Welcome to The VERB!

This probably won't come as a shock to any of you, but we writers... well, we live inside our heads. We create worlds and people and conversations out of thin air. And when we achieve publication—be it short story, poem, article, novel or screenplay—we are naturally ecstatic about it. We waste no time proclaiming our news to every online and offline social network we can find. It's a great day when someone says our writing doesn't suck, that it's worthy of publication. And we feel not just regular special, but super special.

When we aren't inside our heads creating a story, we're in there working on ways to promote ourselves. If we're selling a book, we can't stay away from Amazon. If we've entered a contest, we can't quit clicking the results page. If we have a blog or website, we can't stop checking visitor stats. We google our names to see what others are saying about us. We ask folks to vote for our stories, write favorable reviews and enter our websites in best website contests.

If we own an online business we're constantly thinking of ways to make it a more successful venture. And if you're like me, with no little ones in the house anymore (except a two-year-old munchkin I occasionally baby-sit), it's easy for those thoughts to take precedence. What can I do to attract more clients to ReadingWriters? More subscribers to The VERB? More students to the Story Room? More free ads to the Wednesday Flyer?

The up side of all this head time we indulge in, of course, is that it sharpens our skills, increases our visibility and establishes our credibility as professional writers. The down side is that it makes us terribly self-absorbed.

I, I, I. Me, me, me.

The reason I bring this up, and the reason you didn't receive a July issue of The VERB, is that my fifteen-year-old nephew, Dakota, came for a two-month visit this summer.

Now I don't know if you've been around any fifteen-year-old males lately, but they don't exactly appreciate the quiet lifestyle of a writer. I might've been cerebellum-deep in ecstasy, writing a story or reading a manuscript or analyzing a screenplay, but all he saw was that I spent way too much time in front of the computer. And though he gave me several hours to work the business end of my imagination, I felt him in the distance, hovering, waiting to get on to the fun stuff.

I must admit, I resented this at first. I didn't want to change my daily habits to accommodate him. I wanted him to do all the accommodating. That's just the nature of change. It's uncomfortable, therefore we'd rather not do it. Yet once I squeezed into the groove of pushing myself away from the computer, of crawling out of my head for long periods of time, something wondrous happened.

Balance!

I've come to realize that it's OK to spend half my day on that which dwells within the dusty corridors of my mind, and the other half on things that have absolutely nothing to do with the dusty corridors of my mind. My old motto was: The only way to be successful in life is to keep my nose to the grindstone. But that's changed. My new motto is: The best way to become a better writer, and person, is to get over myself. 

A teenager taught me that. Thanks, Dakota.

On another note, a special congrats to our Dynamic Dialogue Contest winner, D.B. Grady. His story is published in this issue. As usual, many, many great submissions passed over the desk and the choosing was not easy. The complete list of finalists and Honorable Mentions are listed in the Contest Cafe.

Oh, and if you remember, way back in June I asked you to tell us what you call that four-wheeled, food-transporting contraption in the supermarket. Well, here are a few from the hundreds of responses:

Clearly, our humble little poll shows that cart is used by the majority of the US, that trolley is favored by our friends in Europe and Australia and that buggy originated in the Deep American South. Which is good to know if you ever write a story about Southerners going to the grocery store.

Elizabeth Guy
Editor

The VERB
is published
once a month.





It is sent 
exclusively
 to those who
 requested and
 confirmed a
 subscription. 





To manage yours, 
please use
the form below.





To change your
email address,
simply unsubscribe
the old address
and subscribe
the new one.







































































 

This issue 
was published 
under the musical 
influence of...



DAVE MATTHEWS BAND
Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King