Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Getting Unstuck, Getting Tech-y

►From A Room of Her Own Foundation comes this terrific little piece of poetry/defiant determination, Pull The Lever, by Lauren M. Baldwin. Here are a few of my favorite lines:

you are writing what your mother didn't want you to write
you are telling secrets you were supposed to keep
you might not be that good you might get bad reviews you've never won a prize
maybe you're just an ok writer and that's all you'll ever be
nothing extraordinary just a middle class woman writing little poems and

essays and stories
that you publish in journals with a distribution of ten when you count your family members
and you don't have time
and you don't have space
and your children need you to make breakfast
need you to make a living
need a college education not a mother who's a writer living in the desert on her words
and your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your husband needs attention

I'm going to print out the entire poem and hang it over on the wall I stare at (in my own writing room, yes!) and when I'm feeling stuck I can read it, and I don't just mean stuck writing-wise.

►I'm really not tech-geeky enough even to understand them all (well maybe a half-dozen of those listed), but friends who are, tell me that the
50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers list is well, awesome. There are sites -- all free-- for submission tracking, research, formatting and organization, reference, and helpful tools including a PDF creator (#36).

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