Young Writers Society

Welcome to Squills, the official news bulletin of the Young Writers Society!

What will you find here? Tons of interesting news about YWS, including but not limited to: articles about writing, art, and the world of humanities; interviews with YWS members; shameless plugs; link round-ups; and opinionated columns.

And where will all of this come from? Take a look at our fantastic creative staff!






Of course, our content can’t come only from our staff. We also depend on you to help keep Squills successful. You’re all a part of a writing community, after all. If you’re interested in submitting to Squills, pop on over to the Reader’s Corner to find out how you can get involved by contributing an article or participating in other Squills activities. You can also subscribe to the Squills Fan Club , or PM SquillsBot to receive a notification each time a new issue is published!

Well, that’s all I have for now. So, what are you waiting for? Enjoy!

1. FM INTERVIEW
2. HOLIDAY BUZZ
3. SOCIETY PAGES
4. ALL THINGS BOOKS AND READING
5. RARE BOOK REVIEW
6. TWO CENTS: POETIC
7. NEW ARRIVALS
8. LINK ROUNDUP
9. SUBSCRIBERS

Featured Member Interview: JosephGeorgewritten by Kaos < PM: >

Welcome our latest Featured Member, @JosephGeorge, here for an interview! Not only are they a wonderful reviewer with a specific style that they write each review in, but a pleasant presence to the site in general! I happened to grab an interview from him, which was an interesting experience. You may think that they're new, but they've also been on the site from an old account, JayeCShore.



JosephGeorge: No, I did not expect it. In fact, the thought never crossed my mind. I remember from the past being given the chance, (on another account,) but that was only after a lot of effort and a lot of reviews. This time was a surprise.



J: Perhaps the number of solid reviews in a relatively short time. I definitely focused on the quality and not so much the quantity.




J: Doing reviews. I enjoy reading the things that others have written, and giving some personal thoughts on it, or advice, is always refreshing.






J: I would say just be a member of the site. Try to get involved with helping others, especially the Green Room. They need it as much as the rest of us.




That's all we have from JosephGeorge today, but we'll hope that they continue to do what they do in the future!

HOLIDAY BUZZwritten by Aley < PM: >

Hello Squill Readers!

This month there are several cool things going on in the forums and I've come to bring you as much information as I can about them all!

Here is a list of them with links to their homepages.

Secret Santa: 2016
Holiday Poetry Contest 2016
2016 YWS Yearbook
Holidayify Your Avatar
YWS Most Awards 2016
YWS Best Awards 2016

For those of you who are new to YWS, or haven't been around during our holiday season, I'll run through what each of these are.

The first, "Secret Santa: 2016" is an event where you enter to give a gift to an unsuspecting gift giver. Basically, if you sign up you will be put into a randomizer with everyone else, and then assigned someone to give a gift to. At a certain point, entries will be closed and gift creating will commence.

Due Date to sign up for the Secret Santa Event is

The next event also has a deadline, but we'll hear more about that from the host later in an interview I did with @Kaos about the Holiday Poetry Contest 2016.

Each year some of our amazing artists on YWS like to give people the option of getting a holiday themed version of their own avatar! This year is no different. "Holidayify your Avatar" does just that! @Mage has been gracious enough to step into @Lumi's shoes and make sure this event goes smoothly. There are a bunch of wonderful holiday avatars really decking the halls.

The last three threads go together. Each year YWS creates a yearbook with "Most" and "Best" awards where your friends and other YWSers can vote for who they think are things like "the most likely to succeed" or "the best artist" and those votes are tallied up after the end of the year. A post is then made to announce who won what.

Lastly, the YWS Yearbook gives YWSers a location to thank their friends, express their gratitude, and express themselves all together in a giant grouping of posts. It's something of a tradition to try to grab an early page in the yearbook by posting things like "mine" and then coming back through and editing in your messages, so give it a try!

Now that we've covered most of the threads, there is one we have yet to talk about, the Holiday Poetry Contest! This year Kaos is hosting a contest writing Tanka, all about the holiday season, so if you've never tried poetry, or you're not sure about contests, this is the time to try.

In my interview I asked Kaos all about the contest, Tanka, and how to participate, here are the results.



Kaos: Go ahead!



K: The contest is of course, holiday prompted, but the theme is winter in general, which means you can write about anything winter-related in it! The poem is to be written in the form of a Tanka, which is 5-7-5-7-5 or 5-7-5-7-7, similar to Haiku, but not /quite/ the same.



K: You go to the thread and then follow the guidelines of posting it there, which are to title your poem, put in your username, and then have your poem below all of that. Of course, it's a little bit more detailed than that on the thread. You can only submit one poem. After this and the deadline is up (the 23rd), the five judges will be judging each and every poem to find three winners. 3rd place, 2nd, and 1st.



K: They're looking for things like imagery, flow, the connection to the prompt, creativity, and other things!



K: Tanka is a Japanese poem with five lines in it. The 5-7-5-7-5 stands for the syllables. The first line contains five syllables, the second contains seven, and so on! They're similar to Haiku but have two extra lines attached.



K: A Haiku is a Japanese poem with three lines, with 17 syllables in total with them being distributed in a 5-7-5 format, they also usually happen to be nature-related.



K: There's not really one way to write a Tanka, but I suggest that you start off with one or two base images and build off from them to make or comprise of the poem. Prioritize what's important in the poem and what you can cut out because of the short length and don't spend too much time thinking about it!



K: There is the Secret Santa event going on, which mind you, isn't a contest, but that's where you exchange gifts with another YWSer. It's an online gift, not something you'd get in the mail. Some art, writing, graphics, or anything else you can think of!



K: Give it a try, it won't hurt. Plus, it's a lot of fun to see and read all the entries!



K: I went with it because originally I was thinking of doing a Haiku, but that was too short and decided to go with this!



K: I like them equally, I just thought it fit the contest better.



K: It may take some time after the deadline, but hopefully sometime before January ends!



K: It's running through the 1st to the 23rd of December!



K: No problem!

And there you have it! The events this year are going to be stellar, so be sure to get involved.

If you want more information about Tanka such as what is a syllable or other information, check out the Poetry Tutorials here or ask around!

Here's to a fun holiday season!

Society Pageswritten by Mea < PM: >

It’s the middle of December, and those of us in school are being hit hard with the all-too-familiar pre-holidays batch of tests, projects, midterms, essays and other horrors. @DreamingForever probably sums it up best:





And that’s enough about school for everyone, I’m sure.

In some exciting news, @Crysi proposed to her boyfriend and he said yes! Be sure to congratulate her!

@Big Brother wants to know what your review ratio is! For those like me who weren’t around back when review ratios were important, before the points system was implemented as a hard-coded way to get users to review, the review ratio was encouraged - for every work posted, you were supposed to have done 2-3 reviews. It’s a thing of the past now, but if you’re interested in how you compare, just take your number of reviews, tally up your works you’ve posted, and divide the former by the latter.

@EverWinter is posting a hashtag called #LighttheWorld , a cool Christian hashtag focusing on helping others this Christmas season. No matter what you believe in, though, there are some great ideas for giving here, whether it be donating blood or writing a nice note to a family member.

@GalaxyUnicornz has discovered the best way to make yourself popular: bring a large bag of chocolate to school. It's the answer to all your social needs!

@TheSilentBagpipe has been reviewing in order to procrastinate working on her own story, which is probably about the best form of procrastination there is.

Twelve long hours in school has led @passenger to invent a pretzel-centered version of The 12 Days of Christmas, which I’m sure is just as amusing as it sounds. When summoned, @Pretzelstick declares it to be her new theme song.

@Holysocks has discovered that writing in the early morning is the best time to avoid self-doubt, because you just want to sleep. What it does to the quality of your writing, I can’t say.

@OreosAreLife found out she’s the runner-up in a poetry contest she entered, and her poem could be published in a poetry anthology!

In other news, @ChieRynn’s mother has given her the entire day off, @ScarlettFire’s boyfriend gave her a cold for an early Christmas present, @Sacredlege decided not to go to school one day and it turned out 13 of his classmates had the same idea, @CuriosityCat shares the difficulties of Christmas-tree decoration when you have a cat in one cute picture, @Marth is starting her new job at Cracker Barrel, @Lauren2010’s apartment is lacking hot water in sub-zero weather, and @Dracula successfully called someone about a job.

And that wraps it up for this week, folks! In between all your epic real life battles, don’t forget to post a status and let us know how you’re doing.

All Things Books and Readingwritten by Pretzelstick < PM: >


Welcome to my little corner of the world! This week I have done tons of reading, so I am absolutely ready to fill y’all in. We'll be talking about things like taxi libraries, and ownvoices book, some awesome historical fiction, and of course a quote by the only Tolkien. Let’s get this party started!


Something I can't let go of:
Turning Taxis into Libraries








An online book platform called YallaRead(translate to Come on, Read in Arabic), has launched a literary project in collaboration with E-Taxi (something similar to Uber) in Tunis. Now, Tunisians can enjoy spending their time in traffic browsing a selection of books inside the car. One such taxi is driving around with a sign that says: “Attention: This Taxi Contains a Book.” The books are Arabic literature (the official language there) which has a rich history of value and culture. They are looking to expand their selection of books so that there could be an expansion to all cabs in Tunis.


What's New in the World of Books:
The Shock of Survival
by Nicole Field
Release Date: November 9, 2016




In this story, we follow three main characters that all have their unique scars after they've won a bleak war that changed their lives forever. Ophelia is a stubborn kick-ass character who won't back down and is trying to just find herself and her own way in the world (a.k.a exactly my type of character). Then there Ben (short for Benedict) that is guilt-tripping himself into faults but stands as the leader of the threesome group of special magic users. I loved his character probably the most, because he's mysterious character that seemed undecipherable in my eyes. Alyxx is an intimate friend to our MC, who lives in a tree in the woods and has an adorable tail and pointed ears. She really reminded me of the "mother character" who was always out there trying to be protective to the MC, even when she necessarily didn't need that protection always. Then there's Dylan, who although he isn't that well-developed plays a key role in the war efforts and what happened in the plot line.


I think that this book did a brilliant job of subtly introducing us to the idea of polygamous relationship(s), and a real representation of the main bisexual character was excellently done. Why is this so rare? Because this book is #ownvoices we get a story that has personal experiences, which just enhances the diverse representation that I was looking for within this book.


Amazon-- Goodreads


#Reccomendsday:


This is a write-in column where I use get your recommendation requests/questions.


My life-saver this week was @Wolfical, who dropped me a line when I shouted out the request out on my wall. I am calling anyone and everyone reader or beginner reader, to please feel free to reach out to me at any time. I truly appreciate all the interactive feedback that I have room to do with this column.









Historical fiction is my absolute favorite genre, so being my niche I have a boatload of books that I could recommend. But I’m going to narrow it down to two based on your previous favorites.


This first book is similar to the Book Thief, in that there is a beautiful friendship blossoming against the backdrop of WWII. This book is a heartbreaking story about friendship, sacrifice, love, and resilience. One of, if not my #1 favorite book during WWII, which is high praise since I consider myself a minor WWII buff (but otherwise it won a handful of prestigious awards)


Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein



“I have two weeks. You'll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.


That's what you do to enemy agents. It's what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine - and I will do anything, anything to avoid SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden interrogating me again.


He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I'm going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France - an Allied Invasion of Two.


We are a sensational team.” (synopsis from Goodreads)




Amazon --Goodreads


This next book I read on audiobook during the summer and it was absolutely mesmerizing. Each of these three women enraptured me in their story of life and I felt so much empathy and sympathy. There’s a hole in my heart created by this book that I don’t think will be replaced for a long time.


Lilac Girls
by Martha Hall Kelly



“New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline’s world is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939—and then sets its sights on France.

An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement. In a tense atmosphere of watchful eyes and suspecting neighbors, one false move can have dire consequences.

For the ambitious young German doctor, Herta Oberheuser, an ad for a government medical position seems her ticket out of a desolate life. Once hired, though, she finds herself trapped in a male-dominated realm of Nazi secrets and power.

The lives of these three women are set on a collision course when the unthinkable happens and Kasia is sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women. Their stories cross continents—from New York to Paris, Germany, and Poland—as Caroline and Kasia strive to bring justice to those whom history has forgotten.” (synopsis from Goodreads)


Amazon --Goodreads


Quote of the Week:









Happy Reading y’all!


~Book Whisperer

A RARE BOOK REVIEW:
UPROOTED
written by marmalade < PM: >

Recently, I picked up a book with a pretty, fairytale like cover called Uprooted by Naomi Novik. I saw the book on a book-reviewing Instagram page I follow. I hadn’t read in awhile and I was determined to get lost in a book again. Keep in mind that this novel is an adult novel and includes revealing scenes for an 18+ audience.

Ever since I started writing and reviewing, I found myself thinking too much when reading. I’d think what the writer could have done better. The faults stood out to me and in a way that was disappointing. I no longer looked at authors of books as celebrities or something of that sort, but as fellow writers who like me made mistakes. This in a way is good, as I think of myself as someone who has the possibility of being published and it shows I’ve improved as a reviewer. But still I miss being an avid reader who was crazy for books.

So I picked up Uprooted and immediately got lost in it. The story is incredibly interesting and didn’t seem to have been done before which is always refreshing. The story is very much like a Brothers Grimm fairytale except it’s written as a novel so it’s not a short Grimm story.

The book takes place in a valley and follows the first-person perspective of Agnieszka, a free-spirited village girl who cannot seem to keep herself mud-free. In this strange fantasy world, the valley is guarded by a hermit like wizard who lives in a tower and protects the valley people from an evil wood, but at a price! Every ten years the wizard comes down and picks a seventeen year old girl at a choosing to live with him for ten years, away from all her loved ones. Agnieszka has a best friend named Kasia and Kasia is everything you’d expect a fairytale princess to be. She is brave, gorgeous, graceful, elegant, you name it! Everyone expected Kasia to be chosen by the Dragon (the name of the strange wizard). Kasia’s mother had her daughter trained to be the best at cooking and being a lady. But when the choosing actually arrives, the Dragon ends up taking Agnieszka away, not even giving her enough time to process the information.



Now, even though I did get lost in the novel, I still realized quite a few things that I believe could have been done better. I personally found the pacing to be horrible. The story in my opinion should have been a trilogy. It all seemed to happen so fast and the ending could have been so much more epic if the writer wrote the novel as a series instead. I also found the characters to lack connection between each other. Especially the romance between Agnieszka and the Dragon/Sarkan. Sarkan himself didn’t have much backstory that was explained and he was kind of a jerk the entire novel. I don’t know when writers are going to start realizing that being an arrogant jerk is not attractive. It only worked for character like Mr. Darcy because they had reasons that were explained and ended up changing as the story progressed. Sarkan never changed.

Other than those few points, I really enjoyed the novel. The idea of the wood was incredibly interesting and I’d love to see it done as a movie. Speaking of movies...apparently they are going to make Uprooted a movie! Which is super exciting because I feel like it would do really well as a movie as the imagery was beautiful. Hopefully we will see some pretty sets and costumes! If you’ve read Uprooted and want to fangirl over it feel free to PM me or leave a comment on my wall. Thanks for reading this rare book review as I usually don't write these types of articles (I think this is my first book review ever!).

TWO CENTS: "POETIC"written by Aley < PM: >

This might sound wrong of me, but I don't like it when people try to write poems to be, well, poetic. To me, poetry is about expressing yourself, but not an overindulgence with verbose language. I say that realizing that verbose in itself is a word that has come to be seen as a word used when being wordy and overindulgent, but I have my reasons.

The biggest problem I see when people start to write poetry is that they start with the idea that if they use big, flowery language that drawls and swoops and flourishes, then they're going to come up with something pretty. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not. Some people write "poetically" very well, but it's more likely to feel off.

Because we don't use language like "the succulent vivacious flora flowed flatulently across the acreage that swooned into the hillside" we might not notice that I just said a flower farts across hills. There are better examples, I'm sure, but I'm not going to fish them up from the deep ebbing currents of the cascading chaos that is our countries' contour.

To me, this type of writing often leads to flat language because it's not being used with connotation in mind, and that can really make a poem shallow when someone actually pieces together the words and their meanings. A poem written to sound good doesn't often make a poem written to mean something. That takes away from a poem.

Just like short stories and novels, a poem is a form of communicating an idea and a feeling from one person to the next. It's not used for the same purposes as these other forms. A short story is more of a moment of oddity from the norm, and a novel is more of a lengthy distraction from the norm, and a poem is more of discussion or narrative describing a moment, whether it's the norm or not doesn't really matter, but they're all communication.

To me, if you wanted to confuse someone, you'd write a riddle, not a poem. Yes, poems and riddles are very similar, but a riddle isn't really a poem, it's a play on words, a trick. It's trying to manipulate language in a deep enough way that the "garden path" or the obvious direction the author is going to take something, is often backwards and misleading to the real intent of it.

So what should a poem sound like if it shouldn't sound "poetic?" To me, a poem should sound more like a conversation. Having a poem be about something, a moment, an idea, a thought, and investigating that thought, story, or moment, is what makes a poem come alive. It's like getting into a character's head as deeply as you can and listening to their unique presentation.

Twenty thousand people could write a poem about when they saw the video of a horrific event, the same horrific event, like the twin towers falling in 2001, or the bombing in France, and there should be twenty thousand different poems.

Two hundred of those poems might use exactly the same words, but in different orders, different languages, or with unique spacing, and there would still be two hundred different poems. So, to me, the mark of a good poet isn't writing "poetically" with fancy language, or plays on words, or hidden meanings, it's writing uniquely and clearly.

I want to hear your speaker's voice, and when you grow older, and you change speakers, I want to see that change on the page. The best thing for a poet to do, in my opinion, is to seek out the minutia in their language, and make that as personalized to them as they can. You can't do that with someone else's words. You have to use the words you're comfortable in.

All of that being said, there is a time and a place for different language choices. Sometimes you want to write a poem like Shakespeare, or a structured poem, or a poem that rhymes, and I can enjoy that as much as the next person, but there's got to be a reason you want to write that, a reason that it speaks to you and not just "that's how poems are written" but something deeper.

If you told me "I just finished reading Shakespeare's plays and I was really fired up by what he said," then I bet you that would be a poem with "Oh" and "thee" in it that wouldn't fall flat.

NEW ARRIVALS
written by marmalade < PM: >


Take a moment to welcome this week’s newest members to the site!


@NightKaizer joined on December 8th and already has 13 reviews! What?! That’s awesome! Keep it up, I’m sure many writers are grateful for them.


@FangirlDivided just got her first review and joined on December 9th!


@NarniaQueen joined on December 8th and has already given 8 reviews! That’s really great. Keep up the reviewing!

This Week’s Link Round Up 12/11 written by megsug < PM: >

Let’s take a skip through the Creativity Corner


@outvaders wants to know what’s up with reviewing poetry and how it works when it’s not as objective as prose, and all three users that have replied have said something like @Apricity







How do you minimize your subjectivity? Well, it has to do with backing up your observations with solid arguments. Read the thread to get some solid advice on good reviews!


@Carlito wants to discuss the hashtags #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices , what they mean for young writers, and how young writers can incorporate these values. @Dreamy had an anecdote that really gets at the heart of what these hashtags are trying to fix:







There’s some really enlightened conversation going on in this thread. Check it out and get in it now!


@JosephGeorge has decided to share some sketches with us to become an “epic artist.” It looks like they’re getting there:



Check out the thread for another awesome sketch!


@Mea has started a new column titled Let’s Talk Media. To go along with it, she’s started a thread so everyone can talk about the subject matter and the article. This week’s discussion was about Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

@haredrier gave it 3/5 stars because:







Otherwise, the thread has kind of devolved into an Eddy Redmayne fan club (rightly so). Read Mea’s article and jump into the conversation! Just be aware if you haven’t seen the movie yet, here there be spoilers.

SUBSCRIBERS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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