Sending out your work without a careful edit is as unthinkable as sending your daughter to the prom in her nightgown and slippers. But it may be a challenge to find exactly the right editor, especially when you're just starting out. That's why the Story Circle Network created its Editorial Service. Story Circle has vetted each editor and stands behind her work. You can trust her to be reliable, efficient, and thoughtful-exactly the kind of editor every writer wants and needs. --Susan Wittig Albert , bestselling author and founder of the Story Circle Network -- So, you've worked hard on that article, short story, book of poems, memoir, or novel. You've taken Anne Lamott's advice and sat down every day and written your story, bit by bit, bird by bird. Some days your fingers moved like lightning across the keyboard; on others, you spent more time gazing out the window wondering what it would be like to be on a beach in the Caribbean, far away from a computer scre...

Awards come and go, and it pays to be cautious especially in these days of increased book publishing opportunities. Here is a new award I can personally vouch for having been a member of the Story Circle Network for years. ~ Dani Greer ~~~~~ May Sarton under her portrait By Paula Stallings Yost The winner of Story Circle Network's first annual Sarton Memoir Award will be announced at  Stories from the Heart , the biannual SCN National Memoir Conference, at the Wyndham Hotel in Austin, Texas, April 13-15, 2012.  The award is named in honor of May Sarton (1912-1995), the distinguished American poet, novelist, and author of twelve memoirs and journals. Readers have found Sarton 's work to be inspiring, moving, and thought-provoking. While widely acclaimed for her fiction and poetry, Sarton ’s best and most enduring work may lie in her journals. In these honest, probing accounts of her solitary life, she deals with such issues as aging, isolation, solitude, friendship, ...

May Sarton with painting and live photo Our theme this month is "out-of-the-ordinary" and I have a list as long as my arm of people and organizations in the publishing world that fit the theme. Today I'll share the new May Sarton Memoir Award , a project of the Story Circle Network , a memoir-writing group for women. We've talked about SCN before, and founder, Susan Wittig Albert, is an occasional guest at the Blood-Red Pencil. The award is her brain child, and is yet another tool the organization uses to foster "lifewriting" for women. We all have stories to tell, and there are many reasons to tell them. The Sarton award is meant for women who have taken their stories to the ultimate goal - publication. I don't think we've discussed writing awards here, but they are an important part of the publishing world and book promotion. The process of choosing award winners is also an important, sometimes complicated, and often time-consuming process. ...

Recently, my husband and I collaborated on a silent auction contribution for the Story Circle Network Conference held in Austin, Texas. We called it the Sole of the Writer Sock Box and here’s a picture of it. He carved the conference logo on a wooden box styled to look like an old library card catalog, and lined the three compartments with aromatic cedar. Tabs on the three divider cards had Dewey Decimal System numbers related to the three stages of creating a book. What are the three stages you might ask? Let me tell you my thoughts as I knit the three pairs of socks that went into the box. The first stage in any writing project is getting the words down on paper, without regard to form, grammar, punctuation, or anything your inner critic might find to pick apart. This is where the writer dreams with reckless abandon – or in the case of a memoir - remembers without reservation. The sock yarn I chose was a bright multi-colored self-striping yarn, and though we don’t necessarily write...

This week, we're taking a look at the subject of memoir writing. Hardly a day goes by that we don't hear of yet another celebrity tell-all book, and a quick Google search will bring up thousands of once-and-future life stories of the rich and famous. Memoirs are so hot that people are fabricating juicy ones just to get a slice of the publishing pie. First let's quickly define a memoir . It isn't an autobiography in which a person details his life from birth until now. It's a portion of that story told less as straight fact, and more from the author's subjective view of events and aspects of their life. To that end, the creative possibilities are endless, and indeed many contemporary memoirs are as fascinating and thought-provoking as a well-written novel. I first started thinking about memoir after answering an extensive questionnaire for the movie, Brats: Our Journey Home . Upon completion, I realized that not only did I have a tremendous word-count, but some i...