I promised you some links recently. OK, here they are.

For you novelists and story writers, About.com has a page on Fiction Writing. There are a lot of useful articles there, and some advertising. I found it worthwhile.

For Children's writers Write4Kids.com has a lot to sell, but between the for sale links there is still a lot of free information. I have found them very helpful. The Purple Crayon is a similar site done by an editor. I've used articles from both these sites to prepare for our meetings.

For people writing family stories and memoirs, you may like Creative Nonfiction, a site that publishes on online magazine. (They do take submissions.) My favorite is the page with Essays on the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. I plan to read one of these articles every day. One of the coolest articles I have ever read about journalism is The Fact Behind the Facts, or How You Can Get It All Right and Still Get It All Wrong by Philip Gerard. I just found this website today, so I can't tell you much more about it except that I have great expectations of finding a lot of good information.

Diane L. sent me a link for The Writer's Nook.

Thank you Solard for the link you put in your last post.

Everyone please continue post what you find and why you like it for the rest of us.

Let me know what you find helpful.

That was a really good meeting this morning, aside from the sensation that we were almost missing some limbs because of our members who couldn't be there! <> Come baaaack!!

Here is the link that I mentioned: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/09/de-gustibus-and-how-to-reply-to-bad.asp (I'm crossing my fingers it works) Background, for those that weren't at the meeting, in a nutshell: Anne Rice got uppity on Amazon.com at the critics (haters!) who posted not-so-nice reviews of her book "Memnoc": the mumbledy-something (sorry! -can't remember the rest of the title --anyway, the last in her Lestat series). Fans of Neal Gaiman (a popular sci-fi writer) comment on his blog and ask him for his take on her Response. This is his blog-answer. Scroll about half-way down to get his thoughts on that. I think it's very good advice for us as we approach our whole nail-biting critique sessions!

Oh, and upon further reflection... I'm actually glad that lady had her half of that cell phone conversation during our meeting -- I'm excited at the lessons I can learn from my gut response of "HOWRUDE!!!111!!!" in learning to use EVERYTHING as a "prompt."

(Thanks, DJ ;-)

April is National Poetry Month. Robert Lee Brewer has a blog with Writer's Digest called "Poetic Asides". He has made a write a poem-a-day challenge in April. Don't worry about being behind if you haven't seen it before. You can start now, and you can even write poems for previous days if you like. This link Poetic Asides will take you to the current day, the previous link explains the poetry challenge. Have fun!