Mocha Mind

Mocha Mind Self-Publishing Seminar!

August 27th, 2008

Literary Events | No Comments »

A Bastard’s Refuge II

August 27th, 2008

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Pen to Prose Writers’ Group!

July 28th, 2008

Pen to Prose Writers Group

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HARLEM BOOK FAIR!

July 11th, 2008

Don’t miss the 10th HARLEM BOOK FAIR Anniversary Celebration & Gala Harlem, New York in association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Events from July 18 - 20, 2008
West 135th Street from Malcolm X Blvd. to Frederick Douglass Blvd.

The programs of the 10th Anniversary Gala and Celebration of the Harlem Book Fair will begin on Thursday, July 17th at Abyssinian Baptist Church and conclude on Sunday, July 20th at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The outdoor festival will be held on Saturday, July 19, from 11 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on West 135th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues.

For more information please visit www.qbr.com

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Open a Vein

July 7th, 2008

Red Smith “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.“

- Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, American Sportswriter

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Seven Levels Of Rejection: And How To Make Them Work For You by Dara Girard

July 7th, 2008

Scroll & Quill Most people in the writing world talk about the three levels of rejection–form, personal, rewrite–but I’ve discovered seven types (after over 200 rejections before being published and about hundred after, I should know). Learning how to analyze rejection is a helpful skill for any writer because you’ll learn what to ignore, what to consider, and what will put you on the right track or, as the case may be, off of it.

Here are the seven types of rejections that may find their way in your email or mailbox:

1) No response. The agent or editor doesn’t send you anything. I find these ones most annoying. You wait in anticipation, hoping, praying for something either in the mail or online. Nothing. Six months past. Still nothing.

2) Form rejection. These are the ones that start Dear…fill in the name. They tell you that your work isn’t right for them and wish you better luck elsewhere. There’s no feedback. You should toss these rejections immediately. But be warned, form rejections are easy to get if you don’t follow directions: submitting to the wrong magazine or publisher, a wrong topic, wrong manuscript format, or writing in crayon or invisible ink. To avoid form rejections, study the magazine or publisher’s criteria for submissions to make sure you’re giving them something they’ll want (i.e. a clean manuscript that addresses the needs of their readers) and not a missive of “Why I Should be Published by You.”

3) Multiple choice. These agents or editors have gotten creative and made a list of reasons they’re rejecting your work because a) they have something similar, b) the quality of your work doesn’t meet their standards and/or, c) they think you’re completely without talent and hope you’ll never query them again. Sometimes they’ll check one, sometimes they’ll check all three. This is still a form rejection because it’s too general to give you any real advice; however, you at least get an idea of what they’re looking for. But then again, if number three is selected it is best ignored because it’s just an opinion. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Annual Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwriting

July 7th, 2008

Theatre Masks

An annual playwriting contest sponsored by Columbia College Chicago Theater Center, the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwriting is nationally acclaimed for recognizing the outstanding individual accomplishments of African-American playwrights; along with their growing importance to the shape and direction of American drama in our time. Former contest winners have held a mirror up to a myriad of subject matters; the post-American Civil War Reconstruction experience, Negro League baseball in the 1940’s, the 1930’s Tuskegee syphilis experiments, along with the most recent winner, Ma Noah, by Mark Clayton Southers, exploring present day life on and off the streets of Philadelphia.
The goals of the contest are as follows:

1. To uncover and identify new African-American plays addressing the African-American experience that are promising and producible.
2. To encourage and aid playwrights in the development of promising scripts.
3. To offer an opportunity for emerging and
established playwrights of African-American descent to be exposed to Chicago’s professional theater community through staged readings and/or fully mounted productions.

For more information on the submission process, prizes, and deadlines please contact contest facilitator, Chuck Smith at (312)344-6136.

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Preparing Your Book for Publication

June 30th, 2008

Gioya McRae

So you’ve finished your novel. Now it’s time to publish it. Here are a few things to do in preparation to publish your book.

Hire an editor; don’t edit your own work. You’ll see what should be on the page, not what is really on the page.

Study other books in your genre to see how the interior design is set up. I don’t have time to go into interior design in this call, but will cover it in detail in my live seminar. We will also cover cover design in the live seminar.

The main thing to remember when preparing your book for publication is the more work you do