By Linda Donaldson
Happy Summer to all you Writers Guild members and followers! We meet this Sunday, August 19th from 1pm to 3pm at the Cultural Center at Pearl S. Buck’s scenic Green Hills Farm in Perkasie. The gardens are blooming and the setting is inspiring. Come join us!
Here’s a list Anne Kaler has shared of upcoming submission deadlines for several publications with links to their details. First up is the ubiquitous Chicken Soup for the Soul series. We show links for their overall guidelines as well as a list of quite a few upcoming deadlines. Continue reading “Upcoming Meeting and Calls for Submissions”
It’s not too difficult to see how the concept could migrate to the newspaper world in the days of manually set type and travel-impaired distribution. With such long lead times between presentation of copy and delivery of a finished newspaper, getting copy in time to print it was very serious business. I was unable to find a verified instance of an editor shooting a delinquent reporter of columnist but I’m sure punishment was severe. 
I was also unaware of his very cold-eyed approach to the business of writing for publication. When he left advertising to write novels in the early Fifties, he found that Westerns were popular so he wrote Westerns. When Westerns dropped out of favor, he switched to Crime.
Both of my friends argued that I was crimping my ability as a writer. Worse, I might be limiting the marketability of my books. The sweeping social changes of the present are having the same uneven effect on ordinary men and women. Writing about their struggles to adjust, triumphs, and failures are worthy of exploration.
“I’m accepting the Ray Bradbury Challenge,” I crowed. “Just watch how great this will be. My stories will be good and can only get better – and I’ll have fifty-two publishable stories,” said I.
Symptoms include spending an hour searching for the yellow piece of paper with the title and premise for the story about the Grizzly bear who learned sign language, or the certainty that you’ve already re-written the scene you’re working on, and drawing a complete blank when you try to remember the clever password you came up with for Writers’ Market.
Here’s the situation: Someone had to help my readers understand the progress of the police search for my protagonist. If I had been writing in the third person, it would have been easy – the omniscient narrator could just tell the readers what was going on. Or I could head jump among the characters to keep the reader up to date on the closing loop of the police. Since I was writing strictly from my protagonist’s point of view, someone has to tell him how close the cops are. 
Pearl S. Buck Writing Center 