Ezine Receive monthly updates from the site. News of competitions, sites, and more.
Looking Over The Writer's Shoulder: "The storyteller becomes bound by his own decisions; he must follow one chosen route from beginning to end." A new article by Paul Grainger looks at the writing process from the perspective of the writer and the reader.
Things to do to Avoid Writing: Katie Gould takes a wry look at the things authors find to do to avoid writing.
Our 'Writer in Residence' Paul Saevig considers how to tackle writing advice: 'Choosing Your Training as a Writer': or 'How To Evaluate Teachings on Writing For Your Own Best Interest', looks at the problems the plethora of guidance can create.
California Literary Review: Insightful, irreverent book reviews, thought provoking essays, and interviews with talented authors.
How To Write A Book: Information on how to write a book including book writing tips, how to write a fiction book, writing childrens books, writing fantasy books, writing a book proposal, book writing software, format for writing a book, and books on writing.
Self Publishing: Information on self publishing including self publishing books, self publishing presses, self publishing printing, self publishing software, self publishing services, self publishing children's book, self publishing comparison, self publishing sites, and childrens self publishing.
GodSeed: Promoter of the Sci_Fi and Fantasy Author. Our members post their books to our library and bookstore. Enter short story contests. Member book reviews.
Dynamic Fiction: was developed to establish an online presence for amateur writing. Our goal is to provide a central internet location for users to read and comment on fictional stories, book reviews, essays, poems and more. Dynamic Fiction's content is rooted in the idea that group effort yields higher quality material, so we encourage you to give us feedback and and we wish to entertain each and every user by doing so.
Man In The Moon: a website for poetry written by children. Here you can read lots and lots of brilliant poems, read all about children's poet Michael Rosen and play some games. You can also pick up some tips for writing your own poetry, learn a few toe-curling jokes and e-mail us your poems.
hagsharlotsheroines: Hagsharlotsheroines is a vibrant new story telling site, filled with tales of raging demons, pioneering physicians, infamous pickpockets, fickle goddesses, heroic fighter pilots, inspirational artists, chariot riding warriors, pretenders to the throne, witches, writers, murderers, revolutionaries, spies. and all women; members of the so called "weaker" sex. We welcome submissions from our members and provide a valuable writer's tool kit for aspiring writers. Access to the site requires registration - but membership is free. We also send out a monthly newsletter to members containing our Story of the Month.
Appalachian Authors' Guild: The AAG is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to provide avenues of support and networking to Appalachian authors by assisting our members in marketing and selling their products.
Search Engines
Search Methods
We all know search engines and directories exist but what we really need to know is how to use them to good effect and considering the statistics above, it seems even more essential. Search engines and directories can be classified into general categories depending on the material or information you are searching for.
The key thing to remember is that search engines are only as effective as the terms you supply. If you don't include as many phrases or words as you should, or you misspell words, or you are searching for the wrong thing, the results will be flawed.
To begin with it may help to limit yourself to the major search engines and progress from there. Always use a search engine's 'advanced search' help facility, these will give you detailed instructions on the best way to conduct a search according to their requirements and will give you the best chance of securing the information you are looking for. Obviously one search engine can't find everything on the Web. The amount of information available on the internet grows every minute as new pages are listed and old ones are replaced, expanded or removed.
Useful tips:
Create a list of keywords
Create a list of keywords and phrases before you use the search engines. Your list should be designed to produce the longest list of relevant pages from the search engines. Enter the words or phrases into a few selected search engines. When you see the results of your searches, add new terms from the results to your own list of keywords.
Define your search
Finding results with a search engine is not a problem; the challenge is to create a search that excludes irrelevant pages. To search for documents or pages about writing articles, start by entering the keywords "writing" or "articles" to see what comes up. If you look at the results you might find that the words "writing" and "articles" will appear separately in many documents. If you enter the word "freelance" you might find that ''freelance" will appear separately in many documents too. You need some way to link these words so that the pages include combinations of these words to get the best results. To do this you need to use operators.
Learn to use "operators"
Operators are symbols or special words that sit alongside the keywords in a query and tell the search engine how to process them. These can be used to refine searches. Operators let users specify whole phrases or words to exclude, or words that should appear, and words that should appear close together.
Phrase searching
With AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, and Yahoo!, it is possible to specify phrases by putting them in quotation marks (""). It should have become clear that if you put the keywords writing or articles into a search engine it produces too many irrelevant hits. You are not looking for all of the documents that contain the keywords writing and articles or even freelance you are trying to find only those documents that contain the phrase "writing articles" and/or the word freelance.
Try searching for the whole phrase "writing articles" and compare the results with the writing and articles search.
Includes and Excludes (+/-)
To make the search even more precise, you can include and exclude certain terms. If you add a plus sign (+) in front of a term in the search box, the search engine will know that the term must appear in the pages. If you add a minus sign (-) in front of a term, the search engine knows that the term must not appear in the pages.
Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR)
AltaVista and Excite use Boolean, or proximity, operators (always in uppercase) instead of includes and excludes (+/-). Boolean operators can add even more specificity to a search. By placing one of the Boolean operators between terms you can include and exclude terms, find cases where terms occur close together, and account for synonyms for words in a phrase. Here are some basic Boolean operators:
Examples:
AND: writing AND articles: Find all pages containing both the terms writing and articles anywhere on the page.
OR: writing OR articles OR freelance: Find all pages containing the term writing. Find all the pages containing the term articles. And all pages containing the term freelance.
AND NOT: writing AND NOT fiction: Find all pages that contain the term fiction. Of those pages, exclude ones that contain the term fiction.
NEAR: writing NEAR articles: Find all pages that contain the terms writing and articles within 10 spaces of each other.
Several operators can be used at once with parentheses to create even more complex searches. But be careful where you put the parentheses:
Examples:
(writing OR articles) AND freelance: Find pages that contain the terms writing and articles. Find pages that contain articles and freelance.
writing OR (articles AND freelance): Find pages that contain the term writing. Find pages that contain the terms articles and freelance.
(writing NEAR articles) AND freelance: Find pages that contain the phrase writing within 10 characters of the term articles and contain the term freelance somewhere on the page.
Links:
Alexa
AOL
AltaVista
AskJeeves
Direct Hit
DogPile
Excite
Fast/AllTheWeb
Go.com
GoTo.com
HotBot/Lycos
LookSmart
Netscape
Nktomi
Northern Light
Scrub The Web
Search.com
Snap/NBCi
UK Plus
WebCrawler
Yahoo/Yahoo UK
The BBC Webguide
BeaucoupNB. Search engines and directories are subject to frequent take-overs and re-structuring.
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rejectioncollection.com: The writer's online source for misery, commiseration and inspiration? Postings are anonymous, laughs and catharsis are free.
Creative Novel Writing: Roselle Angwin runs a year-round programme, which ranges from retreats on the Isle of Iona to a nine-month novel writing course (based on her book CREATIVE NOVEL WRITING, [Robert Hale, 1999, 2002]) which was featured in The Guardian - and many more. Roselle is an author and poet, and Director of the Fire in the Head creative writing programme.
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Learning Curve: Offer a range of innovative courses in Creative Writing, Fiction Writing, Freelance Journalism. Writing for Television, Radio and Chidren. They help students to rediscover their creative abilities, as well as developing their writing skills - their tutors are experienced editors, writers, publishers and producers.
Burning Leaf: is a literary website featuring original fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, critical essays, photography and art.
The Italian-American Press: posts literature by Italian-Americans and other self-published authors whose books all too often go unnoticed or are ignored by the media. This service is free.
RITRO.com:Volunteer based e-zine with new content daily. They publish and accept submissions in poetry and articles in many departments. There are also message boards, online diaries, and voting polls. Checking submission guidelines is a must before sending in any work.
www.freelance-tips.com: Free newsletter offering tips on marketing, niche marketing, negotiating a contract, getting referrals, pricing your work, building your portfolio and more...
www.writersarena.com: is an international website for aspiring writers. Offering information, advice and showcasing.
The Handy Little Book for Writers by Lynne Hackles is packed with hints and tips for all writers of all genres at all levels. There is something in it to inspire everyone. It's all packed into a 44-page A6 booklet with a distinctive purple cover. The book was published in September by NAWG Publications. It costs a mere £2.99 (with 50p towards cost of post and packing - cheques payable to NAWG). You can order the book from The Handy Little Book for Writers, 40 Burstall Hill, Bridlington, East Yorkshire YO16 7GA.
IWanthatBook: Online Bookshop for difficult to find reference books. IWanthatBook aims to be the place for academics and students alike to order the books they want - simply, securely and cost-effectively.
Freelancers In The UK
The UK's most comprehensive list of freelance writers and copywriting information!
Resourceaid: Resource site for everything to do with the arts. Full of newsletters, articles, links and other resources - ALL FREE - in one easy to navigate site to save time and money.
Today's Woman: A community for men and women over 18, where writers, poets & columnists meet and exchange ideas, contest, rate and review and help each other succeed in the writing industry.
thefictionwritersjourney.com: articles on writing, prompts, exercises from novelist and writing coach, Emily Hanlon. Writing.Com: An online community for writers of all ages, interests and skill levels. Anyone may create a free portfolio and exchange feedback with other writers. We were amongst Writer's Digest's 101 "Best Websites For Writers, 2005" and have thousands of writers within our community.
Today's Writer: a community for men and women over 18, where writers, poets & columnists meet and exchange ideas, contest, rate and review and help each other succeed in the writing industry.
The Argotist Online: is devoted to poetry and poetics. It publishes non-mainstream poetry, and features essays and interviews sympathetic to it. Currently it has interviews with Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Rupert Loydell; and poems by Sheila E Murphy, Annabelle Clippinger, and Hank Lazer among others.