will still be on Live Journal, but it will change the way membership can be updated and handled. It will also open membership to other on line journals. This will also enable us to open the site up to publishers and agents in a way that will protect your work against copyright conflict of specific pieces. This change will hopefully take place in March 2008.
Let us know what you think; we are open and anxious for feedback. We are absolutely open to any other ideas as well.
Going Non Profit, FIRST STEPS:
Ayoub and I did meet for two hours last weekend to work on the beginnings of making Creative Writer a non profit organization. Becoming nonprofit means we will be able to provide scholarships, computers, workshops, and other writing tools. Our first objective is getting a business plan written. We began a five year plan which will grow and change as we receive more demographic information and actually begin the process of writing the business plan. We are looking to become non - profit in 2008 - hopefully by June.
The need for a staff is growing daily, but until Creative Writer is funded or generating an income, or both, a staff will have to be placed on hold. It is important that the staff receive adequate compensation, (meaning a paycheck and benefits), and be within workable proximity of where Creative Writer is There are also laws governing how we can maintain a staff and still cover all the basis. There are several staffing needs to be addressed, several positions needed - and all will be detailed in the business plan. You will hear more about this in the future as we become clearer concerning the need and what is truly feasible.
Creative Writer Magazine?: We discussed the Creative Writer Magazine. This entity will be placed on a serious back burner until we can get a very CLEAR picture of what becoming non profit means. There are questions concerning the balance of a for profit magazine where we pay the writers - balancing with a nonprofit organization. I’m not sure this can be done in a way that balances both in a protected way. We’re not out to find loop holes. The Creative Writer Magazine may need to exist under the umbrella of the non profit organization of Creative Writer, and in so doing may need to remain non profit itself. For now, there is too much legality to be sorted through and scrutinized for long term and for growth. Quite simply put, it’s too early to figure out where the ball might bounce.
Internatioanl Issues:Another issue that must be addressed is Creative Writer is international. We want to be able to benefit ALL of our members, not just the members of one country. If we want to issue a scholarship for a writer in New Zealand, we want to be able to do so easily, quickly and completely according to the needs THERE in New Zealand. . . or Germany, or England, or the United States. . . we want the organization to be international, not just the writing community.
Which leads us to language barriers. One of the goals within the five year period of time is to make sure Creative Writer reaches past language barriers. It’s on the list. We don’t have enough information to know what we will truly be capable of at this point, but we want it.
The Very Long Term: There is talk long term toward a few goals, but it is too early to decide an absolute as to what the actual reality will be. One is a publishing house specifically for new and breaking writers. Another is an international school - another is staying a non profit organization to benefit writers on a funding level. The latter will always be the focus, and will not change. The publishing house and /or school are maybe’s would like to’s. So we’ll see.
Here’s to the future of Creative Writer!
Happy Writing,
Bethanna