Service Note

There is a new gadget on my blog. It's under construction, but you can now read a poem I recently wrote for fun. And when I say under construction, I mean that I'm going to play with privacy settings for this one poem before I start adding more pieces of writing to the list. You will know I'm finished when I take down the [under construction] notice on the gadget.

I realize displaying your writing on the internet can be risky, hence my toying with privacy settings and such. As of now, the goal is for a visitor to click a link and be taken to a document. Ideally, they will be unable to save this document to their computer and be unable to copy and paste the text of the document onto another document. If you know a way to make this happen, please let me know through email. If anything is currently not meeting this goal, send me an email notifying me of such. If you cannot find my email, please leave a comment below.

Along that same tune, anything that's posted in the gadget will be either a poem or flash fiction. This is not to say that I only write small pieces, just that I'm more willing to share those small pieces with the Larger World of the Internet than I am the longer pieces. I also do not want to decrease the importance of writing small pieces by singling them out. The reason I'm more willing to post something small rather than something larger is because they are a fast read and merely a taste of my writing. As always, constructive criticism is always welcome. A feedback policy is upcoming. For now, just send me an email with your thoughts if you so desire.

However, my current concern is not the writing but the feature used to display the writing. Any comments in regards to that will be the most helpful at this moment in time.

Thank you and happy reading.

First Paragraph Contest

Nathan Bransford, former agent of Natalie Whipple (see blog list) is hosting a sort-of annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Contest.  This is a just for fun contest, but the prizes are still really cool.  The grand prize includes getting a partial manuscript looked over by Catherine Drayton who represents Markus Zusak, John Flanagan, Becca Fitzpatrick, and others.

So, naturally, I entered.  A new year's resolution I have is to research and enter a few writing contests, and I say this counts.

This is the paragraph I entered.  Please critique it as an opening paragraph in the comments below (if you so desire).

I broke away from an important conversation to walk down the strange corridor. The walls were sterile white, decorated with closed doors of the same color, and stretched to infinity. My feet carried me forward and yet I went nowhere at the same time. Still I kept walking, never realizing the counter-productivity of the action. My focus was on the end of the hallway, where a door just like the other doors waited. A woman stood in front of that door, her back to me. She repeatedly opened the door as if to enter, and every time she opened it, she was opening the door for the first time. In a way, I was at both places, but I couldn't walk through the door unless the me walking through the corridor arrived at the door. I wondered why I couldn't just teleport directly to the door; this is a dream after all.