A Book Published by Blurb: See Blurb Bookstore
Full Information at: www.blurb.com
With Blurb, you’ll find all the tools you need to make your own photo book, whether you’re making a personalized wedding album, cookbook, baby book, travel photo book, or fundraising book.
Count on bookstore-quality printing and binding, and a range of choices from Hardcover photobooks to Softcover paperbacks in an array of trim sizes. Use any of our free online bookmaking tools to create your own book.
Learn how to publish a book and much more with our free how-to tips and tutorials or watch our two-minute BookSmart video and see how easy it is to make a coffee table photo book. Be sure to register and subscribe to Blurb emails to get the news first on Blurb events and promo code coupon offers.
Mixbook is the easy and fun way to make completely customizable photo books, cards, and calendars on the web – for free. With Mixbook, you aren’t limited to static pre-designed templates – our powerful design software gives you the freedom to lay out and design your creations to your heart’s content. We’ve dedicated ourselves to bringing you the best experience in creating photo products so that you can make keepsakes that truly reflect your vision. With Mixbook, you can truly Make It Yours™.
Full Information at the MixBook site: www.mixbook.com
Continue reading "Digital Photo Journals and eBooks: Try Mixbook!" »
The Institute for Children's Literature For more than 40 years, the Institute of Children’s Literature has offered the premiere writing course to adults interested in learning how to write and be published for children and teens. The hallmark of our course is one-on-one personalized instruction from an impressive faculty of active professional writers and experienced editors. College Credits are available for our course. Instruction is conveniently available everywhere via the traditional home study method – with lessons exchanged through the mail or via the Internet. This site offers information on our course, Writing for Children and Teenagers, on our teaching methods, and on our faculty of professional writers and editors. The objective of our course and instructors is to train you to create manuscripts for today’s publishing market. Please go to the Short Story or to the Full Story for details on our course and how you can benefit from it. For fun, you may want to go immediately to "Our Instructors". We're very proud of our instructors because they are all established writers or editors. They've been there; they know how it's done; and one of them would be your teacher and mentor all the way through the course. Check them out.
World Hum: The Best Travel Stories on the Web
This is D. Mack's All-Purpose Travel Postcard Template. He's on a campaign to make handwritten postcards and letters cool again, and would love to receive one from you -- for more information, please visit his blog.
Writing Assignment: Awaken your Inner Travel Writer and write a short poem or story about a memorable experience from your travels. If you are planning a trip, be sure to take your journal and note special experiences, events, and happenings. Write Now! GO!
For examples of some of the very best contemporary travel writing, take a look at World Hum:
Here is an item from World Hum about Pico Iyer's new book:
Continue reading "Awaken Your Inner Travel Writer! Discover World Hum" »
Full Biography and other information about Po's books and articles at:
Excerpt:
Find a few good role models. You only need a few, maybe only one. Let them inspire you. Art reacts to art. All good books are a work of art that is a creative reaction to other art.
Always tell a story. It grounds the reader in a shared experience.
Understand voice. Write the same sentence ten different ways by imitating the writing voices of ten different writers.
Practice plots. Understand different ways to tell the same story – the difference between hiding a surprise and foreshadowing it, for instance. Starting a story in the middle versus its natural beginning, et cetera. Learn what creates suspense, forward lean, keeps the pages turning.
Journalism first or fiction first? (Grad school in Journalism or Grad school in Creative Writing?) There is no way to answer this. This is an artificial question. It reveals a thirst, a hope, that the journey can be shortened, that there is a shortcut. It can’t. Journalism (facts) or fiction (style)? Both. Both. Both. In no particular order.
Don’t be a snob. It’s good for people to read, so whatever they read, no matter what it is, be glad they're reading.
No matter what your style or genre or form, even if it's journalism, read John Gardner's "The Art of Fiction" very carefully and try some of the exercises. Realize that once you command these skills, you can break every rule he teaches, but these are the basic skills.
Work on your weaknesses. Find out what you’re hiding from.
Stop looking for shortcuts.
“Of all our truest hopes and desires for our work is that, what we find, we ourselves never knew. It came as a shock. It came as a surprise. It was new. We could never have known what we were going to do before we did it, and in that sense, we discover too. Here is what I’ve got to say to you: there are things in your life you will see; there are stories you will hear; if you don’t write them down, if you don’t make the picture, they won’t get seen, they won’t get told.”
Emmet Gowin
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Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of live and shape the human story.
Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.
What can I use Cowbird to do?
Continue reading "CowBird: A Small Community of Storytellers" »
Join Larry Brody as he takes you through the steps of good storytelling, showing how to:
Source: http://www.tvwriter.com
Whether you call it New Media, 4th Generation Media, Peer Production, Webcasting, Slivercasting, or any one of dozens of terms that have come barrelling into use in recent months, markets and formats based on New Technology are here to stay. And growing bigger everyday.
The purpose of TV Writer.Com's New Media Workshop is to teach those who already are on the cutting edge of the technology how to be on the cutting edge of creativity as well
For expanding your "digital identity toolkit" beyond the text only universe, take some time to explore the wide range of Web 2.0 tools now available for creating a multi-media interactive journal. We might call this the "Digital Journal," where you can collect and link various sites and programs to provide a rich ecology of venues for telling your stories.
Current and emerging technologies give Journalers and Storytellers the opportunity to fully explore and express dimensions of personality in ways that have not been possible until now.
Optional:
Use Google Search to find out about the best products available, and see which ones you feel might be compatible with your personal JOURNAL - 2012 purpose and goals.
The rapidly expanding universe of Web 2.0 tools currently includes, but is not limited to, blogs, wikis, toolkits, googleapps, comics, open office, cloud computing, social networks, youTube, Second Life, and other programs coming along.
Source: http://www.storycenter.org
digital story (dig·i·tal sto·ry)
A short, first person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.
digital storyteller (dig·i·tal sto·ry·tell·er)
Anyone who has a desire to document life experience, ideas, or feelings through the use of story and digital media. Usually someone with little to no prior experience in the realm of video production but time to spend a few days attending a workshop and developing a story with creative support and technical assistance from compassionate, highly experienced facilitators.
Continue reading "Digital Storytelling - A New Way to Tell Your Stories" »
Experiment!
Use a simple program for creating comics and create journal posts using a comic format.
Recommended: Comic Life - Watch This Video
Hola! Potential Bloggers!
If you do not already have a blog, are you ready to create a blog for your journey through 2012, with excerpts from your journal and other writing you may do?
There are some basic books you must have on your shelf if you are serious about your Blogging Practice. There is a wealth of material, references, and sources available to help you get a sense of the scale and power of this new digital universe. Search "Blog" and "Blogging" on Amazon and see which of the many available books speaks to you. I recommend the latest edition of the DUMMIES book on blogging, just because this series breaks everything down into simple, easy to understand steps.
What is most exciting of all is your potential role in this vast new frontier for positive social change. Of course, because I view both Blogging and Writing Practice as essentially spiritual disciplines, I recommend that you immediately establish a positive vision, motivating purpose and realistic goals for your work. But right now, surf, sail or fly on over to your nearest bookstore and get ready to explore the ever-expanding frontiers of the Blogosphere! cyber-camp.
Write Now!
What will be the theme of your blog? What title will it have? What is your audience? How will you make others aware of your blog? Which blogging service will you use? (I recommend Typepad, but there are many other good ones.)