Travel Writing - Just Back

If you are interested in travel writing and can make the most mundane trip sound wonderful, enter this Just Back from The Daily Telegraph pay £200 each
week for the best 500 word article.

Although most of the destinations written about are fairly exotic. Peru, Palestine, Arizona, Laos, Tanzania, the Himalayas, Edinburgh...

Cill Rialaig Residences

The Cill Rialaig Project in south-west Kerry invites applications for residencies for September 2011 to December 2012.
Built out of the ruins of a 1790s pre-famine village atop a cliff face overlooking the Atlantic, Cill Rialaig offers artists and other creative professionals an opportunity to get away from everyday career pressures and the demands of 21st century life in order to focus entirely on their artistic practice. The purpose of Cill Rialaig is to foster creativity and excellence, to provide a place to work and regenerate. To that end it operates a multi-disciplinary residency programme. While residents are primarily visual artists, they also include photographers, writers, poets, screenwriters, applied artists, musicians and composers, architects, and their peers, from Ireland and abroad.

Cill Rialaig is located in a very remote Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking, area. Its cottages are living-work spaces that provide for residents’ essential work and living needs. They are very simple without modern accoutrements of television, telephones or internet. The remote location means that there are very few distractions other than the landscape; it is a true retreat.

Residencies are offered free of charge, although there is a small service fee for utilities. Residents provide their own transportation, food and supplies. The selection committee meets twice a year.

Deadline: 15 September 2011.

The following deadline is 15 March 2012.

Please contact Mary O’Connell at cillrialaigarts@gmail.com for information about applying.

Common faults made by Emerging Writers

This post inspired by reading some eBooks by new writers.
Read this post by Louise Wise first. Includes:

• Boring. Nothing much happens. Doughy prose, stodgy story.
• Point of View all over the place. Start with one person for a while, leap onto someone else's point of view, then back then... Or start with one person for ages, then leap to another. Disorientating.
• Characters not showing enough emotion. Show us what they feel even if they're trying to hide it.
• Minor characters with too much information. If the policeman is minor, don't tell us he's called Gregor.
• Show, don't tell. This was a revelation to me the first time I heard it. I must have heard it close on to a thousand times now. e.g. The first time she was told, she felt it was an absolutely key piece of advice (telling) When Stuart told her the rule first, she wrote it down in her notebook in capital letters, underlined then tore the page out and stuck it above her writing desk when she got home. (showing)
• Timeline. Is it winter? Does it matter? How long does it take to get the story from A to Z?
• Irrelevant detail. Get the character out of the house. Don't show us her breakfast, unless she's going to spew it up all over the love interest later on.
• Pompous words. OK, I get that if you know the word, archipeligo, you don't have to use it, but if it's the right word...On the other hand, if you mean small, why use diminuative? A thesaurus can be your best friend as long as you don't give into temptation.
• Speech tags. Use said. Sometimes you can use asked. Don't use enquired, quipped, demanded, requested, queried, laughed, etc etc. It should be obvious from the context what it is. Whispered and shouted can sometimes be an exception.
• Cliches. Within speech, OK. Otherwise, avoid. But what is a cliche? Your call.

To which I would add

• If you're going to have vampires, zombies, magic, aliens, a crime, have it soon into your novel so the reader knows what to expect. Having the first sniff of a vampire appear 50% into the story is cruel and unnecessary.
• Humour. I don't know of a good book that doesn't have a sniff of humour in it.
• On the subject of humour, don't tell us when to laugh (By having your characters split their sides over some brief joke.)
• Emotional tunnel. Too much despair, grief, loved-up-ness, anger, greed etc in one go can be too much. Break it up.
• Description. Give us a little to go on. We don't need to know the layout of the apartment, the garden design or the photofit image but a few little details go a long way to painting a picture in the reader's head.

The Subject of Language

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie via Kalle at The Brown Bread Mixtape

Horizon Review Submissions

 Now you may know that I am not a huge fan of online, free magazines but this one is associated with the independent press Salt.

They are reading now until 15th August.

Horizon is an online review of literature and art. We publish poems, stories, essays, articles and memoir, multimedia pieces (but light on the talking heads please), art reviews, photo essays, and other items of cultural interest. Queries are welcome. The review appears twice yearly, in March and September.

Submission highlights:
We accept submissions only by email, at submissions-horizon@saltpublishing.com.
maximum of six poems or three short stories.
Criticism, memoir and essays should be no more than 3,000 words.
Reviews should be no more than 1,000 words.
75-word biographical note.

If you are not contacted by Salt within 30 days of your submission, your work has not been accepted for publication.

Details here

Poetry Apps

First posted on writing.ie.

Inspired by this piece by the poet and fiction author, Nick Laird in the Guardian (can't be doing without my Saturday Guardian) I've had a look at some of the online poetry tools he mentions.

Wattpad - a website to share your stories and poems. You can perhaps read the most popular (What's Hot) but having a quick scan through showed nothing of interest to me. 1 millions reads? Romance gets a lot of reads here; poetry doesn't. There's an app to read on your mobile too. Wiki here tells you how it all works. I've uploaded an old short story of mine up here and will see what happens.

Portapoet for

• Easily writing and sharing rhyming poems
• Finding rhymes for words
•  

Available as an app on iPad etc. Not a huge fan of rhymes for rhyming sake myself.

Another is Erotic Poems where you can, for 99c, once you successfully complete the structured poems in this program, create more complex work, learning to:
-excite all five of your lover's senses
-identify formulas for creating structured forms of poetry
-enjoy the fruits of prewriting and revision
-use figurative language to entice someone special
-create a sustained image to captivate the person of your desires

Right, so.

The Poetry Foundation in America has some apps. It is said to turn your phone into a mobile poetry library. But only if it's an iPhone. I have an HTC. I love my HTC.
Poetry Ireland take note. A great way to promote Irish Poetry. Also the Poetry Society in the UK. Get over yourselves and get out there.

Prose with Bros again for the iPhone, competitive poetry with random words. Each player is given the same 50 words to construct their prose, and after submitting the results, other players vote on which is best over the course of the next 24 hours. As described here, pretty smutty.

On my HTC, if I search Marketplace for Poetry I get 1,046 results, mostly other people's poems for free, people I haven't heard of as well as Bill Shakespeare and his buddy, Goethe.

Refrigerator Poetry is there as an android app and there are rhyming dictionaries too.

Interview with writer and blogger Nuala Ni Chonchor

This interview first published on writing.ie

Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a full-time fiction writer and poet. She has published three collections of short fiction, the most recent being Nude by Salt Publishing and three poetry collections, including the bi-lingual Tattoo: Tatu by Arlen House, and most recently one novel, You published by New Island.

Welcome to writing.ie. Could you introduce yourself to the readers please?
I’m a full-time writer from Dublin living in County Galway. I write both fiction and poetry but my heart lies in fiction really. I have three kids and ten hours a week to write so I stuff a lot into those precious ten hours. At the moment I am writing a novel and am at the ‘enjoying it’ stage of that.

How did you get into writing?

I’ve been writing since I was a child, it grew from my love of reading. I came second in a national poetry competition when I was ten and that gave me a boost and a special interest in writing. Michael Hartnett was the judge of that comp and I remember my mother’s awe and reverence when we met him; it rubbed off.

What do you consider the highlights so far?

Winning the Francis MacManus Award in 2003 was brilliant – the money was great and it was just an all round positive experience. My first novel You coming out last year with New Island, after 5 years of schlepping it around publishers, was also a highlight.

Which came first, poetry or fiction?
Poetry came first for me, but I fell in love with short fiction after taking a course with Mike McCormack in Galway Arts Centre in the mid nineties. I still love short stories, as both reader and writer.

How do you change from one form to another? Do you feel the poetry helps the fiction and vice versa?

I write everything at the same time, I don’t totally neglect one form for another. So even though I am in the thick of a novel, if a poem or short story occurs to me, I will abandon the novel to write that.

I think poetry and fiction complement each other. Poets pay very close attention to language and individual word choices – that then becomes important in the fiction.

What have you got coming up?
My third full poetry collection The Juno Charm is due out from Salmon Poetry in November, so I am putting the finishing touches to the manuscript at the moment.

Which Irish poets, living or dead, do you recommend people search out and read?

Too many to mention but here are a few: Patrick Cotter, Mary O’Donnell, Cherry Smyth, Paul Durcan, Matthew Sweeney, Grace Wells.

You can find out more about Nuala at ·http://www.nualanichonchuir.com/·and her lovely blog http://womenrulewriter.blogspot.com