This Week’s Poetry Across the Web

Another fresh vine of poetry has grown across the web this week. I have pruned it down to some nice little flowers. Enjoy…

Immortality
The cook’s right hand, lifted
an exact century ago,
completes its downward arc

unwritten meridian poem
the weapons-grade petulance

Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell
the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe

Ghazal for a Comfort
Sometimes the hierarchy works, or looks to

The Stone Gatherer
Now I collect stones, and tell others
they are grave markers.

Pistachio
A spritz of soda, carbon captured, bubbles bursting;
Antiseptic odor effervescing from the glass.

The Iconoclasm of Mice
Mouse dung falls from overhead on books
I’ve made into icons in my writing house.

Starfish
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert.

Just a Poem About Coffee
a man with sunglasses scans the menu
he walks out the front door empty handed

And one from me:

Big Heads
Each a random sampling of their parent’s failures
Cobbled together and mostly functional

On The Web: Writing about fiction writing

This week the blogosphere was chock full of fiction writing advice. Advice is always useful, just try to remember that the time you spend reading advice can be spent just as profitably writing. Here are a few nuggets for you to chew on.

• Writing science fiction; writing fictional interviews: “If the phrase “next on CNN, an interview with a cyberdragon” then this is the article for you.
• 10 Writing Rules You Should Break and Why: Break them, don’t break them, decide for yourself.
• Writing Advice: Ignoring the rules, and craft is crap: “Reading the advice of other writers and publishing industry professionals is useful to a degree directly proportional to the amount of fiction writing the reader of the advice actually achieves.”
• Fiction Writing Pitfalls and Successful Strategies: How to blast through writer’s block.
• The single simplest and most effective technique known to improve fiction writing and journalism: A passionate, intense, concise attack on adjectives.
• Plot chart for fiction writing: Learn to plot like J.K. Rowling!
• A Roadmap for Your Fiction Writing Career: Because unpublished is a dirty word.
• It Came From the Slush …and Survived! “Even the best of us were once nobodies, striving to make an impression upon the critical eye of someone who can help build or launch our careers.”
• Interview with Laurence Dumortier: Author of Love is in the Ether.

Poetry Across The Web (Week Two)

This week, once again, the web has yielded plenty of new poems for poetry lovers to read. Here are a few, with my favorite lines selected.

An Eighth Lesson in Magic
In the absence of miracles, the pot
simmers a new husband in the oven.

They’re Leaving Home
After forty years he has to wonder,
will he ever go back to that street?

mandate (social)
Dollars notwithstanding, they each burn their own way.

Sojourns in a Parallel World
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.

Blues
I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world.

The Scent of Blue
As a girl, she wears Bluebell,
fresh and full of hope

Perfect Dead
You are improving
as you die

Her Eyes Filled, Thus the Poem Spoke
doves of peace
fluttering like Mae West’s eye-lashes

Lake Powell Revisited
sandstone reaches up
from man’s hoarded water tank

Happiness
happiness is the uncle you never
knew about

The final poem is one of mine:

Snow Together
I had to describe it for her
Falling down and collecting on the windshield

A Quick Guide to Acrostic Poetry

The acrostic poetry form is fun and easy to learn. For this reason it is very popular in elementary and middle school poetry programs. The key to the form is that the first letters of the first words of every line in the poem come together to spell out a word or phrase — generally the overall subject of the poem. For example:

Sushi

Squid, eel and tuna
Upon a bed of rice
Sit ready to be eaten
Happily by those who can stand
It.

There are very few other requirements to the form. Acrostic poems don’t normally rhyme, which can be a relief for teachers and can help prepare students for less lyrical forms such as blank verse and free verse. The form still requires students to think about language and word choice without having to rely on rhyme or meter. Because the form has a reputation as a beginner’s or children’s form, it is not commonly taught at the college level and is rarely used by published poets, but it is an excellent introduction to the world of poetry.
Acrostic poems across the web:

• Animal acrostic poems
• Color acrostics
• Repository of acrostic poems
• Our name poems
• Sample acrostic poems
• Third grade MLK acrostics
• Important things acrostics
• Children’s Bible acrostic
  

Here are some additional articles about writing and teaching acrostics:

• Definition and much more: acrostic
• Enchanted learning acrostic poems
• Emory acrostic poetry
• Poetry Teachers How to Write Acrostic Poems
• Poetry Workshop Acrostics
• Acrostic Poems: All About Me and My Favorite Things
  
• Teacher lessons for acrostics
• How to Write an Acrostic Poem

Eight Tips for Writing a Division Essay

The purpose of the division essay, also known as the classification essay or the division and classification essay, is to separate things into categories. For example, you might write about diseases that have similar symptoms, categories of comedy, or causes behind social unrest. The key to a division essay to discuss the differences and delineations between things that are in many ways similar or contribute toward a similar whole. Here are some tips to help you write a division essay:

• A division essay must contain at least three categories. When you have only two categories, your essay would be classified as compare and contrast.
• The best division essays find new categories that haven’t already been discussed to death. The three branches of the United States government have been categories a million times. An essay that categorizes the ways the executive branch and the judicial branch interact would be a more original approach to similar material.
• Classifications should use the same elements for each item in the category. If you classify one category by size, speed, color and price, you need to classify every category by size, speed, color and price.
• Give every category an equal amount of attention and discussion. If one categories merits a full page of discussion, all the categories should receive about a page of discussion.
• Your introduction should mention all of the categories you wish to discuss and mention the criteria you intend to use to differentiate between the categories.
• Try to be thorough, don’t leave a category out. If it looks like there are too many categories to discuss using the amount of space and time you have available, then look for a less complex topic. For short essays, it is usually better to stick to topics that can be divided into three or four categories.
• Make sure that your categories can all be divided using the same criteria. If two categories are very similar and the rest are very different, your essay may feel unbalanced.
• Outlines are useful for most types of essays, but they are especially useful for division essays because they give you the opportunity to quickly review the criteria you are using to differentiate each category. Make sure that, you have researched and identified the key comparison points for each category.

Successful Freelance Writers Know How to Close the Sale

Successful freelance writers know how to close the sale. They get the client to commit and they get the money. Many potential clients have trouble committing to a project. They know that they want help, but there is some issue holding them back. Money can be a big issue. Defining the project can be a problem. The client may have concerns about the amount of time it takes to finish or be unsure of your ability to meet their needs. Some people just have trouble committing to anything. They always think a better deal is just around the corner.

Whatever the issue is, if you want their money you are going to have to get them to commit. The longer it takes a client to commit, the more unpaid time you are going to have to invest in that client. That is why you need to develop some closing skills. You need to get comfortable with sales techniques and you need to learn when to cut your losses. Most clients are worth the extra time it takes to get them to commit, but a potential client that can’t commit is a potential drain on your time and resources even when they do commit. Hard to sell prospects usually become hard to please clients.

There are plenty of articles on the web about how to close sales, and I’ll link to them below, but a few quick things to remember are:

• Many objections are really requests for information. Restate the objection so that it is clear to you and to them, then answer the prospect’s objection with information.
• Get to the point. When your sales pitch is long and unfocused, you are wasting both your time and the potential client’s time.
• Ask for a commitment. Don’t wait for them to offer to commit.
• Discuss specifics. Make it clear how you much you are going to charge and what you are going to do for them.
• Ask questions and respond to the prospect’s answers. The process is primarily about their needs and your ability to meet their needs.

Here are some good articles about closing sales:

• How to Close a Sale
• Three Common Closing Mistakes
• Tips for Closing a Sale
• How to Close a Sale in the First 30 Seconds
• How to Close a Sale
• How can I close a sale?
• Closing the Sale

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