Real Pants has been passing around the Instagram cup of cheer to various literary organizations. P&W's turn has resulted in my hands becoming more famous than the rest of me. Here they are posing hard at work POSING stop that! pictured at one of the keyboards where the P&W website gets done.
Here's the original post.
Git geeks get bonus points for recognizing the chart on top of the computer.
The May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine is out. This issue focuses on writing contests. The special section includes a "guide to the competitions that turn manuscripts into books", so hurry down to your local newsstand and pick up a copy, because that part isn't available online.
But don't despair! As always, the online writing contests database is up-to-date and ready to help you find the right grant, award, or contest for your poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction.
The latest additions include a fully-themeable module that lets users select deadlined content for reminder e-mails. On the admin side, the module can be applied to any content type that has a date field. The default e-mail template can be overridden on a content-type basis, as well as theme hooks to override the node title and sort order. We needed that because our database of writing contests actually presents the title as one content field and the node title combined.
Users can select a variety of timings for the reminders, such as "weekly until the deadline" or "one week before the deadline". You can see an example at http://www.pw.org/content/adelphi_university. The "Set Reminder" link is provided for each content type selected in the reminders admin form. The interface uses jquery slickness which gracefully degrades to a separate page form.
We also have a template-based mod for views with exposed filters that allows users to quickly select how many items to show per page. A mini-module stores the user's preferences for each page with the account, so logged-in users get the same default for each individual page on every visit.
On the content end, we now have a searchable database of MFA programs in creative writing (yes, you can set e-mail reminders on the application deadline), a terriffic PDF supplement ($4.99) called The Poets & Writers Guide to MFA Programs, an online version of Seth Abramson's article "The Top Fifty MFA Programs in the United States: A Comprehensive Guide" (with abbreviated ranking tables), a new expanded What's New page, and a whole lot more.
Yes, the March/April 2009 issue is out. It's the annual Conferences and Residencies issue, with information on writing retreats and literary getaways. Of course, the database of writing contests is updated, as always. The Agents & Editors column this issue is a Q&A with Richard Nash, Lee Boudreaux, Alexis Gargagliano, and Eric Chinski.
I have long held that literary fiction and genre fiction were not in any way mutually exclusive. There have been many, many shining examples of very literary genre writers. Now people are starting to notice that there are many genre-leaning literary writers, too.