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This month there’s a double helping of expert advice, Ten Top Tips to help you generate new ideas, inspiring success stories and useful websites.
Hello again and welcome to the July issue.
We are glad our students are liking the newly opened forums – they are still undergoing a bit of tweaking but should be there soon. Thanks for your feedback.
Phew! It’s really hot and humid here with lots of spectacular thunderstorms too. July, named after Julius Caesar, is the official start of summer and, along with Wimbledon, strawberries and cream are a traditional favourite for this time of year in the UK. However, in Chile you’d probably be eating Pastel de Choclo – a summer dish made from a mixture of ground corn, meat, chicken, onions, olives and hard-boiled egg. Or you could treat yourself to a Korean Samgyetang – a hearty soup of chicken and ginseng for the hot, muggy season – meant to rejuvenate the body. And Julius Caesar had some interesting tastes in food too, including dormice dipped in honey and rolled in poppy seeds and sows' udders stuffed with sea urchins....eeeek! If reading about food gets your creative juices flowing, perhaps you should consider writing about it too! Are there any traditional or weird foods you could write about or particular favourites of yours that you’d like to share with others? Well, it’s something for you to chew over – pun intended! And if article writing is something you think you’d like why not enrol on one of our courses and learn the secrets to getting your work published.
Student stories feature Kate who lives in France and Trish from the UK. Expert advice covers finding markets for and promoting your work using the internet. Tutors Sue Wilkes and Lorraine Mace share their secrets to reaching as many people as possible. Sue advises on how to promote your writing using a blog in ‘It Never Sleeps’ and Lorraine, who lives in France so is well aware of the obstacles overseas writers can come up against when trying to find UK markets, offers some new avenues for you to venture down in ‘Easy Magazine Research’. If you are not sure how to utilise the Internet fully our course ‘How to Write for Profit using the Internet’, will show you the tricks and tips to maximise your exposure and gain the most from it. Ten Top Tips helps you discover how to generate new ideas for yourself in all kinds of interesting ways.
Useful Websites features only one site this week and there’s good reason for this. In expert advice you’ll have 11 sites to wander around. The site I have chosen to feature is a great little site with endless travel writing opportunities for the beginner and the seasoned writer alike. It’s a fantastic springboard for those wanting to get their name known and everyone can write about at least one place they know – where they live!
This month you could meander along to the 2009 Polyverse Festival held at Loughborough University, Leicestershire, starting on the 24th July for three days. Featuring performances, some exclusive, by a plethora of renowned poets, including Sue Guiney and Siobhan Logan, the weekend also boasts free workshops – this looks like an interesting one, ‘Why do poets die younger than other writers?’ by Mike Wilson. You do have to book for the workshops, so get in early if you fancy attending one. Tickets are £20.00 and further information is available here.
Or you could amble across to Buxton in Derbyshire (my home town, so a little smidge of pride creeps in when I talk about it) for the Buxton Festival. Events run until the 28th July and are as diverse as they come with speakers – ranging from Jeffrey Deaver to Rabbi Lionel Blue to David Cameron! – talking about their experiences and work. This is also a music and opera festival so there’s plenty to keep you occupied. Tickets for literary events range from £9.00 to £15.00 and further information can be found here.
We are currently in the process of updating some of our marketing materials and I am looking for students who have had work published in magazines and newspapers and are prepared to tell me how much they were paid for it. There’ll be no names on the information – it will simply be a list of what you can earn for your work so that newbie writers have some idea about what kinds of figures they can quote if asked to name a fee and what to expect when offered a fee for a piece of work.
Don’t forget you can send your work in for Chapter and Verse too! Rob, the editor, is looking for submissions each month and the theme is detailed in the current issue – remember you can send anything you like as long as it’s on the subject area. Please also make sure you adhere to the submission guidelines.
Finally and sadly, it seems no one wanted to take part in the Tanabata poem challenge! Come on people – you can use this newsletter to get some constructive feedback from other students about your work, if you are brave enough to send it.
Have a great month.
Shelley x
NB. Thank you to those of you who entered the Poetry and Short Story Competition. It has now closed and entries are being devoured and digested. The winners will be online for inspection in September – good luck!
