Wondering if your novel is going to be a huge success? Well, now you can assess your chances with the Lulu Titlescorer. Just type in your title, answer a few questions, and find out what the odds are that your novel will hit number one.
"When Speaking with the Dead," the title of my novel from NaNoWriMo, has a 35.9% chance of being a bestseller. How about yours?
Friday, December 30, 2005
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Merry Christmas!
Wishing peace, love, and joy to all.
Mary’s Devotion
Years from now when your good words
have fallen like fisted knots
of a net dimpling the sea’s surface;
when you’ve let your fingers settle
like roots of love
pushing between hairline cracks in rock;
when your eyes have refused
to reflect the hatred of unsympathetic ears
even as you cry salt and blood;
then I will touch this time and hold fast –
not to a crown of thorns
but to the crowning of your head,
slick with thick black hair between my legs,
your small yelp screaming for milk
and a mother’s strength.
Mary’s Devotion
Years from now when your good words
have fallen like fisted knots
of a net dimpling the sea’s surface;
when you’ve let your fingers settle
like roots of love
pushing between hairline cracks in rock;
when your eyes have refused
to reflect the hatred of unsympathetic ears
even as you cry salt and blood;
then I will touch this time and hold fast –
not to a crown of thorns
but to the crowning of your head,
slick with thick black hair between my legs,
your small yelp screaming for milk
and a mother’s strength.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
When You Ask if I Love You
When You Ask if I Love You
Must we re-examine our faith on this street corner
while the Salvation Army band is playing
‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ as coins drop into the red kettle
with gluttonous chinks and rattles?
A neon Jesus beams down from the top of the building
where the Miller girl usually rides the moon
sidesaddle like a debutante afloat on her escort’s arm,
and we’re standing here in falling snow
growing white with the duff of your needy words.
I fold a dollar bill and push it through the slit
in the kettle’s cover. It makes no sound.
Must we re-examine our faith on this street corner
while the Salvation Army band is playing
‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ as coins drop into the red kettle
with gluttonous chinks and rattles?
A neon Jesus beams down from the top of the building
where the Miller girl usually rides the moon
sidesaddle like a debutante afloat on her escort’s arm,
and we’re standing here in falling snow
growing white with the duff of your needy words.
I fold a dollar bill and push it through the slit
in the kettle’s cover. It makes no sound.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Poetry and Kids, Part Two
In a previous post, I talked about the joy of reading poetry with children, from simple nursery rhymes to modern works of humor. What's even better than reading poetry? Writing it! Once kids are able to recognize poetry, they'll want to try their own.
Here are two haiku that my daughter Emma, 5, wrote a couple of weeks ago:
The Scholastic website offers many wonderful resources, including their Writing with Writers workshops for kids. In the Poetry section, kids can read or listen to poems and get step by step instruction from published writers. There's even a poetry idea engine to help kids get started by offering word choices for creating haiku, cinquain, and limericks.
Poetry4Kids offers contests, lessons, games, poems, and a rhyming dictionary, all geared toward kids.
abcteach provides printouts on poetic devices and forms, including metaphors, alliteration, rhyme, acrostic poems, haiku, cinquain, abecederian, and others. They offer a brief definition, example(s), and space for kids to write their own poems or images.
For older kids and adults, The Academy of American poets is an invaluable resource of both essays on poetic forms and a wide variety of poems.
If you have a kid, take the time to read a poem, or two, or three, together. Roll the words around in your mouths, let the sounds jumble up and crash around you. Feel the texture of the lines in your fingers. And then, grab a pencil and a piece of paper and listen to what your child has to say. You might be surprised to hear him or her speaking in poetry.
Here are two haiku that my daughter Emma, 5, wrote a couple of weeks ago:
stars and moon shine bright
at bedtime they twinkle smiles
to help me sleep tight
red leaves fall from the
trees, yellow leaves following,
orange leaves floating
at bedtime they twinkle smiles
to help me sleep tight
red leaves fall from the
trees, yellow leaves following,
orange leaves floating
The Scholastic website offers many wonderful resources, including their Writing with Writers workshops for kids. In the Poetry section, kids can read or listen to poems and get step by step instruction from published writers. There's even a poetry idea engine to help kids get started by offering word choices for creating haiku, cinquain, and limericks.
Poetry4Kids offers contests, lessons, games, poems, and a rhyming dictionary, all geared toward kids.
abcteach provides printouts on poetic devices and forms, including metaphors, alliteration, rhyme, acrostic poems, haiku, cinquain, abecederian, and others. They offer a brief definition, example(s), and space for kids to write their own poems or images.
For older kids and adults, The Academy of American poets is an invaluable resource of both essays on poetic forms and a wide variety of poems.
If you have a kid, take the time to read a poem, or two, or three, together. Roll the words around in your mouths, let the sounds jumble up and crash around you. Feel the texture of the lines in your fingers. And then, grab a pencil and a piece of paper and listen to what your child has to say. You might be surprised to hear him or her speaking in poetry.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Tidbits of Random News
• My copy of Bonfire arrived last week, complete with five poems by yours truly (and a photo accompanying my bio). It is an absolutely lovely journal and I'm very proud to be a part of it.
• My daughter Emma lost her first tooth last Friday. When she smiles her gappy grin at me, I feel a rush of joy for the person she is growing into, and a twinge of nostalgia for the baby she's leaving behind.
• I've been knitting up a storm with Touch Me, a wonderfully luxurious and very expensive yarn. I can't reveal what I'm making, though, until after Christmas.
• Kate, who will be three in January, continues to refuse any and all enticements to be potty trained. She is perfectly capable of doing it, knows how and when, but simply doesn't want any part of it. Even the most overt bribery isn't working. Suggestions are welcomed.
• Having finished off NaNoWriMo in a timely fashion, I'm now participating in the 30/30 Challenge (one new poem a day for 30 days) at Inside the Writer’s Studio, an online poetry workshop.
• My daughter Emma lost her first tooth last Friday. When she smiles her gappy grin at me, I feel a rush of joy for the person she is growing into, and a twinge of nostalgia for the baby she's leaving behind.
• I've been knitting up a storm with Touch Me, a wonderfully luxurious and very expensive yarn. I can't reveal what I'm making, though, until after Christmas.
• Kate, who will be three in January, continues to refuse any and all enticements to be potty trained. She is perfectly capable of doing it, knows how and when, but simply doesn't want any part of it. Even the most overt bribery isn't working. Suggestions are welcomed.
• Having finished off NaNoWriMo in a timely fashion, I'm now participating in the 30/30 Challenge (one new poem a day for 30 days) at Inside the Writer’s Studio, an online poetry workshop.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
In Case You Missed It...
...here's my flash which appeared in Quiction a couple of weeks ago.
Migrations
I flow and gloat on high east-west winds blown by the breath of gods. Kilimanjaro is their king, and though he still shines radiance into the world’s gloom, his glory is melting. Long ago he was a volatile youngster, angry and misunderstood, and I watched him cry dry tears of ash, laying down a carpet for the ancestors of man. I watched them, too, loping across the plain in painful evolution. Have you seen their footprints?
I scry a river where the thorn trees grow. It snakes a silver path through grassland and forest. Water is the way of all life here, from the sequestered hippo in his deep green pool to the tremulous waterside wanderings of the shy bushbuck. The earliest humans were not different. They too knelt on these banks and savored the moments between life and death. I saw them in their search for stones, knocking one rock against another in pitiful imitation of the hyena’s teeth, the leopard’s claws.
Smoke rises to the west and I stretch across the savanna, searching the cause and sorting the species below like suits in a hand of cards. I have followed this dance from the earliest days, swaying and stomping to the tune. It began with the burble and squelch of protozoan proto-life,
the thunderous lowing of dino-herds. I’ve heard the hoof beat heartbeat of wildebeest replenishing the land as they suckle it dry, been tempted by the tintinnabulation of tribal song.
Witness to the rise and fall of phyla, I have smelt the decay as they fade, puffing my cheeks in eternal triumph, abiding forever. I spin on the wind and scent the future. It is not unlike the past.
Migrations
I flow and gloat on high east-west winds blown by the breath of gods. Kilimanjaro is their king, and though he still shines radiance into the world’s gloom, his glory is melting. Long ago he was a volatile youngster, angry and misunderstood, and I watched him cry dry tears of ash, laying down a carpet for the ancestors of man. I watched them, too, loping across the plain in painful evolution. Have you seen their footprints?
I scry a river where the thorn trees grow. It snakes a silver path through grassland and forest. Water is the way of all life here, from the sequestered hippo in his deep green pool to the tremulous waterside wanderings of the shy bushbuck. The earliest humans were not different. They too knelt on these banks and savored the moments between life and death. I saw them in their search for stones, knocking one rock against another in pitiful imitation of the hyena’s teeth, the leopard’s claws.
Smoke rises to the west and I stretch across the savanna, searching the cause and sorting the species below like suits in a hand of cards. I have followed this dance from the earliest days, swaying and stomping to the tune. It began with the burble and squelch of protozoan proto-life,
the thunderous lowing of dino-herds. I’ve heard the hoof beat heartbeat of wildebeest replenishing the land as they suckle it dry, been tempted by the tintinnabulation of tribal song.
Witness to the rise and fall of phyla, I have smelt the decay as they fade, puffing my cheeks in eternal triumph, abiding forever. I spin on the wind and scent the future. It is not unlike the past.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
The Finish Line
I did it! I finished my (50,718-word) novel yesterday afternoon.
For me, NaNoWriMo was a resounding success. Not because I've come away with a rough (very rough) draft of a novel, although that is a nice thing to have in one's back pocket. No, what is more important than the end result is that this was an incredible learning experience.
Five Things I Learned During NaNo:
1. If you're moving fast enough, that pesky inner critic/editor won't be able to keep up.
2. Writing every day is easier than you think; this is one habit that is good to have.
3. Friends and family who believe in you can make the difference between meeting your word count or failing.
4. You really don't need a plot to start with.
5. Satisfaction comes in many sizes, but 50,000 words feels just right.
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