Author: Stephanie Orges

Stephanie is an award-winning copywriter, aspiring novelist, and barely passable ukulele player. Here, she offers writing prompts, tips, and moderate-to-deep philosophical discussions. You can also find her on and Pinterest.

Inspiration Monday XII

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Last week was rife with the (unfounded) insecurity of Rewriters who didn’t like their pieces but had the courage to post them anyway, much to the delight of the readers, who found them as good as ever. Be sure to read around!

Also, in case you missed yesterday’s post by TragicPete, be sure to pop over. “Pete” is my long-time critique partner and also happens to be my brother. He mentioned he needed an outlet for some of his shorter work, and just last week it occured to me that inviting him to join my blog would be the perfect solution. He expects to post once or twice a month, and you’ll probably see him around in the comments.

***EDIT: Check out the InMon page for official InMon badges created by Marantha!

Jinx and two

Patti

Marantha

Mike

Ken

Scribbla

Kay

Billie Jo

Drew

Hugmore

Fredi

Char

Carl

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The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before6 pm CSTon the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

Paper towns*

The firing squad couldn’t face him

 Seemed like a good idea at the time

Unorthodox alarm clock

You wouldn’t think to look at her

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at stephanie (at) balcomagency (dot) com.

Happy writing!

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Today’s first prompt brought to you by a book of the same title, by John Green.

How to Format Your Manuscript

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Times New Roman. 12 pt font. Double spaced. You’ve got all that covered. But what else do you have to do to get your manuscript in shape for submission? Here’s some handy info I stole from a used copy of Writer’s Market (any edition of which I highly recommend; mine’s a 2004).

Cover page

In the upper left-hand corner, list your real name, street address, phone number, and email address (remember to use a professional-looking email addy based on your name) – this is the only part that should be single-spaced.

 In the upper right-hand corner, put the word count rounded to the nearest 500.

 One-third of the way down the page, center the book title in all caps. Double space, “by,” double-space again and type your name (or pseudonym).

Chapters

Start each chapter on a new page, one-third of the way down the page. Write the number of the chapter, a colon, and the chapter title (if applicable) in all caps, centered. Double space and begin the chapter.

Header

Create a header with your last name, page number, and shortened version of book title (unless it’s already short), all separated by dashes, and all caps. (For directions on this, type “insert header” into the search in MS Word Help.) 

Spaces

Double space everything. Indent the first line of every paragraph. Do NOT include an extra line between each paragraph, and do NOT include an extra space between sentences. Align text to the left; do NOT justify. Your margins are fine at whatever Word automatically sets them (usually between 1 and 1.5 inches).

Favor Chicago over AP Style

Generally, fiction favors Chicago style and journalism favors AP style. So use em dashes—like this—instead of en dashes – like this. And don’t forget your serial commas when listing three, four, or more of anything. When in doubt, consult Strunk & White.

No fancy fonts!

I know I already mentioned Times New Roman. Apparently Courier is okay, too. But seriously – don’t even use a fancy font for the titles. Your story should stand out because of the writing, not the type. Besides, if you send an e-query, the agent’s computer might not recognize said fancy font, and it’ll just pick the next-closest thing, which may look grotesque.

No fancy paper!

Standard 8.5×11 white printer paper. No colors, designs or sparkles!

File type

“.doc” seems to be the universally accepted file type. If you have a current version of MS Word, it may automatically save as a .docx, but if the agent you are querying has an older version of Word (like mine), they won’t be able to open it – so make sure you change it to .doc.

Questions? Need clarification? Shoot me a comment!

Inspiration Monday XI

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I think you guys are the nicest people on the planet. And also some of the most talented. Thanks for being so understanding about everything, thanks for being encouraging both to me and to each other, and thanks most of all for writing! I think words are more powerful than any of us realize.

Rashmi told me how to get the poll up – so if you haven’t already made your opinion known in yesterday’s comments, click through to my home page and click on the poll on the right sidebar.

And click on some of these names! All of them are well worth the read (or the listen!)

Kay

Fredi and two and three

Jinx

Drew

Carl

Billie Jo

Marantha

Hugmore

Patti

Scribbla

Char

Mike and two and three

Mark

Barb

Also, Drew, the Rewriters’ resident composer, actually produced an actual song based on lyrics he wrote for InMon VII – actually a real song! Go check it out.

—

The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before6 pm CSTon the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

The curse of immortality
War was the least of our problems
Sun sets, curtain rises
Declared independence. Nobody listened.
One man’s trash

 

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at stephanie (at) balcomagency (dot) com.

Happy writing!

Change coming to Inspiration Monday

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Dear, dear, dear Rewriters,


First of all, don’t panic. It’s only a small change, and I think it’ll hurt me more than it hurts you. In fact, I’ve been arguing with myself over it for the past two weeks.

Time constraints dictate that, for future Inspiration Mondays, I can only promise to read the first ten unique submissions (“unique” meaning from different people). This doesn’t mean I won’t read your submission if it happens to be number eleven. It just means I might not read it. I will also continue to link to ALL submissions (so keep linking back!).

This is in no way a guilt trip or a veiled request for less participation. The whole point of InMon is to write more! I hope that more people will continue to be regularly involved, and if any of you even thinks of apologizing for participating “too much,” I will hire a private investigator to find out where you live so I can go smack you upside the head.

Really, this was bound to happen sooner or later. If I want this thing to grow, I can’t limit it to what just one person can keep up with. But even now, as my cursor hovers over the “Publish” button, I am hesitating. I don’t want you to think I don’t care, or that reading your work is even a chore – it’s not! This is like giving up chocolate or something. All week long, I was reading submissions, thinking – what if she writes something this fantastic next week and I don’t even read it? What if he tops himself again next week and I miss it? Plus, you’ve all been so kind and supportive. So even though this is torturing me, I wanted to be up front with you guys about the what, the why and whatever else.
First Tuesday posts, now InMon reading, are you slowly inching away?
No! I’m simply instituting practical guidelines for myself so I can keep this good thing going. There’s so much I want to do with this blog! But I only started blogging seriously last February, so I’m still gauging how much I can handle.
Will there be any other changes to InMon in the future?
If the submissions keep building, I may have to limit links. For instance, if we get up to 40 or 50 per week, I may only link to the first 25. But for now, I’ll continue linking to all submissions.
The only other changes I can foresee might be how I select the 10 to read or the 25 to link – I may start choosing randomly, or focusing on new faces. Also, there may be some “break” weeks for holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Super Secret Project.

 
What is the Super Secret Project???
I can’t tell you yet! But I’m about 25% of the way into preparations.

And another thing…
I don’t want you to look at me as some kind of faceless, inaccessible “expert.” First, I’m not really an expert. I’m still learning, too. Second, this is a community; we should help each other. So talk to me! Ask me questions! If I can possibly help, I will.

A question to leave you with:

What do you guys think about maybe, possibly, sometime in the future self-publishing a collection of the “best of InMon” in a book? All the Rewriters would pick the best of their submissions, and we’d put them all together in a book through Lulu.com or something like that. Nothing fancy—it would only be marketed to our small community—but I think it would be cool. I’ve created a poll (click through if you are reading through email/RSS), and feel free to elaborate on your thoughts in the comments.

EDIT: Okay, I can’t figure out how to get the poll up. Just let me know what you think in the comments.

5 ways my mom made me a writer

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Although my mom isn’t a writer, I owe a lot to her for making me one. She did this in five big ways:

She read to us

My mom reads like a fiend and she read to us all the time when we were little. Narnia, The Hobbit, The Just So Stories, A Wrinkle In Time, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and countless others. She taught us to love stories – I can still remember how excited I was when I got into first grade and found out I was going to learn to read for myself.

She took us to the library

Every two weeks in the summer, she’d drive us to the library – not the tiny one up the street, but the big one that was a little farther off. I’d make a b-line for the YA section and grab anything that looked interesting, and take home a whole stack of books I could only hope would last me two weeks.

She home-schooled us

Most kids spend six hours a day in class and still have homework in the evening. They’re so busy cramming their heads with facts, they don’t have time to experiment with hobbies and figure out what they really want to do. When you’re home-schooled, you have a certain amount of work to do per day or week, and once you’re done with it, you’re free. On a good day, I could get everything done bynoon.

 

She made us amuse ourselves

You’d think with all that free time, we’d get bored. Well, sometimes we did. But every time we complained to Mom about it, she would say “You could always clean out the garage” or something to that effect, which meant we quickly learned not to depend on her for entertainment. Instead, we learned to amuse ourselves – which naturally lead to reading, which itself naturally led to writing (for two out of three of us).

 

She never told us we couldn’t

Although we understood that we had to lead productive lives and make real money, neither she nor my dad ever told us we couldn’t become writers (or a singer, which was what I wanted to be for most of my childhood). However, we also didn’t ask them to spend vast amounts of money to feed our hobbies; we didn’t ask them to buy us fancy computers or send us to expensive writer’s camps. I guess the message behind that is, if your kid really wants to do it, he’ll find a way with or without a big stack of money.

Happy Mother’s Day!