The Department of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and GRASSROOTS, SIUC’s undergraduate literary magazine, are pleased to announce the 2010 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Awards. One book of poetry and one book of prose (novel, short fiction, or literary nonfiction) will be selected from submissions of titles published in 2009, and the winning authors will receive an honorarium of $1000 and will present a public reading and participate in panels at the Devil’s Kitchen Fall Literary Festival at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. The dates for the 2010 festival are yet to be determined, but usually takes place in late October/early November. Travel and accommodations will be provided for the two winners.

Entries may be submitted by either author or publisher, and must include a copy of the book, a cover letter, a brief biography of the author including previous publications, and a $15.00 entry fee made out to “SIUC – Dept. of English.” Entries must be postmarked December 1, 2009 – February 1, 2010. Materials postmarked after February 1 will be returned unopened. Because we cannot guarantee their return, all entries will become the property of the SIUC Department of English. Entrants wishing acknowledgment of receipt of materials must include a self-addressed stamped postcard.

The options for available writing software may be growing, but so are the price tags for these highly sought after programs. Some of them are priced high enough to ruin a starving writer’s entire week. The sad truth is that none of these programs will help us write better, but they can help us become more organized, efficient, and structured writers. Although I own two commercial writing programs, I’m still constantly on the lookout for free software that can closely match the feature lists of their commercial brethren. Actually, I’d be just as happy with something fairly easy to learn that can help me manage my writing notes and structure in an effective manner.

Here’s a list of twenty writing programs I stumbled upon and bookmarked at some point. I have to admit I have not personally used or reviewed any these programs, but as far as I can tell, they will cost you exactly $0.00 to give them a try yourself.

1. ywriter
2. RoughDraft
3. WritersFocus
4. Storybook
5. Writing Management
6. Celtx
7. Evernote
8. The Literary Machine
9. Manuscript Tracking Software
10. Text Block Writer
11. Character Keeper
12. Cinergy Script Editor
13. Papel
14. DarkRoom
15. Scripped
16. Zhura
17. ScriptBuddy
18. PlotBot
19. Slang
20. Lyx

Eligibility and Guidelines: Short stories, written in English, up to 7,000 words. Only open to writers who have not yet published a book of fiction. Only previously unpublished stories accepted. Unlimited entries per person. Simultaneous submissions accepted; please notify the Festival if your story is accepted elsewhere. Stories that won this contest in previous years are ineligible; their authors remain eligible but must submit new work. Stories submitted to this contest in previous years that did not place are eligible. Author’s name should not appear on manuscript. Include a separate page with story title and name, address, phone, and email of author.

Deadline: November 16, 2009 (postmark). Winner will be announced by March 1, 2010.

Entry Fee: $25

As a writer, I am needy by definition and need ego gratification to help keep me motivated.  If you’re a writer, that probably applies to you as well.  It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about freelance writing, copy writing, web content authoring or your novel.  You want to see your hard work in print.

I am also a subscriber to Writer’s Digest.  I was perusing the latest issue when I began to take notice of the amount of advertisements of self-publishing companies.  The October 2008 issue has no less than 18 ads for these services.  That tells me that this is big business in the writing world.

You’re So Vain…

In the past, self publishing was partly done through what was known as a “vanity press”.  (It was important that if you were a real writer, you looked down your nose and said this with a certain amount of disdain.)  Self publishing was seen as something that no serious novelist would ever consider.  Using a vanity press was just for that very reason – vanity.

“Bad guys” are expected to look repulsive and to live in dark, eerie places. Superhero adventures and fairytales make villains easy to detect. Haven’t we all seen their brooding expression, occasionally offset by a smug smile, suddenly explode into an arrogant laugh as they bask in the pleasure of having successfully created chaos?

Foes are not so obvious (or comical) in real life. We cannot so easily spot the child abuser, the terrorists and the thieves among us. It’s hard to predict if someone is about to “go postal” or is simply on the verge of a burnout. Neither is it evident to tell the religiously devout apart from the dangerous fanatic or the animal rights champion from the brash, pied-piper activist willing to use terrorist means of coercion.

In our day and age, principles of morality and ethical responsibility are considered relative; standards for one person may not necessarily apply to another, given the priority assigned to the values in question and the particular circumstance surrounding each case. The boundary between right and wrong has become increasingly foggy, and traditional values are more likely to be abandoned than upheld. Despite this trend, the battle between good and evil wages inside the very heart and soul of humanity’s integrity and extends outward to encompass our every social connection.

Plotting is the process of describing your novel in summarised form, usually before you start the actual work of writing it. First, it can be very useful in the writing of your novel, especially when you start to lose your way. Second, it’s much quicker to read, revise and rewrite a two page summary than a four hundred page novel. It’s easier to spot flaws and it’s easier to get an overview of the whole book.

So why doesn’t every author write a plot outline?

I don’t know about other authors, but I never liked plotting and I never enjoyed writing to a detailed outline. Once I’d spent days or weeks on the plot, writing the book was just like going to the movies and watching a film I’d seen ten or twelve times already. I knew what was coming, and frankly I found it quite boring.

What I used to do was map out a few scenes ahead of where I was writing and basically stumble along until I reached the end of my novel. That worked fine, except that I never knew how long a novel would take to write, and I’d end up with loads of dead ends and stray scenes. It was creative and spontaneous, yes, but it was also inefficient and very slow going.