6 Valuable Online Resources For Writers

I'm a writer. If you saw this headline and thought "Ooh!" and clicked on it, you're probably a writer, too. Because time is a scarce thing for most of us, I thought I would share the handful of websites I feel give you the most mojo for your minutes if you don't want to spend a lot of time out of "the process":

These sites can help out whether you're looking for work, trying to get published, or just trying to solve a problem anywhere along the line while you're working on a project.

1. Freedom With Writing - This is an amazing resource if you're looking for work as a writer. The site offers a daily email digest of websites and publications that will pay you for your work.

2. Writer's Circle - Want to find articles on the writing industry, tips on the craft, interesting facts about famous authors? This is a great site for you, then. Writers Circle also has a fun Facebook page, which is actually how I found out about the website. The website has a list of writers' resources on everything from e-book publishing to writers' conferences to accepting feedback from readers.

3. The Write Life - This website offers industry tips for freelancers and other professional writers (or those looking to become professional), along with tips on craft.

4. Duotrope - Duotrope is an amazing tool for writers submitting work to literary journals and other magazines. First, it is a comprehensive and easily searchable database of journals and magazines that accept work and will let you know if (and at what level) a market pays. More than that, it includes a submissions tracker to help you keep up with what pieces you've sent where, whether you've received a response and whether your work was accepted. Beyond the free trial period there is a subscription cost, but if you're submitting your work professionally (or even fanatically), it's worth it.

5. Writers Digest - Another great website offering everything from creative prompts to tips on writing good cover letters and synopses when you submit your work. This is also where Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides blog lives, and every April he does a Poem-A-Day Challenge with writing prompts for poets who want to write a piece a day during National Poetry Month. Although there are plenty of resources at the website, if you can subscribe to the magazine or find back issues at your local library, I recommend reading "hard copies," too.

6. Poets & Writers - There is so much to be found at the P&W website, I hardly know where to begin. There are listings of journals and magazines accepting submissions, writing contests looking for entries, databases of small presses and literary agents and MFA programs, lists of fellowships and writing conferences ... you name it. There are even writing prompts for both poetry and fiction, and a message board to "talk" with other writers. As with Writers Digest, if you can get your hands on a subscription or back issues, I highly recommend the P&W magazine, although the website is fantastic, too.

10 Great Websites for Creatives, Women, and Creative Women

I'm engaged in the ongoing struggle to keep my head from completely disappearing into the abyss of Facebook, but by now I'm so conditioned to goofing around online when there's nothing else going on that it's been difficult. But as part of my quest to get beyond the Book of Faces I have come across a handful of wonderful websites for creative types and for women (and sometimes they overlap).

1. AndreaBalt.com - A great resource for inspiration and tips on creativity and leading the Renaissance-person lifestyle. I was drawn in by her essay "5 Things Nobody Told You About Living A Creative Life."

2. Luna Luna Magazine - A potent mixture of culture, commentary, art, literature and femininity, with a taste of the supernatural. I think I've recommended Luna Luna as a literary journal before, and with good reason.

3. JuliaCameronLive.com - The website of Julia Cameron, author of "The Artist's Way." Some people can't stand "The Artist's Way" -- my housemate thinks it's some sort of authoritarian system of churning out art -- but it has done me a lot of good in the past. I went to a workshop based on "The Artist's Way" last fall and recently visited the website to kind of refresh myself. Cameron's blog offers encouragement and insights, such as this post about inspiration.

4. CreativeSomething - A great website full of ideas, inspiration and talk about the creative process. There's also a podcast and a "library" -- a list of recommended books about creativity.

5. Brain Pickings - This website offers all kinds of intellectually stimulating content -- and that in itself can spark some creative inspiration -- but it includes some wonderful posts specifically about art and creativity, such as this article containing advice on creativity from Neil Gaiman.

6. Vagina: The Zine - This is a gutsy and interesting journal featuring creative work, opinions and advice articles. Not only is it full of engaging material, but anyone who self-identifies as a woman can contribute work.

7. Entheos - This site might be a little New Age-y woo-woo for some tastes, but it has a lot to offer. There are lots of things for sale, but access to some lectures can be as low as $10/month, and Entheos occasionally offers fantastic and free conferences or symposiums. Check out their page of conferences dealing specifically with creativity for ideas of what you can find there.

8. Being Boss - This is an awesome site for those looking to become creative entrepreneurs (not necessarily entrepreneurs in the creative "industry" but running whatever business venture you've got in a creative and successful fashion).

10. Amy Poehler's Smart Girls - Okay, I'm wayyyy over 30 and I love this website and wish it had been around several decades ago. It might not have a lot to do with the creative process, but it is inspiring to see what girls and young women are capable of when it comes to making changes in the world. Plus there are downloadable coloring pages and Galentine's Day cards, among other things 12-year-old me would have loved (and adult me still does, because why not?).

On the quest to die laughing

This was what I posted on Facebook a year ago today, the day after Robin Williams' suicide. I make no secret of the fact that I've struggled with major depression and panic disorder off & on throughout my life, and it was kind of mind-boggling to see so many people saying, "But he was so funny! How could he be so sad?" Well ... you kind of have to be funny or else you're miserable.

Sometimes I think a certain degree of depression can be a gift -- it's the "strangeness in the proportion" that gives a person a different take on the world, that helps a person understand that this world is indeed temporary and that every one of is is going to die someday, though most people don't like to think about it and think you're weird if you do. That sense of urgency, and that sense of sorrow, can be fuel for a powerful fire. You look for the sweetness in life. You appreciate how rare and wonderful the beautiful and funny moments are. You run like hell from the darkness that's chasing you, toward humor and beauty and light. I think that's why it turns out that so many funny people are depressed -- we're not joking, we're fighting for our lives. And if you're lucky, really lucky, you can find a balance between the darkness and the light. You can stand on the edge, keep that fire burning, without getting sucked into the blackness. But sometimes you lose that balance. Sometimes you get too tired to keep running. And if you don't ask for help, if you don't find help, that's the end of you. But there is help, folks. There are friends. There are professionals. There are meds if you want/need to go that route. Every day that I wake up and find one thing that touches my heart or makes me laugh is a "fuck you" to the disease that could have taken me but didn't. Today I'm grateful that I found help -- the best group of friends a person could hope for, wonderful therapists, meds when my heart was too heavy for even these kind people to lift, and lifestyle changes that have made the struggle more manageable. When I find myself balancing on the edge, I don't stand there -- I dance.

Writing about writing for non-writers

During this whole process of making major revisions to my novella, I've been posting progress updates on Facebook. Possibly too many, and almost certainly more than were of interest to my Facebook friends. But there is a method to my madness.

Writing is a weird vocation. It's not like most of the other arts that I'm surrounded by. If you play music or sing or dance or do spoken word stuff, there's a stage and an audience and an immediate exchange of energy and appreciation (hopefully) between you and the audience when they see the result of your offstage efforts. If you paint or sculpt, there's a finished product that people can look at and instantly be wowed by. Sometimes people will even watch you paint or sculpt, like the live painters I've seen at some art shows (and some music shows), and when you're done they can look at the fruits of your labor and decide whether they think it's awesome or awful.

Writing isn't like that. Nobody watches you do it for fun. You usually do it alone or maybe in small groups. You may do some readings from your book, but unless you read the entire thing to an audience, it only gives them a small taste of the whole thing. There's no immediate gratification, no instant "wow" when someone looks at your book (unless it has a great cover and/or great title). Appreciation of writing takes a lot of effort on the part of your potential audience and patrons. They have to sit and read it. Part of the challenge is writing something that's interesting and engaging enough to convince people to give that much of their time.

As much as I dislike talking about my "process" -- and I still can't really put  my particular process into words, other than it involves music and food and keeping my calico from walking across my laptop -- I wanted to try to show some of what happens during the creation of a piece of written art, to show that writing is as much of an active process as painting or dancing or anything else. It might not involve a lot of physical movement, besides typing furiously, frowning and occasionally pounding your mattress or your keyboard or your forehead with a fist, but it's not like a writer just sits down with a computer or typewriter or paper and pencil and a novel just falls out. But since people rarely see a writer at work, it might seem like it. It's such a solitary pursuit that to non-writers, it might seem like writing takes only a little more effort than typing. Nope.

In fact, it's an arduous process -- as demanding as any other creative act. You make a plan. You abandon the plan. You try to stick to a plan but as you write the characters do something unexpected and you have to decide whether that's good or bad, and if it's good, you compensate by making sure they haven't created any plot holes. Even if you write roman a clefs or stories that take a fantastic turn but are based on real people and places, you create a whole world in your head, and then you have to make that world make sense to other people. Then comes the editing, during which you argue with yourself about a world that only exists in your head -- which under different circumstances is probably a symptom of something diagnosable.

So I was hoping to show my non-writer friends some of what's involved, to let them know that writing is very much an "alive" process. It's hard to describe exactly what goes on, but I can say that it is active, not passive. Even things that come "through" the writer rather than "from" the writer, like this book I've been refining, requires some kind of interaction with the ideas and energy in play. You have to say "yes" and offer up your skill and your time to whatever story is trying to come through you.

As a matter of fact, sometimes I'm writing in my head when I'm nowhere near pen & paper -- whether I'm thinking of things I need to fix in the manuscript or witnessing something amazing in the world and thinking, "This needs to go in a book," and hitting my on-board record button. Just because you don't see the work happening doesn't mean it's not happening or that it's not hard. It's very real.

I'm not demeaning performance art or visual art in any way -- I'm constantly amazed by both of those things, and since I also dance and play music I know how much effort goes into it. I simply mean to say that in the case of writing, the efforts of the artist aren't always as immediately obvious, and I'm trying to bring some of that effort to light.

Also, I finished this round of revisions a day ahead of schedule. I made some notes on things to doublecheck and things to fix when I make my next round of edits, but other than a few issues I'm really pleased with how it's turned out and I will be ready to share it with the world in a few months.