It’s been cool and dreary on the porch most of today. We had one spectacular lighting show Tuesday evening, followed by bucketsful of rain mixed with hail. There was a time when the front yard looked like it had snowed. The lighting lasted far into the night.
My granddaughter and I enjoyed the lightning on our way home from her dance class. She asked me what causes lightning. I tried to explain as simply as I could without getting too scientific for an 8 year old. She finally told me, “Grandma, I think God makes lightning because He’s mad. Maybe He had a fight with somebody.”
Thursday, I had the opportunity to go to one of our area middle schools and meet with several students. My main purpose was to give these young people interested in writing an overview of the steps it takes to get their work from their writing pad or computer screen into a magazine.
I had the 7th grade first and was told there would be “quite a few”, so considering the size of the school, I figured around 25 kids. I was told to expect 2-3 8th grade students. Several 6th graders had expressed an interest, so I expected maybe 20 in that group. Well, the first group had 57, the second 14, and the third about 30. I was thrilled to see so many young people interested in writing!
It is hard to tell how much the students learned from my talk. I don’t think a lot of them had heard much of the information I told them. I’m not sure that anyone had ever seen “The Writer’s Market Guide”. I took a copy of that along. I hope that my words inspired these young writers and that some of them will follow through and pursue their dream of publication. Others will go on to accomplish different goals, and that is fine too.
The idea occurred to me that I would like to start a series on my blog geared to young writers. I think many young people have the desire to get published, but don’t know how to go about it or what to expect when they do put their work “out there in the world”. So, help me spread the word about this series to any young people you know who would like to be published.
Every Friday, I will enter a blog post geared to the young writer. I’m going to start by posting the guidelines for Starsongs, a publication of Written World Communications for which I am the editor.
You are the future, and Starsongs wants to hear your ideas about it. Whether you like to write about the world in general or your little piece of it, we would like to see your story.
We are looking for short stories, poetry, artwork, and photography that reflect the way the writer or photographer views their life experiences with relationships to family, friends, role models, situations that young people face today and how they solve their dilemma.
We are interested in work by writers, artists, and photographers age 12-19. We are open to fiction or non-fiction and “as told to” stories.
We are not interested in work that deals with encouragement of drug use, explicit sexual situations, graphic violence, slasher stories, or torture situations.
Short stories should be submitted as an attachment with the following format. Double spaced, times new roman or courier new, 12-14 point font, 1" margins top, bottom, and both sides. Any Microsoft word program from 2007 and earlier is acceptable.
Starsongs will be a small publication with limited space. Therefore, short stories are limited to 1500-2000 words. Poetry is restricted to 16-24 lines per poem and can be sent as an attachment or in the body of the email in the way you would like to see it formatted on the page.
Photography should be submitted as an attachment in jpeg format.
Submissions should be addressed to Patti Shene at starsongs.mag@gmail.com
Next Week: Before you submit - Part I
Thanks for reading my blog.
.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment