Since I’ve been Twittering a lot of links lately, I figured I would share them with you here. You can also follow me @meghancward or like my Facebook Page to receive these links throughout the week.
Here is a great post by Brian Meeks about Fake Hashtaggery.
Keren Taylor, founder of WriteGirl, tells the LA Times how she made it.
Here are several Regreturature links. The first is me making a fool of myself. The second is photos from Regreturature, including of @IsaacFitzgerald, managing editor of The Rumpus, playing a drag queen in my screenplay. (Heather Donahue, the star of Blair Witch Project, plays the hooker who gets punched out.) The third is a review of Regreturature by Litseen, which includes summaries and videos of all the readings.
If you’re like me, and you write chapters of your WIP by stuffing Girl Scout cookies down your yaptrap every sentence or so, take a look at this.
In case you missed these, here are Part I and Part II of a convo between self-publishing mavens Barry Eisler and JA Konkath.
I’ve never tried Wee World and I am loathe to join any more social networks, but here is an article on 5 Ways YA Authors Can Use Wee World.
In case you missed this post back in April (like I did), Nathan Bransford explains how to write a good blog comment, a skill that is invaluable for anyone with a blog.
Congrats to fab blogger Kristen Lippert-Martin on the arrival of Augustus James Martin!
I tweeted this article titled Tweets, texts, and posts: New Sources for Memoir Writers before reading it. I generally love Alan Rinzler’s blog, but the concept of mining your tweets and texts for memoir material really diminishes the amount of work that goes into writing a memoir. And I sure as heck don’t want to read a memoir constructed of links texts and tweets. Blog posts are a different story. What do you think?
Video of a lecture by Margaret Atwood titled An author’s view of the publishing pie. You gotta love Margaret Atwood, for her dedication to Twitter as well as her books.
In this economy, should you avoid spending thousands of dollars on an MFA?
Also from GalleyCat, How to cope with writing life anxiety.
Happy weekend, everyone! See you Tuesday.
Thanks for the links!
If you apply for a MFA and your program is reputable you usually get funding of some kind, partial if not full. The few that don't offer aid or very little aid are usually private institutions, and these become terrifically expensive. If you can't afford these you might avoid them if you don't want the loans. But in a bad job market, a student who emerges with a MFA can then teach at the grade school level at as much as 15k more per year than a peer teacher without the same credential, or teach at the college level for much more. Also, at that link, it promotes Low-Res programs as an alternative and these usually don't offer any fellowships at all and are not as affordable as most reputable MFA programs that are often at low-cost state schools, where even if you had to pay part or all of your tuition, you'd not be in deep. The reason for this is that many low-res programs are cash cows for their respective institutions, capitalizing on the popularity of the study of creative writing. This is regrettable. I advise anyone applying to be very skeptical of any MFA program that does not offer any funding to incoming students, but in general do not avoid the programs out of a sense they are expensive—they are by and large the opposite, and provide a writer with time to write and support they won't find elsewhere, as art funding at the state and federal level dries up, and book advances and magazine fees decline.
Koreanish – Thanks for stopping by! I love your website, btw (your main site). I earned my MFA from a private institution (Mills College), and I did get my second year for free through a fellowship and a discount on my other semesters through the alumni scholarship fund. I still have hefty loans to repay since I went for five semesters, but I feel it was worth it. I didn't know, btw, that an MFA increased the pay of grade school teachers. I figured they were only useful for people who wanted to teach at the college level. Good to know there are other opportunities out there – because the community colleges around here are not hiring right now.