MS REFUSENIK TELLS IT LIKE IT IS: 09/01/2008

TO MY FRIENDS, THE WRITERS

Here are a bunch of writing prompts. Some are geared for students, but still helpful. Some are for fiction writers, but still will get you going. And there are a couple of cool prompt generators in here too: http://jc-schools.net/write/create.htm http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/prompts.html http://www.creativewritingprompts.com/ http://www.writersdigest.com/WritingPrompts/ http://www.cdli.ca/CITE/writing_prompts.htm http://www.theteacherscorner.net/daily-writing-prompts/index.htm http://www.creativity-portal.com/howto/writing/writing.prompts.html http://www.classbrain.com/artteensb/publish/cat_index_22.shtml http://www.ettc.net/writing/Index.htm http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/5/4wiencek.html http://www.abcteach.com/MonthtoMonth/January/writing.htm http://languageisavirus.com/writing_prompts.html http://www.tengrrl.com/tens/018.shtml http://tengrrl.com/tens/019.shtml http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/2004/release/prompts.html http://www.oncewritten.com/FreeCreativeWritingPrompts.php And Blue Mountain Artsis having a poetry contest with no entry fees. It's the Thirteenth Biannual Poetry Card Contest and the deadline is December 31, 2008. 1st prize = $300 * 2nd prize = $150 * 3rd prize = $50 Enter as many times as you like I found a good long list of magazine writer's markets complete with links for writer's guidelines without having to spend $29 I don't have on "Writer's Market". It's at Writing for Dollars and each listing tells you straight up whether it pays low, medium or high. There are a lot of good ones on there and I'm only up to Photolife. There are also trade, greeting card and a whole bunch of markets by topics. You're welcome. I think I am going to try my hand at writing greeting cards. I can't believe how well they pay: around $75 each. Here's one list of publishers. Wait, here's a better list with links for guidelines for those that accept freelance submissions. I have sent away for all kinds of guidelines. There was a freelance ad this week for writers to write cards for cancer patients: Freelance Greeting Card Writers Wanted by Jodee Our new company is looking for freelance greeting card writers. Specifically, for both adults and children suffering with cancer. Please submit greeting on an index card with name and contact information on the back. Thank You. Pays $75.00 per verse Contact: Tammy Maxey Maxey,LLC P.O. Box 701 Moorestown, NJ 08057 Also, looking for all categories of greeting including traditional, funny as well as spiritual. I looked around on e card sites trying to find out what passes for funny for cancer patients. It was mostly a bunch of "fuck cancer" cards. Not too funny in my book, but then my sister just died of it in December. I may have trouble coming up with funny cards.

THE WRITING LIFE OF UPS AND DOWNS AND ALL AROUNDS

Top 10 Blogs for Writers List is Out Just sitting at my desk day after day trying to make something work with my writing. Dig this. For three days I was cheered because I stayed in first place in the most recent Helium.com writing contest. I figured I'd just write one more article even though I was a shoo-in to win. Today it all came crumbling down and the peers rated me so low I am not a contender. I wish I knew how the peers rate. I think I am a good writer. I do a lot of research and really knock myself out on each and every article I write. And then I find out it was all set on sand. I have been applying for some more freelance gigs. Nothing too ambitious. Just part-time sort of fun article writing. I am wondering if Google's Knol really ends up paying anything. It's all AdSense money and I have never used that before. I am so sick of making nickle and dimes while I get my big chance at that overused want-ad word, "exposure." I need to make some money, not be exposed. I am still plugging away at 30 poems in 30 days. Here's one poem I wrote about my 18-year-old son: Bunny Boy My son, the semi-grown man-child, memorizes rap music and says fuck too much. He wanted something to love never having had a girlfriend and his Dad died. Now he has a tiny, baby, long-eared, softer than baby hair, white and brown rabbit That follows him wherever he goes. It eats bright green, crunchy lettuce from his hand. He makes little houses for it to crawl in and out from boxes. I was there the first time the little bunny let him pet her with two extended fingers. His touch was barely there, almost above her, as though he were petting her aura. His smile was so gentle and loving as he petted her the gate to his heart was left wide open. Anyone could have walked right in. I sure did. *** Anyhow, it came from my heart. My son is so precious with his rabbit, Biscuit. He would kill me if he ever read this poem, but I don't have to worry about either of my kids reading my blog. Now I am working on a Helium.com Marketplace publisher request for an article that provides "a compelling view of life between the ages of 50 and 59." They want the "most interesting, scintillating or inspiring items of news that are occurring." All I came up with is that it's making big news that Baby Boomers are rethinking retirement in view of the economic situation in this country. Instead, they are looking into second and third careers. Some talk about having to work until they are 80. A survey of 50- to 65-year-old workers done for the federal government in August found that 29 percent of 55- to 59-year-olds plan to work beyond 65. And that was even before all the shit hit the fan on Wall Street. I'm sure it's worse now. I better get some discipline with my writing life or I'm going to be one of the toothless ones asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

"AND ALL I ASK OF DYING IS TO GO NATURALLY." ("When I Die")

I have decided that I want a green funeral. I don't want it so I can be trendy, because I don't believe I'll care about keeping up with the greenies at that point in my non-life. I want it because it makes sense and it doesn't scare me. All my life I've had this crazy notion that I'm going to come to inside that steel or what have you coffin and be six feet under and wide awake and alert. I'll be trapped and alone, and have no way to scream for help. Does anyone else ever have that thought or is it just me? Besides, what could be more natural than just returning to the earth. It's the ultimate recycling after a long life of recycling. "Dust to dust" and all that. Not to mention that it is cheap and I have no life insurance. The kids could set me up on the couch if they wanted to be Irish about it, or skip the whole wake thing entirely and just have a simple memorial service in the woods some place. At least I hope they will want to do that much. My ex used to say he was going to put me in a giant Hefty bag and drag me from his rear car bumper for the dogs to get. Nice, huh? You might say what about cremation? It pollutes. It causes nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals and particulates to be released into the atmosphere when a body is cremated. Don't be a polluter after you tried not to be during your life. No embalming when you go green (ick, gross). I don't care if there's a casket really. Put me in a refrigerator box if they want. But you can get cool green caskets made of jute or bamboo. It's time to stop taking advantage of the dead and their relatives with all the expensive ways funeral directors have of trying to remove the living from the fact that the deceased is actually deceased. The dead person doesn't care how expensive the coffin is and if it's guaranteed not to rust or leak. The family really shouldn't give a shit either. The person is dead. And I don't want some male stranger even trying to fix my hair and makeup the way I wore it. I get shudders. I can barely stand to go to a new salon wide awake for fear of who they might try to turn me into. I wash my hair and scrunch its natural curl. Then I let the air dry it. Five will get you ten they would put rollers in my hair, blow dry it, and put on a lot of mousse. Then they would put bright red lipstick on me, and I rarely ever even wear light lipstick. I would sit up in that casket and scream I swear. And all my relatives and friends would be trying to say something nice, all the time thinking, "My God she looks so dead, and so horrible. And what has she done to her hair!" So I want to get back to tradition. They put the dead to rest long before there were funeral directors. I guess the hard part is finding a place to legally bury the body. I know they won't let the kids put me in the back yard like a dog. I found a great resource on green funerals that tells you about everything you need to know. According to this they have green burial specialists, so it's not the kids and you, the stiff, out in the back yard with a shovel. The next time the annoying people from Penn Life call I am going to tell them that my funeral will only cost as much as a couple of cartons of cigarettes and I don't need them.

WRITER'S BLOCK SUCKS

Doesn't it? Since this blog is ostensibly about its freelance writing tag, let's talk about some ways out of it and into article ideas in a pinch. My usual desperate measures include writing prompts. Here are some that I have checked out and determined to be not as corny and mind-numbing as most 1. An example, "Set yourself the task of writing in a way you've never written before, no matter who you are." This is one of the easier prompts from a very challenging group of prompts called "Creative Writing Exercise Prompts: Writing Prompts". 2. Here's one, "In 300 words write about a day, week, life of an old wedding dress..." Check out the other 328 prompts at 3. The granddaddy genie in the bottle at Writer's Digest. Example is the proverbial "You've been hired as a writer for "Late Show with David Letterman." Your first assignment is to come up with a witty, nonpolitical Top Ten list for him to read on air. Challenge, from Ms.Refusenik, do it in less than 15 minutes and use the word "cheese". Okay, enough of that. Other article mental church-keys, as we used to call them in greaser-town where I grew up: Google Trends, Google Zeitgeist 2007 (soon 2008), AOL trends and AOL trends blog, Digg, I'd write Delicious but I don't have the patience for all that upper and lower case nonsense. You get the idea. Twitter. All those social networking places including Gather. You can forget MyLot where the IQ seems to be "Big Butts or Not?" questions. Sign up for more Reader RSS subscriptions. Read obituaries. I thank the wonderful writer at Escape Grace blog for turning me on to the obit that will join many other fine obits in my files. Read it here if you didn't read it there. She challenges readers to find a better obit. I've got better ones believe it or not, but I've got ADD and the challenge is to find the goddamn file. I just looked. It's sorta hopeless given my brain.

LORD, THERE'S JUST ONE SET OF FOOTPRINTS THANKS TO SARAH PALIN

What makes this woman writing in The New York Times think she can tell me, an Obama supporter, to "calm down" and "take a deep breath"? Doesn't she read Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman or, for God's sake, Ariana Huffington? I do. And, I can't help being scared by this monster that shoots wolves from planes, wants to ban Harry Potter and God knows what other books, really did call Iraq "God's task" in her church, would allow her ticket to call Obama some kind of pedophile for suggesting kindergarteners be taught "good touch/bad touch".... I am beside myself. I have come out of my body and I am beside myself at the damage this hockey mom is capable of doing to this already far too damaged country. She lies through those lipsticked lips like a pro Republican. She is one of the club. Being a woman doesn't make her more honest, as is sometimes the case. There's only one set of footprints in my life's wanderings today. I need to be carried through day E-53 and counting. I really, really, really cannot take any more Republican shenanigans, and I mean that word in the worst way. For example, I mean "shenanigans" like in the following article I wrote a while back about why Mr. Military Hero gets protected in the media for unthinkable wrongdoing while Obama gets slammed for being in the same room with people. Or why so much is made of Michele Obama's honesty about her feelings for this country, which I share, and no mention is made of the fact that Cindy McCain would still be sitting in a federal penitentiary for drug stealing and prescription theft if her husband hadn't intervened on her behalf. No one mentions that he and Cindy didn't even vote for Bush last time, or that he publicly called his wife the "c" word. This is a nasty man with a very bad temper and a worse liar than Bush if that is possible. Anyhow, here is the article along those lines: Presidential Elections 2008 US elections 2008: Obama's radical "baggage": Rev. Wright and the 1960s radicals It's truly remarkable how our media only picks up on certain things to repeat endlessly like crazed mynah birds, and ignores the elephant in the living room. It's how the game of politics is played in this sound-bite mad country. You want to talk about baggage? Let's talk about some real baggage. Right now I am looking at a photo that was published in the New York Times of Bill Clinton shaking hands with a spiritual adviser who came to help him when he was in his confessional mode after the Lewinsky scandal in 1998. The preacher's name? Oh, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Chicago. Funny Bill hasn't brought that up recently. So many scandals to cover, and yet you'd think the press only knew about two of Obama's unfortunate acquaintances. Here's the whole problem. Obama is too nice. Bill, Hillary and John McCain have enough scandals between them, past and current, to keep a large army of reporters busy for years, but no one brings it up. Obama can thank Hillary Clinton for making a big stink about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. so she could scare white voters into thinking big, bad, bigoted black men were about to make Obama their love slave or whatever she is trying to imply. Obama must have been having a rough day when he accused Hillary of using a "kitchen-sink" (as in "everything but the kitchen-sink") strategy of negative attacks aimed at him. He told her, "You learned the wrong lessons from those Republicans who were going after you in same way using the same tactics all those years. I don't want us to become like them. I want us to change the country." Isn't he just the sweetest? Too bad, isn't it, because he could really go to town if he played their way. Poor Obama just can't stop being a basically decent guy despite whatever she does next. He is too much of a gentleman to remind her that she sleeps with a man who pardoned not one but two Weathermen. He merely attended board meetings with one. Nor does he mention how in late 2007 the Clinton campaign was forced to return $850,000 in campaign donations to Norman Hsu who acquired the money through a Ponzi scheme. They forgot to do a background check. Of course, they hadn't planned on returning it until the media got wind of it. And he doesn't bring up Vina Gupta who spent $900,000 on travel for the Clintons, or her old friend, John Huang, whom she got a job for at the Commerce Dept. until he was sentenced in 1999 for campaign finance violations. Then there was the $22,000 campaign contribution from Jose Carbera who got that money out of his account set up for his cocaine selling business. Or he could mention her old partner Webster Hubbell, or Addul Rehman Jinnah, or Sandy Berger. Oh, and Hillary, just what were your brothers Hugh and Tony Rodham doing with that strange investment in hazelnuts in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, or when Hugh Rodham took large cash payments for trying to broker presidential pardons? Wasn't that a bit sleazy? The list just goes on. People in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks they say. And Mr. John McCain who must vent his spleen about Obama's former pastor and Sixties radical Bill Ayers. He must have forgotten that little internationally known incident called the Keating Five that he was involved with a few years ago. And he certainly has forgotten his actions on behalf of alleged paramour Vicki Iseman known as McCain's Purple Cow incident. And I thought that hearing that his wife steals recipes from cookbooks and passes them off on the campaign website as old family dishes was a big thing until I found out about her drug addiction. My, the way she stole those drugs from the charity she worked for. They say if McCain hadn't intervened and she had been poor and black she would still be doing time. And what about his campaign manager Terry Nelson who, it turns out, has been connected to several Republican scandals? No, no, no, Barack is too nice to mention any of that. But best of all was reading about McCain's recent endorsement by John Hagee, televangelist, and a leading Christian supporter of Israel and a large figure in the Christian-Zionist movement, a political philosophy rooted in biblical prophecies and a belief that Israel's struggles signal a prelude to Armageddon. He attempted to distance himself from his newest evangelical supporter when the Democratic National Committee called on him to denounce his support, citing controversial remarks Hagee has made on a variety of subjects. McCain said, "In no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee's views, which obviously I do not." And, "obviously", Barrack Obama doesn't agree with all of Rev. Wright's views either. Everybody's got baggage. Obama's seems like coincidental kid stuff compared to the real pros. ,,

ADVENTURES IN FREELANCE WRITING

It looks like MinskMinks, we'll call it, isn't going to pan out. I thought it was a U.K. magazine I was going to write for. It turns out it was a Russian-based rag for people without a country or something--nomads living far from home who still wanted to read about fashion, diet and beauty wherever they are perched at the moment. I spent a lot of hours on a piece about a Cambridge University study looking at U.K. and U.S. attitudes towards working mothers over the past 30 years. It showed support for working mothers is ebbing away. Unless you are Nicola Horlick in the U.K. or Sarah Palin here, with six and five children respectively and high-powered careers, you just can't afford (literally) to be a supermum or supermom anymore. And it's too bad to find that out now that 75 percent of moms work, and most work because they can't make it on one income anymore. But the Professor who did the Cambridge study, Jacqueline Scott, hit the nail on the head as to what the real problem is with the fault-finding on the one who usually takes the rap for the family's problems--good ol' Mom. Scott said that among young people, "gender role division that people thought was eradicated 25 years ago" was the norm. There remained the expectation that women should do the majority of household chores and child-caring work regardless of her job responsibilities outside the home. Well, sisters, we've all known about that, haven't we? And when he has to eat eggs for dinner, or even worse, cook eggs for dinner for the kids because you're out working late, then he tells the sociologist poll taker that yes, things have never been worse than since you started working. And what is the answer? Is his answer that you quit go on welfare, sell the other car, and shop only at thrift stores? I bet not. He just wants you to function on even less sleep than you do now. To make it seem at home like you don't even work outside the home. I know all about that. I got divorced finally after I had had enough of it. I worked nights and he worked days. My plan was that this way not only could we save desperately needed money on babysitting, but our children wouldn't have to be with non-family members for a good part of the day. I had my first child when I was 36, the second at 40. These were long-awaited much wanted children. We wanted them too much to only to see them on weekends. Before I hit on the night/day work schedule thing, I went off to work crying on many a day, and I know lots of other mothers do too. It breaks your heart. You wonder if today will be the big day you miss them finally say Mommy for the first time and you won't hear it? Will it be the day they take the first step you're not there to see it? When you have to drop them off when they're sick it's all you can do to get through the day. You want to call the sitter every 20 minutes. You want to let that infant know you are there with him or her in spirit, but it's impossible. You just feel like a bad mother and a bad worker who can't concentrate on the job in front of her. Oh, sorry. I was talking about freelance writing and the report I wrote for the Russian magazine. Yeah, I haven't heard a thing since I submitted it. I found the gig in a newspaper ad that seemed to be posted everywhere. I ran into it several times before I e-mailed my samples. Wouldn't that be a cheap and easy way to run a little magazine? Put out ads for articles. Assign a topic. Collect all the articles in some faraway country. Change a few things here and there. And just publish them for nothing. Or maybe I've been trained all my life to think like that about the Russkies. For shame. But back to my good for nothing ex-husband. He wanted me to get up at the crack of dawn even though I worked nights and didn't get to bed until quite late. He wanted me to make his breakfast and his lunch. As it was, I spent my days in a pop-eyed frenzy (popping health-food store supplements like Tic Tacs) trying to make it look like I was really a full-time homemaker. I schlepped the kids to various stimulating classes for growth and fun, cleaned, prepared a fully home-cooked dinner from scratch so all he would have to do was heat and serve when he got home, did the shopping, did the laundry--you know the usual. I ran around like Martha Stewart on Dexedrine. And all I got was complaints. Why hadn't I washed my dinner cooking dishes? Why wasn't all the laundry folded and put away? Here's my question? Why did I wait so fucking long to divorce the son of a bitch?

WE HAVE BEEN INVADED!

Yes, I was almost invaded myself this morning. I thought well, why not, the rest of the Internet community is always a buzz over selling blog space, I might as well get with it. To tell you the God's truth, and it's shameful, I had moved over to WordPress because I saw in ads that people wanted you to be familiar with it. Then I came back to Blogger and read about this new AdSense thing, and I had been a little bummed that I couldn't use the new Google AdSense I was just dying to try at WordPress so I moved back. Taking my blogs back and forth like a teenage newlywed going back and forth to Mom and Dad's after learning what marriage is really like. Well, now I'm back and I figured today I would get me some of that big money and sign on for AdSense. It was much easier than I had let to believe. I first looked it up in FAQ and boy did that confuse me. I ended up downloading some WordPress template that I had no idea how to install. Finally I figured out it was a "gadget" listed on layout and I only had to make a couple of clicks. And there on my beautiful page with a poem about my daughter and a picture of a wood thrush meant to represent her as she leaves the nest for good, was an ad, first about making big bucks doing some damn thing, and, the second one was about "blogging for dollars". I simply could not live with myself. And for what? Two cents a day? No thank you. If I sell out it's going to be for larger cash. You know I write now for Suite 101.com. I just started freelancing regularly for them. I feel like it's sort of a real job in that I filled out an application with writing samples and got accepted and all that. As you can see from link, I have a profile and a list of my articles and my picture and everything. Well, yesterday I almost pissed where I swim. I was anxious to fill up that list of articles written by me and was lunging around desperate for ideas. I hate when I get like that. I am totally burned out but won't admit it. I had spent three days on that 2,700 word "History of Coffee" piece. (I used three books for reference and a bunch of Internet sites.) I was crunchy. Anyhow, I started doing what I do when I am fresh out of article ideas. I went to 2007 Google Zeitgeist, Google Trends and Hot Trends for the day and previous few days, and then I went to AOL's blog on their day's trends. They were writing and listing bizarre celebrity spa treatments like fanny facials, snake massages, snake venom creams, cupping, nightingale dung facials, lava shell massage, 24-carat gold facials, human placenta facials, hyaluronic acid (key component of human tissue), and, oh, yeah, fish nibbling at your toes pedicures. And let's not forget Demi Moore's admission on Letterman this past March that she went to Austria to have leeches suck the old out of her and then she laid in a bathtub of turpentine to "detoxify" her body. Is a younger man's attention really worth all that? Well, I had names of which celebs did what. (Madonna-placenta, Gwyneth-cupping, snake venom and, I'd say, pretty much whatever; and I even got Oprah down for hyaluronic acid, although I like to think of her as too ethereal for all of that nonsense.) Well I had the thing pretty much written and went to paste it on the little machine that takes the articles. The f'n machine just spun around and the words went into cyberspace. I tried it about three times. It just wouldn't take my junky, crappy, low-life article that was only geared toward keyword optimization and nothing else much really. I woke up grateful today. I am ashamed and sorry, but I still may go write it for Helium. I spent too much time on researching who did what to blow it off completely. I only wish I knew if it were true about Halle Berry putting coffee grinds on her butt to get rid of cellulite. It sounds kind of out there, but what if it's true? Some so-called expert says that because coffee is a stimulant and a diuretic that when applied on the skin it increases blood flow and thus detoxifies and breaks up cellulite. Pretty to think so, eh? Oh, well, it should get me high ratings on Helium for the dish. Damn Helium. They owe me $70 for an article I sold on, get this, the body language of horses. Tell me that didn't take some research. I put in for it weeks ago, before the first of the month, as specified. I actually expected to see it in my PayPal account yesterday. Still not there today. No sign of it in my "earnings" report except as an "adjustment". I sent them an e-mail. If they don't pay up this entire blog may be changed to the Helium.com is a Con and a Thief etc. Blog, making sure I use all the right key words to get it Googled regularly. Ta Ta for now.