The web’s awash in poetry links
To satisfy your rhyming muse
Here’s a few for poets all
To glean tips, advice & news

(Sorry for the rhyming poor
But verse, for me, is very hard
Tho’ you’d think I’d have at least some knack
Being saddled with the last name Bard)

PoemHunter.com – A database of poetry and lyrics, searchable by title, author or text. Great for gaining some inspiration from the best!

WinningWriters.com – Articles, links and more about all types of writing, but geared particularly for poets.  They sponsor a series of contests, as well.

ilovepoetry.com – An online community for poets, featuring message boards for networking and critiquing.

gigglepoetry.com – Lighthearted site devoted specifically to children’s poetry

Poetry Writing with Jack Prelutsky – Award winning children’s poet offers an online guide to writing poetry.  It’s created for kids, but has lots of great advice for all aspiring wordsmiths.

kalliope – A comprehensive online poetry writing workshop and information center.

Interested in learning how to write a book and send it to children’s book publishers? Come on over to The CBI Clubhouse for audios, videos, insider writing tips and much, much more!

Yes, Google is great.  Really, it’s revolutionized the world.  But the web doesn’t end at Google’s doors.  For the writer, there are some really, really terrific research tools just waiting to be discovered.  So, let’s discover ‘em!

Ms. Freckles – Crisply designed site that puts a boatload of info at your fingertips.  It’s particularly strong for writers needing translations or definitions of non-English words.  http://www.msfreckles.com/index.php?lang=en

Questia - Offers access to a huge collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles, much of which are unavailable elsewhere.  There’s a monthly cost, but you can get a 72 hour free trial to check it out.  http://www.questia.com

Yahoo Kids – OK, you’ve heard of Yahoo, but have you checked out this search tool?  From this page, you’ll be able to dig through pop culture in no time.  Need to know what your readers are into?  Here’s where to turn!  http://kids.yahoo.com/search

Complete Planet – Got some serious research to do?  Have a look at Complete Planet, which provides over 70,000+ searchable “deep web”  databases and specialty search engines.  http://aip.completeplanet.com/

Interested in learning how to write a book and send it to children’s book publishers? Come on over to The CBI Clubhouse for audios, videos, insider writing tips and much, much more!

I was honored to be interviewed by Shelli Johannes for the “Marvelous Markters” section of her excellent blog Market My Words. The subject: how writers can promote themselves and their work.

Check it out — I think you’ll enjoy it.

http://faeriality.blogspot.com/2009/06/marvelous-marketer-jon-bard-childrens.html

Wordle is a free online tool that takes any text and creates a “word cloud”.  The more a word shows up in the text, the larger it appears in a cloud.  Here’s a Wordle cloud I created using the text of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

I can think of a few  interesting uses for children’s book writers (or any writer, for that matter):

• Run your manuscript through it to see if you’re overusing certain adjectives.  If a word that has nothing to do with the theme of your story is larger than those that do, perhaps it’s time to take out the thesaurus and vary your word choices a bit.

• Need to write a plot synopsis, but you’re not certain what to say?  Let Wordle show you what the overriding themes of your story are.  It’s pretty clear what President Lincoln had on his mind while crafting his speech by examining the Worldle above.

• Perhaps you can find a novel way to use one of these for storytelling purposes.  Maybe providing a Wordle of each chapter throughout a manuscript would be a memorable way of summing things up?  Or take the dialogue from each character and create their own Wordles and run them back-to-back.  I leave the possibilities to your own creative minds.

Have a look for yourself at http://wordle.net

Interested in learning how to write a book and send it to children’s book publishers? Come on over to The CBI Clubhouse for audios, videos, insider writing tips and much, much more!

We’ve just posted a new Squidoo lens about writing for children. Here’s the link:

How to Write a Book for Children

Feel free to bookmark!

Interested in learning how to write a book and send it to children’s book publishers? Come on over to The CBI Clubhouse for audios, videos, insider writing tips and much, much more!

Looking to add some accuracy and realism to your story telling? Check out these resources:

The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Psychology. If one of your characters is undergoing therapy, here’s how to make sure you dealing with facts, not myth. This site details psychological disorders, therapy techniques, ethical issues for psychologists, jargon, the dynamics of a therapy session and more. An excellent find for writers who don’t know their Freud from their Jung. http://www.archetypewriting.com/index.html

Police Body Language and Behavior. Officer Lynda Sue Cooper shares the secrets of police body language in this fascinating article. How do they stand in a danger situation? How do they approach a possible criminal? What steps do they take before entering a buidling? Great insight — and just the sort of thing that would bring your police character to life. http://www.hodrw.com/cop2.htm

For more writing tips, head on over to The CBI Clubhouse, the new site packed with audio, video, insider advice and much more — all about writing children’s books!

As a writer, you’re expected to know enough about your subject to write authoritatively about it. That’s fine if you’ve spent your life as a firefighter and your story is set in a firehouse. But what if you’re writing a story in which the main character dreams of being an Olympic diver, and you don’t even know how to swim?

That’s the sort of pickle writers find themselves in all the time. There’s a setting, an occupation, a hobby that just feels right for your character, but the writer is utterly ignorant about the details and inner workings that would bring such an element to life.

That’s why eHow.com is such a cool site. Their slogan is Clear Instructions on How To Do (just about) Everything and it’s a fair boast. Pay them a visit and you’ll know how to do a Forward One-and-a-Half Flip From a Springboard in a matter of minutes!

http://eHow.com

For writing tips and more information about writing for children, visit The CBI Clubhouse – Home of the Fightin’ Bookworms!

Several years ago, Anastasia Suen sent us this note, which still appears on our web site: “Yesterday’s mail brought copies of Hodgepodge, with my poem on the back page, and an acceptance letter from Babybug for another poem! My poems in Shoofly will be out in April. ALL these leads came from Children’s Book Insider! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

If you go to Anastasia’s own web site today (www.asuen.com) you’ll see that she’s the author of over 100 books, she leads online writing workshops, speaks at numerous conferences, and gets $1250 per day for a full-day school visit ($1500 if she has to travel). We like to think of Anastasia as our own personal CBI-success story, but really we can’t take any of the credit. Anastasia did it because she’s got what it takes to be a prolific, published children’s book author. One thing Anastasia, and other writers like her, has is a certain stick-to-it mentality that says, “I want this, I can do this, and I absolutely won’t give up.”

Read more

Just got this e-mail, so I’m passing it along:

“Rhyming Critters 2″ has ten membership slots, of which eight are currently filled.

Our members are generally consider themselves to be at the Intermediate level.  All have been writing for a number of years in different formats (poetry, prose, plays, music) and for different audience age levels.

In the group, we write and critique exclusively in rhyme.  That’s how we got started and we have retained that unique format.  Members can ask for critiques of other work but any critiques of prose or regular poetry are done off-line.  The time commitment to the group is usually around a couple hours per week at most.

For our critiques, we exchange rhymes via e-mail, usually about one or two rhymes monthly per person.  Critiques are also provided to the author via e-mail.   We have an open recruitment for our vacancies – I keep a waiting list of interested candidates who I contact as vacancies occur—we’ve been running one or two vacancies per year, usually resulting from pressing family priorities or the good fortune of extra work related to getting a book manuscript accepted for publication.

Interested? Contact the group’s moderator Bill Kirk at rnbkirk@aol.com

This is cool — now you can leave your comment to any blog post as a video!  Check out the comments section for my video comment, and then leave one of your own.