Bebo

Oh the timewasters you'll see if only you'll look,
Myspace to be Linkedin to the Face in a Book.
Twittering tweets, Youtube and ipod itunes,
Hulu, IM, Txting, Bebo, Tivo and Zunes.
.

Oh the timewasters you'll use with great wonder and glee,
No need for plane travel, just plain electricity.
Wi Fi, RPG, Flickr, email, ebay's un-store,
Webisode overload, morph, Moodle, Skype hype and more.

Oh the timewasters you'll try and find and do.
Celebrity chats, Google, kudos, Yahoo.
Podcast broadcasts, Wikipedia, T9--
Captcha imagination, networking's mined.


Oh the timewasters you'll pick for every occasion
Blogs and ezines, can you Kindle the elation?
With all the sense spent on such cents-less play
Why not buy my book and go tech free for a day?


© 2009
Get away from the fray--
A Sensible Match by Teryl Cartwright
"How to lose a guy in ten days" in Regency England

www.amazon.com or ordered at your local bookstore

There are so many people aching to write and be read. So much that we could consider them competition. The question always remains. If you help someone, will it hurt you later on?

I think the more we try, the more we understand what it takes. What we have to do to be a 'writer'.. We have to be true to ourselves. Helping others DOES help us in the long run. Business is business and there is no union for freelancers. But we are all united in our joint quest and common hope.

There is a website "absolute write" that lists publishers and agents to be wary of. Although some opinions need weighed carefully, some ring fairly true. Especially when backed up by the voices of many, many others. i recommed you give it a few minutes of your time.

Use the site and research the middlemen to know what you are getting into. It is not discouraging to know the good, bad AND the ugly. It is just business. The ache to be published will push you to submit the book. But the WILL to be published will get you to take the time to find the right place to send your dream.

Bring on the competition.

You write and I wirite and there will be room for us all. The business of writing is giving voice to our hearts and life to our words. The business of writing is not selling our souls, but revealing them.

In order to improve writing and enhance creativity, I've done something counterintuitive. I've purchased a college course on how to write. Given by a Professor Landon from the University of Iowa, Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft ,is surprisingly not a stiffling jail cell of overanalysis, but a helpful practical guide. It does get a little long with lecture and the need to name and reinforce each term of writing tools and premise, yet it is recommended if you want to try something different. If you want to think about writing before doing it. At least it doesn't seem to inhibit the flow like some DIY material out there.

As Gertrude Stein said (over and over) "Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?"

Why indeed? As writers honing pens into precise knives to slice into meaning, we have to remember that style and content are not divisible. That the joy of wordwork is construction not destruction. That we can still learn, even from teachers.

So if, as the prof mentions, sentences are cells, then let us be clear they are building blocks and not prisons for propositions and ideas. Let's enjoy and be pleased with our little pieces of books. We may still sweat the sequencing, but at least as crafters, we are not sentenced to merely their study. We get to use what we learn and thus learn what to use and I think even Gertrude would agree that is truly a pleasure indeed.