Midlist Writer: poets

Showing posts with label poets. Show all posts

Saturday, 16 January 2010

I'm a prize-winning poet (NOT!)

A friend who used to revel in the easy living of Madrid recently returned to the high-powered grind of Dubai. It's her fault I got into blogging, and therefore it's her fault you're reading this, so blame her. Anyway, she had a competition on her blog to win a copy of Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. All we had to do was give a reason why we wanted the book and the two best entries would get copies. I sent this limerick:

A friend of mine lives in Dubai
(for reasons I’m not sure why)
she has a neat book
I’d sure like to look
at flag-waving hookers, oh my!

OK, that's pretty crappy, but as a limerick on a friend's personal blog you can't expect much more, and hey, I won!

So now I can honestly say I'm a prize-winning poet, but I won't. The reason I won't is that waaaaay too many struggling writers make fake or wildly exaggerated claims about their success, like using the meaningless title "Pulitzer Prize Nominee" or boasting of all their self-published publications. I've ranted about this before in greater detail. It seems some writers will grasp at any straw in an attempt to make themselves look good.

They should save their energy. Pros (like editors and agents) can see right through it. It's not like me bragging about being a "prize-winning poet" will lead to a career in poetry, now will it?

Photo courtesy Duncharris via Wikimedia Commons.

Friday, 2 October 2009

There's a new editor in town

I'm obviously not doing my job.

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the agonies of the freelance life and yet in the past week two friends have asked me to read their novels, and now another friend has started a freelance editing business. Have I taught you people nothing?

The new editor in town is Missouri poet Shawn Douglas, known in Madrid as Shawn Numero Dos because he arrived there after me. Well, having spent two years teaching English and surviving snarky comments from inferior poets, he's back in St. Louis writing and setting up his own editing business. It's called Write-Edit-Teach and besides editing he's offering writing services, including technical writing (he's a computer whizz who's saved my Luddite ass on several occasions), and teaching everything from English to SAT preparation. So if you're in the St. Louis area, or willing to work via email (and as a writer you better be) then check him out. He's easy going, his rates are competitive, and he knows his stuff.

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

Writers and Armistice/Remembrance Day

Ninety years ago today, on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, World War One ended. Here in Madrid there's an exhibition titled "¡1914! The Avant-Garde and the Great War" exploring how World War One affected the art and ideas of Europe. I've blogged about it here.

My favorite items in the extensive collections of paintings and sculptures were two trench notebooks, one by Guillaume Apollinaire and the other by André More. Apollinaire was a poet who coined the term "surrealism" and sadly died just two days before the end of the war. More was a painter and lived until 1932. Apollinaire wrote poems while at the front, often forming the words into pictures. More painted colorful portraits of fellow soldiers that look like pages from an illuminated manuscript.

What's amazing about these guys is that while hunkering down amid the mud and body parts, they continued to create. Nothing could stop their art, not gas attacks, not snipers, not days of shelling. So the next time you say that you have too much going on in your life to write, remember these guys and get back to work.

Photo courtesy Caroline Ford, from Wikimedia Commons, reproduced under GNU Free Documentation License.

Monday, 27 October 2008

Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas would have been 98 today. I've been reading his Selected Letters, but having so much other reading I need to do for my book projects I'm still only on his early life, when he was a 20 year-old unknown. He had gotten a few of his poems published, but his first book wasn't out yet. The letters are full of youthful enthusiasm and affectation, but are wonderfully written. He's pretty scathing on editors and the publishing process. Poor editorial taste? Heaps of rejections? Slow response? Even slower payment? It looks like some things never change.

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The Case of the Purloined Pyramid

The Last Hotel Room

He came to Tangier to die, but life isn’t done with him yet. Tom Miller has lost his job, his wife, and his dreams. Broke and alone, he ends up in a flophouse in Morocco, ready to end it all. But soon he finds himself tangled in a web of danger and duty as he’s pulled into scamming tourists for a crooked cop while trying to help a Syrian refugee boy survive life on the streets. Can a lifelong loser do something good for a change? A portion of my royalties will go to a charity for Syrian refugees.

Warpath into Sonora

Arizona 1846: Nantan, a young Apache warrior, is building a name for himself by leading raids against Mexican ranches to impress his war chief, and the chief’s lovely daughter. But there is one thing he and all other Apaches fear—a ruthless band of Mexican scalp hunters who slaughter entire villages. Nantan and his friends have sworn to fight back, but they are inexperienced, and led by a war chief driven mad with a thirst for revenge. Can they track their tribe’s worst enemy into unknown territory and defeat them?

Radio Hope

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . . A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son. A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump. The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command. One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Refugees from the Righteous Horde (Toxic World Book 2)

When you only have one shot, you better aim true. In a ravaged world, civilization’s last outpost is reeling after fighting off the fanatical warriors of the Righteous Horde. Sheriff Annette Cruz becomes New City’s long arm of vengeance as she sets off across the wildlands to take out the cult’s leader. All she has is a sniper’s rifle with one bullet and a former cultist with his own agenda. Meanwhile, one of the cult’s escaped slaves makes a discovery that could tear New City apart. . . Refugees from the Righteous Horde continues the Toxic World series started in Radio Hope, an ongoing narrative of humanity’s struggle to rebuild the world it ruined.

The Scavenger

In a world shattered by war, pollution, and disease, a lone scavenger discovers a priceless relic from the Old Times. The problem is, it's stuck in the middle of the worst wasteland he knows--a contaminated city inhabited by insane chem addicts and vengeful villagers. Only his wits, his gun, and an unlikely ally can get him out alive. Set in the Toxic World series introduced in the novel Radio Hope, this 10,000-word story explores more of the dangers and personalities that make up a post-apocalyptic world that's all too possible.

Trench Raiders

September 1914: The British Expeditionary Force has the Germans on the run, or so they think. After a month of bitter fighting, the British are battered, exhausted, and down to half their strength, yet they’ve helped save Paris and are pushing toward Berlin. Then the retreating Germans decide to make a stand. Holding a steep slope beside the River Aisne, the entrenched Germans mow down the advancing British with machine gun fire. Soon the British dig in too, and it looks like the war might grind down into deadly stalemate. Searching through No-Man’s Land in the darkness, Private Timothy Crawford of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry finds a chink in the German armor. But can this lowly private, who spends as much time in the battalion guardhouse as he does on the parade ground, convince his commanding officer to risk everything for a chance to break through?

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