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The Drum is an online literary magazine with a twist: The Drum publishes all its content exclusively in audio form!

They offer listeners short fiction and essays that they can listen to on the site or download to an mp3 player. In the future, they will be offering public-domain works read aloud by notable and familiar voices, as well as occasional interviews with noted authors.

The Drum launched on May 1 with work from New York Times best-seller Jenna Blum, award-winning Bret Anthony Thomas, and Faulkner-Wisdom Finalist Randy Susan Meyers, among others. The June issue will feature work from Maud Casey, Ben Percy, and Lauren Grodstein, and many other emerging and established writers.

They are looking for submissions of new short fiction and essays and encourage writers to visit www.drumlitmag.com for more information and submission guidelines–as well as just to enjoy listening to the great work currently on the site.

For more info visit www.drumlitmag.com

It’s easy to forget that writing is a verb. Best-selling author Michael Connelly advocates glueing our butts to our collective chairs just 15 minutes a day to make sure we stay in the habit. Well, 15 minutes. Honestly. How tough can that be?

If it turns into 30 minutes, great. An hour? Phenomenal. Taking Connelly’s advice to heart, a few of us who shared our words with each other over occasional critique sessions formed our own “Butt Glue” club a year ago. (In polite company we’re simply the BGs – sans the disco).

Today, the BGs are up to 10 members, spread across four states. We have just TWO rules:
1. No excuses accepted for why we didn’t write last night.
2. WRITE AT LEAST 15 MINUTES A DAY.

Sure, we’ve all broken the rules a few times, but it’s mostly kept us on track, kept us inspired, and kept us accountable – to each other and to our words. Once in a while one of the members will send a status update; others will chime in. Everyone encourages everyone else, just enough of a voice in the void to keep us from solitary confinement.

Most productive though: what starts as the 15 minutes a day often morphs into 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 2 hours, 6 hours. Word counts range from 200 words to, “Thanks to the Butt Glue club, I was able to finish a new chapter this week!”

Give it a try – and commit to those first 30 days to really make your 15 minutes a day a healthy habit. And on that note, I’ll leave you with this from the ever-brilliant Barbara Kingsolver: “There is no perfect time to write. There is only NOW.”

Category: On Writing  Tags: , ,  2 Comments

‘Tis the season of birth and rebirth, whether you’re a bunny, a chick, a flowering bud on the dogwood tree, an apple blossom or a business. So while you’re working through your own spring cleaning, ask yourself, “What about me or my book or my business needs reborn?”

Take advantage of the longer daylight hours to shed more light on your writing: Does your manuscript need cleaning up? Could your website use sprucing up? Should your schedule be revved up? Does a project need geared up? Does your audience need ramped up?

There’s no better time to dig in– after all, it’s easy to think fresh and new when fresh and new is bursting all around us!

Fueled by all Ma Nature’s inspiration, we’re knee-deep in our own rebirth here too, funneling all the knowledge of a myriad of past projects, successful launches and clever campaigns into the niche we know and love best: literary artists – writers, authors, aspiring authors – and words that need to be seen.

And while there’s some tedious chores in the process (pruning old content, planting new social media seedlings, endless directory listings while developing a new look and focus), overall it’s been tremendously liberating. We were thrilled to toss some of those old techniques and archaic tools gathering dust on the shelf. We even had the courage to pull a few weeds and say, “no thanks” to the projects that no longer added anything to our new landscape design.

Our reward for the diligence: A fresh new look and feel with a much better view… just like the season… Happy Easter and Happy Spring! A7PYYPXY2C8Z