Looking
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Want to write for publication or for personal growth?
Want to sharpen those professional skills?
WritersCollege.com is
the place!
Ran across this gem while doing my "dailies" for the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA). The author, a former reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, talked to that paper's first online reporter/editor/everything. In 1981, I remind you, the Web did not exist. And, despite the erroneous advertising seen in the TV news report, there were no pictures or any graphics whatever. Just the text, painfully arrived at.
It took two hours to download the daily newspaper over a phone-cradle, 8 kbps modem, and the time cost you $10 on CompuServe. "But if I see something I want to save, "I can print it out," boasts a user (identified on the TV news story as "Owns a home computer"). The entire printed newspaper in those days was twenty cents.
Well, they not only did not make money, but the Examiner lost so much revenue to the online competition over the next decades that it went out of business. The current Examiner is a different newspaper.
We talked yesterday about the YouTube-classic 1981 TV news report about a primitive experiment with making newspapers available online, which at the time meant through the CompuServe service. One of many amusing, ironic moments in the piece is when the guy in charge of the experiment at the San Francisco Examiner, one of the participating newspapers, says, "We're not in it to make money. We're probably not going to lose a lot but we aren't going to make much either."
Being able to take photos, or find photos, to accompany your writing can help sell the story, keep control over your work, and even earn you extra money.
An intensive, eight week poetry workshop in which we'll be dealing with poetry written in prescribed forms as well as open form "free verse" poetry, and the prose poem
This course will help you move from the emotive language of light verse or the private language of poetry notebooks toward literary prosody. You will learn when to tell the whole story and when to tell enough of the story to invite readers inside to look around for themselves.
SCHOOL
NEWS: Sadly, we had to put John Paxton Sheriff's course on Crime Novels and Short Stories, as well as his course in Novel Writing, on hold for the present. If John can rejoin us in the future we will be glad to have him back. We are working on some new courses; more on that later.
WHO's
DOING WHAT: Pat Alvarado's Piggy Press prints children's books in English and Spanish. She got her start with a book lauding a virtuous cockroach, so don't tell us you can't write about just anything and Piggy Press now publishes dozens of clever and bilingual children's books. Alvarado, who lives in Panama, also knew that the fourth Stooge was Shemp, our question from last week's newsletter. But we're guessing that Sparky told her. (Sparky the Wonder Dog has his own advice column in a Panama newspaper.)
ESSAY: Writing for Money—or Fame? by Robert Pollock
Probably
the most important first decision a writer has to make, particularly
a new one, is to establish his or her intent. Why do I want to write?
Not what, but why? Why is far more important than what because the answer to that question can be the beginning or not of a
writing career.
