I recently decided to make the most insane decision ever.

I gave up Twitter and Facebook for Lent.

*taking a deep breath and wiping sweat from my brow*

When I told my husband he had an interesting reaction. He said, “Aren’t you just going to be hurting your platform by doing that instead of helping?”

To which I said, “I don’t think so. I’ll still be blogging.”

Bu then I sat back and thought about all the tweeting I do with agents and other authors and began to wonder, am I hurting myself more than helping?

Well regardless the choice has been made and I intend to stick with it.

Do you think taking a break from social networking would hinder your career as a writer? Would you be able to give it up for a full 40 days and 40 nights?

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Marybeth is an aspiring novelist currently working on her second novel. For more information visit her website www.marybethsmith.com. She also has a blog Desperately Searching for my Inner Mary Poppins where you can keep up on her moments as mother, wife and writer..

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I have been browsing writer-friendly sites and articles, and I thought I could share some of them with the girls.

1. Useful links to terrific articles and pointers from agents etc.

2. An Agent’s Wish List

3. Fab Writing Tips

4. Checkpoints when writing scenes

5. Brainstorming Techniques

Some of the links contain links to more useful writer’s resources.

Happy Reading, Girls!

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For the past few weeks, I have been writing once a week with a small group. It has been a great creative experience, as everyone turns up with writing ideas, prompts. What we have basically done so far is timed writing, and it has thrown up some interesting results. It is always fascinating to see how based on the same prompt, different people come up with radically different stories!

Today, one of the word prompts was  Skin, and we had everything from an artist painting his masterpiece on a woman’s body, to a pregnant girl being massaged by her mother for relief. In my piece, suddenly the voice of a psychopathic sixteen-year-old boy took over, who has just skinned a cat, and would like to skin girls some day. Ouch.

But  the point is that I’ve discovered that group writing without exchanging critiques can be quite a pleasant experience, and very helpful. It is very stress-free and people give and receive advice or share problems. Exactly what I would look for in a group of writing friends. We plan to introduce critiquing, but gently, and only for those who want it.

Any of our readers have an experience with writing groups?

photo credit: spaceshipbeebe

Many of us writers out here in cyberspace frequently feel lost.  We seem to circle around the same bonfires, again and again.  The steps. Write your novel, edit your novel, query your novel.

Or: Write your short story, poem, essay.  Edit. Query.

Write. Edit. Query.

It doesn’t seem easy to get lost.  Seems like a simple enough process (if not a simple achievement) and still….

We blog we write we facebook we twitter we network and we hope for the day that all of our work comes together in the beautiful dream that is the journeys end.  Publication.

I know there have been several times since I started this trip that I’ve felt lost.  I forget where I am going and where I am and where I started.

How about you?  Do you feel lost on this adventure?  How do you get back on the right road?

Liza Carens Salerno

In a quest to self-educate, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott, sits on my bedside table.  It is a library copy, and I admit here in print that I have bent down at least five page corners containing sentences or whole paragraphs I want to reread and remember.  A casualty of the 8:30-5:00 schedule is the lack of an endless supply of yellow sticky notes with which to mark significant pages; but I get some credit for not using a highlighter, right?  By the way, the book is stunning; for me because I’m trying to write, but for everyone, because the author is funny, self deprecating, brutally honest, and she spells it all out in language that makes you want to holler, “Exactly!”

So anyway, I’m plowing along and marking these inspirational comments because they are real and they teach and they guide, and then I turn to page 193 and read a quote that stops me dead.  The author didn’t write it.  She, like everyone who writes, once struggled (although she’ll tell you that it’s always a struggle), and before she was published, Lamott submitted a short story to “an important magazine editor.” Loving and kind soul that he must have been, he sent her back a note that said: “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting.”

Whoa.  Big swallow.  My blog—multiple posts between February 6th and now—all about me.  I am experiencing, I believe, a minor crisis of faith here, so please bear with me.

You know–I had no conscious plan in February to start writing a blog.  It poured out of me as a result of the trauma from the elimination of my position the previous day, and the first essay made me feel whole and slightly accomplished and in a strange way relieved; like discovering the last portion of a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, stuck way under the couch with the dust bunnies during a good spring cleaning–and I’ve kept on.

I look back at some of my entries and think, “Yuck,” or “Does anyone really care?”  To my credit, sometimes I think, “Wow, I wrote that?”  In some regard though, it almost doesn’t matter, because I am so completely in love with the effort, the unexpected words that bubble up out of me day after day.  There are mornings that I approach the computer with nothing less than trepidation, because I’m not sure there is anything left in me to write.  But so far, something always spills out of my fingers and when I’m done I think; “At this moment anyway, this is me on the page as best as I can get it, as honestly, and clearly as I know how to write.”  I’m not writing what I think my three readers want to hear…I’m just reporting if you will, the things that apparently swirl down there in my Swiss cheese of a soul.

Of course, I hope in some regard that this practice is helping me to improve at my craft, but hear this.  I’m simply grateful that I am doing it.  Lamott comments on that horrific response from the editor with the following: “Now needless to say, I was mortified.  But the note ended up only helping me because it didn’t stop me.”  Turning to another folded corner I read this:  “Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.  The thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part.”   I’m with her.   Of course, results matter; but even harsh criticism is worth it because the thinking, the imagining, the creating, the formulating, the editing, the revising, the massaging–even the hair pulling, it’s this giving birth to writing that the author so succinctly points out, is “the best part.”  So I hope you like me, but even if you don’t–taking a bent page out of Anne Lamott’s book, I’m not stopping either.

Liza Carens Salerno is a freelance writer and former corporate professional whose position was eliminated in an economic downsizing.  Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, Adoptive Families Magazine and Writer’sDigest.com.  She has spent the last several months focusing on her writing and blogs at www.middlepassages-lcs.blogspot.com.

Sarah is writer looking for an agent. She is currently working on novel # 4, editing novels 2 and 3, and querying novel # 1. For more insight to her work, visit: http://legendoftheprotectors.wordpress.com/ or http://legendoftheprotectors.blogspot.com/

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