Look at the picture below and write a 100 word story. It really is that simple.
If you care to share, either post a link to your story in the comments, or post the whole story.
I can’t wait to see what you write!
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Here are 5 more places online worth checking out:
Enjoy!
I haven’t talked about Edward Gorey much on my blog (except for here and here). I apologize for that. It was a terrible oversight and I aim to remedy that right now.
Gorey was a brilliant author and artist, well known for his abecedaries, his limericks, his crosshatched illustrations, and his morbid sense of humor. He was a genius and I’d count him among my influences (should I someday write something worth reading and become famous, this will save critics some time in deciding who my influences were).
Unfortunately, he died. That keeps happening to my favorite authors.
And yet, he lives again! Well, after a fashion.
Thank you, College Humor for bringing Gorey back to life through Death himself. Beautiful.
This is the fifteenth and final installment of my Icebreaker series. Find your backpack and cram your Trapper Keeper inside!
Here I am with hair and trombones. I still have those trombones. The hair, not so much.
You may already know that I was king of the band geeks in high school. It would stand to reason that music classes would have been my favorite. And I think if I were to answer this question in high school, I would have agreed.
Looking back now though, I think my favorite subject in high school was English, specifically AP Literature and AP Composition. And it turns out, those are the subjects that have impacted me most.
I mean, I worked for a bookstore for ten years because I love books. I write daily on this blog of mine. I have aspirations of being published in a variety of forms. And I work for a publisher, albeit in the marketing department.
You know the last time I played my trombone? Me neither. Now, I don’t regret taking any of the music classes that I took, and at one time I considered becoming a band teacher (but let’s be honest—I’m glad that I don’t have to listen to junior high or high school students learn how to play the clarinet).
My favorite subject is still related to reading and writing.
How about you? What is yours?
It is funny sometimes how disconnected a person can become from their image. Not too long ago, I discovered the man behind the logo of KFC, Colonel Sanders, was very different from what I expected.
Go read this article from a few years ago and discover it for yourself.
If you don’t want to bother with reading the linked article, let me sum it up for you. The image of Colonel Sanders as a kindly Southern gentleman who makes delicious chicken when he isn’t busy smiling is only a little bit true. He was from the south and he made chicken, but that is certainly not the full story.
Harlan Sanders ran a gas station in Kentucky and had a bit of a feud with a rival gas station owner in town. As he was in the middle of a meeting with his supervisors, the rival started painting over Sanders’ sign. That led to an armed confrontation and one of the Colonel’s supervisors ended up dead, while Sanders shot his rival in the shoulder.
Apparently, Harlan Sanders was no stranger to confrontations. His tenacity and opportunism made as many friends as it did enemies, even within the ranks of KFC, the successful chain of fried chicken restaurants that he founded. But that isn’t the image that they sell on the side of the chicken buckets.
What do people see when they look at you? How far removed is that from the truth?
I found myself on the other side of the desk this week.
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how uncomfortable it is to wait for rejection/acceptance after submitting a piece of your writing. And then when I got a rejection from one of the publishers, I wrote a piece about how rejection ultimately makes us stronger as writers and as people. I don’t mean to harp on this theme, but I got a chance this week to be the one dashing other people’s dreams.
Here’s the scenario:
I am the marketing manager at a relatively small book publisher in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since I work in marketing and not editorial, I have a limited voice in deciding which books are published and which are not. What I do have power over is deciding what to do when people ask for review copies of our products. Asking for a review copy is essentially the same thing as asking the publisher for free stuff.
The purpose of a review copy is for an organization or an institute of higher learning or some member of the press to give some publicity to the product in exchange for getting the product for free. I would guess that a lot of review copy requests get approved, but the cost of a book is a cheap price to pay for the potential that a good review can have on that book’s sales.
But this week, I received a request for a review copy and I don’t feel right about sending free products. For one thing, the request had spelling errors, which I think reflects negatively on the ability of sender to produce the type of review that will entice others to buy our stuff. And the other reason that I am disinclined to send free stuff is that the organization requesting the materials didn’t have a quality website and the other reviews that were shown there weren’t professional.
Now, I don’t like saying no to people, but for the sake of the products for which I am responsible, I have to. But I don’t have a nice form letter made up to say no without hurting anyone’s feelings. What I do have is a plan.
I’m going to send out a slew of review copy requests to a number of publishers. My blog will be my platform. I review books on here semi-regularly, so it isn’t beyond possibility that a request might be granted. Best of all, I’d be just as happy with a rejection letter as I’d be with actually getting a free product, because the rejection letter would give me ideas on how to reject such requests tactfully.
I’m making a list now of stuff that I want. I’ll keep you posted about how the requests turn out.
What is the nicest rejection letter you ever got?
Look at the picture below and write a 100 word story. It really is that simple.
If you care to share, either post a link to your story in the comments, or post the whole story.
I can’t wait to see what you write!
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