Keeping informed (also, quit dilly-dallying!)

At AWP last year I came across this flier for a free group that promotes writing contests, job opportunities, calls for submissions, etc.  They send out emails often, to the point where I had to choose the digest format because it drove me nuts getting so many emails so often about some contests and things that I didn't really care about because they didn't apply to me (like poetry contests).

But this is a great resource, and if some writer happens to stumble upon this blog, I hope that they check this group out.  It's free to join and there are some great, obscure and not obscure opportunities listed.

In other news, some writing friends and I are talking about each making a fiction chapbook.  I need to do more research on it, but I'm so pumped about it.  I would like to write two fresh stories for it.  Must brainstorm....

I've been really wanting to try to write a suspense story (I tried a couple times before but apparently they weren't suspenseful enough to carry the story).  I ordered several books from Powells recently (and can't WAIT for them to come in!) and one of them is Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.  I'm really looking forward to the arrival of my order, and especially this book.  Not only do I want to try it out in a story, but I want to try it out in the screenplay that has been brewing in my mind.

I've been trying to write five pages a day but that hasn't really been working out so far since I write full-time for a living, even if it is training materials and the like.  So I've pared it down to 1000 words a day which is less daunting, and I told myself that writing blogs, journal entries, and even typed letters on my typewriter do NOT count.  I'm working on a new story and it's taking some unusual and unexpected twists, and now I think I will totally have to change one character (Margaret) but I think it will be for the better.  She is too good, too Chrisitan-y, and a little boring.  While I've been writing more of her introduction story I've been rehashing some painful memories from my own life and it's been theraputic but difficult too...one day while I was writing about a terrible paint-by-number painting of a horse I started to cry and then felt so depressed for the rest of the day I could hardly get anything done.  I didn't even vacuum, and now there are tufts of gray cat hair floating all around my (still unvacuumed) house.

Other books I ordered from Powells include:

• Elbow Room, James Alan Mcpherson
• On Teaching and Writing Fiction,Wallace Stegner and Lynn Stegner
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee
• Off for the Sweet Hereafter, T R Pearson
•  A Place to Come to : A Novel, Robert Penn Warren

Now, to get to work.