First off I want to point you towards Michelle McLean's Writer Ramblings who this month is doing weekly posts on poetry in honor of Valentine's Day. In this first posting she discusses how to write a heroic couplet. It would be an actual heroic act on my part if I could write one of those couplets, but sadly this skill is beyond me due to a genetic disorder that makes it impossible for me to decipher where the stressed syllable is in a word. And since knowing where the stress is in a word is kind of the basis of iambic pentameter, which is then (according to Michelle and I think she knows what she's talking about) the 2nd step in creating a heroic couplet - I think this will be beyond me.
It was during college while I was taking a speech class as part of my theatre classes that I discovered this odd disability. We had to choose a poem and go through the whole thing marking where the stressed syllables where. By the time I finished this assignment my two poor roommates were ready to kill me, because this is what I did for each word.
ME: FOR-get. for-GET. FOR-get. for-GET. hmmm. for-GET. for-GET. FOR-get?
Roommates Jenny and Melissa in Chorus: AAAUUUGGHHH!!! How can you not hear it? Listen. Forget. Don't you hear it? Forget.
ME: So... FOR-get?
It was good times.
Okay, another great link. I have already mentioned my love of Query Tracker and what a great resource it is for finding the right agent to query and keeping track of said agents while you query. The forums over there are full of some of the best people on earth as well. And now to complete the QT trifecta of awesome there is also a blog. The posts are full of great info on how to write a query letter, synopsis, logline, and so much other information. I highly recommend checking it out.
This next link is one that I found a while ago on the Dear Author website, where it discusses how woman feel the need to be defensive or feel apologetic about reading romance. Since this goes back to my own posting about coming out of the genre closest, I found it to be an argument that really hit close to home for me. - especially when she talks about at first being apologetic about not reading very many male authors. I am also a male author avoider (well in fiction, in non-fiction I think I actually tend to favor male authors - try and figure that one out.) - in fact when I perusing the shelves at the library or bookstore if I see a male name on a book that I was reaching for, I usually think "meh" and pull back.
Finally, for a bit of silliness here are some of my favorite bits from the FAIL blog. It was a few months ago that I first discovered this blog and there is definitely a bit of an element of schadenfreude (If you aren't sure of the exact meaning of this word I recommend following this link to have it explained in song from the musical Avenue Q) involved in enjoying it.
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