NaPoWriMo: Get ready!

Tomorrow is the BIG DAY! To get you prepared and all ready - with plenty of prompts and fabulous bloggers who will be struggling through it with you, of course - here are some links to peruse during April for tips, exercises, prompts, and to connect with a community of fearless people who are in on the challenge. This will also be in the sidebar for quick reference throughout the month.

Poetic Asides with Robert Lee Brewer at Writer's Digest (daily posted prompts)
ReadWritePoem*
Twitter Magnets**
Book of Kells: 30 New Poetry Prompts (a list you can consult throughout the month)

*ReadWritePoem is creating an anthology at the end of the month consisting of poems that poets choose to submit from their April portfolio. If you don't write a poem each day - make sure you take the RWP pledge first at readwritepoem.org - but you still end up with 30 poems because you play a little catch-up, then you will be able to enter in a raffle for some gently-used poetry collections. RWP is also packing up its bags and leaving after the NaPoWriMo challenge, so you might consider stopping by and taking a look around the site and its social networking features (which will be disabled May 1) before it's dismantled.

**Twitter Magnets isn't a community at all. It's something that exists year-round, and it's helped me with my writing on quite a few occasions that I decided it was worth entering here as a little extra push if necessary. I won't tell you exactly what it is - you'll have to visit the site yourself to figure it out - but it's a little drag-and-drop Twittery fun.

I'm so excited for NaPoWriMo...I will be posting all my poems here daily but whisking quite a few of them off (after a day-ish) into invisibility so I can tune them up - in other words, make them utterly unrecognizably fantastic - for submission to magazines.

Happy poeming!

layers of happy

I did something nice today.

It made me feel good.

I couldn't stop smiling.

p.s.
Today is my dad's birthday. [He is awesome. He does everything for everybody and drives me back and forth from school every day. He tells weird jokes and has a funny sense of humor. He is also really really smart.] Please wish him a very happy birthday in the comments. :) Happy birthday Daddy!

wonderland

I haven't seen it yet, but the images -- and trailer -- from this film are absolutely incredible. I'm working on a piece that's based off the book, and I really like it. I'm thinking about using a similar feel and theme for several of my April poems, kind of changing it up and seeing how you can interpret the story in different ways.

What do you think?

Ramona and Beezus: July 23

When I heard they were making a movie out of the Ramona books (by Beverly Cleary), I was beyond excited. I've always loved the books and they're so much fun to read, and I knew they couldn't go too wrong with the film.

The trailer was just released and it's so cute. It's going to be incredible.

National Poetry Month 2010

APRIL is almost here, and I'm really excited because, like last year, I will end up forcing myself to join the poem-a-day challenge. It's easier, I've figured out, when hundreds of people are doing it with you. :)

p.s. One of the coolest things about NPM is seeing the poster. I love this year's, but I think I like last year's a little bit better.

p.p.s. [ETA] I just took out comment moderation. It has worked for the past one-and-a-half weeks, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that the spammers are OUT forever.

The Scientist

This was on American Idol last night -- this is by far my favorite performance on Idol in a long, long time. Maybe I'm in the minority, I don't know, but I really, really, really loved this performance and had to share it with people who don't watch the show.

Check it out for yourself. :)

a note

Comment moderation is temporarily in effect here. It's kind of annoying, I know, but I've started getting floods of spam comments (about fifteen every two or three days).

It's been happening for a while now; I even enabled the word verification, but somehow the commenters are getting past that roadblock. Hopefully comment moderation will help to block off the spam and I'll be able to disable moderation soon, but for now, it's the best defense I've got.

I'll be back to blogging again very soon.