Young Writers Society

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

1. TEAM TORTOISE INTERVIEW WITH FLAMINGPHOENIX
2. A SPRINGY TIME
3. NAPO HIGHLIGHTS
4. WORD OF THE WEEK:QUIXOTIC
5. LMS IV ENDS: INTERVIEW WITH LORDWOLF
6. YA NOVELS: QUICK NOTE ABOUT INCEST
7. APRIL MADNESS UPDATE
8. SHAMELESS PLUGS
9. SUBSCRIBERS

TEAM TORTOISE INTERVIEW WITH FLAMINGPHOENIX
written by alliyah < PM: >

Have you ever wondered what the "Team Tortoise" is all about over in the Review Leaderboards ? I'll be honest, I was probably on the site for several years before I ever noticed it. To win Team Tortoise you have to write at least 1 review every day. Back in July 2017, there was an official push for members to participate in the "Great Tortoise Race" but really every month members have a chance to complete it. You can even earn a badge if you make it through the whole month. And you'll find that the list in the leaderboard updates every day to keep up with the folks who are still in the race. This month (at the time this article is being written) @Toboldlygo, @Leviari, @FlamingPhoenix, @EagleFly, @Anma, and @JabberHut are all still in. JabberHut and FlamingPhoenix actually completed it last month. This is actually FlamingPhoenix's 4th time tackling it in a row - meaning she's reviewed every day for the last three month which is almost 100 days in a row. That's pretty amazing! To learn more about her experience with Team Tortoise, I found FlamingPhoenix and we did an interview.



FlamingPhoenix: Well I hadn't given it a go yet, and I really wanted to bet the badge.




F: I kind of do I guess, I make sure I do a review before I go to bed.



F: Well once I got into team tortoise, it was quite fun, and it was nice to go out and help others, it also keeps the green room at bay, and you're doing a lot of good reviewing of other peoples works. If you want to join team tortoise just go out there and review them the way you would like to be reviewed. Say nice things about their work to keep them motivated, but also help them by pointing out the things you think can be fixed.




F: Funny enough, yes I have. My favorite work to review right now is @shieldmaiden's book, The Emperor's Heir . It's really fun to read her book from the very beginning, and review every chapter, and just watch her grow. Her writing is really good, and her plot is amazing.
But to be honest, I love everybody's work, they all have grown over time. And their works are amazing.



F: That I have know idea, I think it's fun to review, and help others out. So probably for a while.

Alright, thanks for your answers FlamingPhoenix! If you're interested in trying out Team Tortoise, you'll have to wait for June to get started, but then all you have to do is review every day and the site will add you automatically to the list. Be sure to wish FlamingPhoenix and the other reviewers good luck as they tackle May.

Oh! There's also a banner you can use for Team Tortoise in your reviews that was designed by one of the site's most ambitious reviewers @Kaylaa - I'll post it for you below!

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[img]http://i.imgur.com/eoTTn3G.jpg[/img]

A SPRINGY TIMEwritten by fraey < PM: >

Hello readers and welcome to the lovely month of May, and the springtime of course. I thought I could provide a story about this time of year that involves very sweet strawberries and annoying yet cute pill (sow) bugs.

My parents and I recently moved into a new house near the end of March, so we've been trying to settle in these last few weeks. We found some strawberry patches in the backyard which was really cool since we could get actually fresh fruit, which we never really could before.

One day I was texting my dad during a break between my classes, and I got some surprising news. The strawberries were definitely growing and becoming ripe; however, the many pill bugs were actually eating them even when the fruit wasn't fully developed.

Since then, we've got some yummy pieces that we could suck happily on, but some have little (or large) chunks out of their sides that we could directly apply to the little rascals chewing on the skins. It seems that some of the high numbers of pill bugs have dwindled somewhat, but I'm very indecisive as to how we should deal with them.

Besides that, though, I've had an alright start to the spring season. Plenty of flowers are sprouting and blooming in my backyard and neighborhood. It's going to get very colorful soon, which is always fun, and the warmth's slowly crawling back with every set of the sun.

This also means that school's coming to an inevitable end, which I'm not quite sure how to feel about either. I'll be a year older, a year into community college, still living with my family, while some of my friends will have been gone for a whole twelve months.

I suppose we'll see what these next few months will bring us all. Until next time Squillians.

NAPO HIGHLIGHTS

written by alliyah < PM: >

National Poetry Month is on its final days, and this past week poets have really pushed those poems to meet their final goals. Here's our final blast of highlights for the month, be sure to click and comment on the full-poems if you see something you enjoy.




in April,
all of my hollow places
fill with water--
and like hospital patients
who drown
in the fluid in their lungs,
I drown inside of myself

@Querencia paroxysm xxi


listen to your pain.
learn from its history.
appreciate its scars.
pain will always be there,
but strength shall
always prevail.
@JabberHut Faith Says



i can only watch, mouth agape
as i study yet again
my jumbled mess of knots
and threads that never seem to find
the right place.


@niteowl Poem 15


my mind is a forest
full of light and ancient,
forgotten things
where all is as it seems
and nothing is forbidden.
@ScarlettFire everything is allowed; nothing is forbidden


A creature of habit
And of reincarnation
I scatter and explode
Just to be alive again.
@amelie explosions in the sky



It's Wednesday
And I know why the daylight lingers
in the squeezes and bare gaps
dancing before the lake
thriving with herons, waxwings
morning doves and swallowtails in lovesongs


@Audy Poem 8




@soundofmind i'm sorry, i'm sorry




Thank you to all the National Poetry Month Poets for sharing your poetry! For readers, you can check out the rest of the poems from NaPo here at
The NaPo Threads Link and for poets, don't forget to claim your badges if you've made it to 15 or 30 poems over at the NaPo Contest Thread .

WORD OF THE WEEK: QUIXOTIC
written by EternalRain < PM: >

Pronunciation: kwik-saw-tik

Part of Speech: adjective

Definition: foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals

Synonyms: idealistic, romantic, starry, starry-eyed, visionary

Origin: From literary Don Quixote.

Used in a Sentence: He was often criticized as being quixotic by his peers, especially when it came to the future of the world.

LMS IV ENDS: INTERVIEW WITH LORDWOLF

written by alliyah < PM: >

This week a 43 week-long event has come to a close. For those who haven't heard of it, or still think "LMS" stands for "like my status" - LMS is the YWS competition that's been going on for several years actually, started off by @Tenyo. It stands for "Last Man Standing" and every week participants write a determined number of increasing wordcounts until... you guessed it... there's one person left standing. @Panikos and @LordWolf were the last two standing warriors in this 4th round of the competition, and this week Pan was able to finish their novel draft "A Pocketful of Posies;" epilogue and all! Congrats Pan! This leaves LordWolf as the last person still writing from the round. @mellifera and @TheSilverFox are also still continuing as rogue writers and have been writing for a great many weeks too. So with LordWolf the last person standing from this current round I checked in with them to ask about their experience with LMS.


LordWolf: I decided to do LMS round IV because I wanted to prove that I could make my way through a project. And I knew a lot of the people who did round III, and there was a lot of urging from the people in my friend groups to do this big, big YWS thing.
I changed my project idea like a week before and therefore I had no planning for Delta, but I just went about it because of friends encouraging me.


L: Motivation for writing week to week came from my total of two YWS readers, sometimes going up to three if I'm counting the one liners I sometimes sent an outside friend.

And in an environment like YWS, where there's a very specific way novels tend to be treated, some motivation comes back to proving yourself. I wanted to keep writing for the sake of showing that I can keep going with a project that absolutely no one is reading.
My self confidence for Delta is still terrible. I'm waiting for the time when my second draft comes around and I can write the story as "not crap". And yes, I do plan on continuing this concept but not in its current form.


L:Being the last person standing is slightly unexpected, but not quite an entire surprise.

When the blizzard round was announced, I was in a writers feed pad with a few people in LMS and it was sort of decided that I was someone who could win. Actually it was more along the lines of "Jack can write the 200k" and other people declaring that they probably couldn't. I didn't manage to write 30k this week because I only spent three days doing my writing, but I have a certain idea in mind for seeing if the average citizen of YWS will be able to write that 200k in the space of a week.


L:I am planning on continuing Delta but as I started to say above, it will be in a very different form. I love the concept and I love how far my characters have spread, but the current draft is just terrible in its quality. It's not just going to be a re-write, it's going to be a reset.

The content of the Delta series will probably not be making a reappearance on YWS but it was a great place to test out how I wanted everything to go.


L:Harry Bivens was born a child of war, raised a warrior, and inherited a throne that she soon had to forget. After over five hundred years of being a soldier for hire across the galaxy, Harry found herself working in a detective agency in the city sector of Delta on the planet of Zinnia, twirling around in an office chair while dreaming of the white picket fence life. But white picket fences don't come easy to people who spend their time in the darkest parts of the city, torturing people hanging from pipes and hiding the details of their extracurriculars from their partner.

Harry Bivens carries many secrets and one is the golden ring in her breast pocket.

That sounds pretty neat! If anyone wants to check out LordWolf's project it'd make a great summer reading edition and "Delta" can be found right on YWS. Here's Chapter 1 . After wrestling through 30 days of NaPo I honestly can't imagine taking on a project like that so congratulations to all who've been or have participated in LMS IV and big congratulatons for LordWolf for sticking with that project for such a long time.

If you're interested in reading the projects from this last round or joining in the next one, you can find out more information on the LMS Club Page .

YA NOVELS: QUICK NOTE ABOUT INCESTwritten by fraey < PM: >

Hello, again readers! Welcome to another short look into the YA noveling world that plenty of us have been in at some point or another.

I think my main point today is to discuss something that has turned to be a key aspect of many plots and stories - characters being secretly related (or not in some cases) to the assumed main romantic person.

Dare I say it, but incest has turned into a kind of monster all on its own, on platforms lined with some other heavy-hitting themes that have serious issues with the general society. However, in stories, regardless of whether they come from bestsellers or not, family relations has developed into an eerie form of being somewhat accepted by readers since all that matters overall is love.

Right?

Maybe not in some cases. I don't want to be the spoiler or the harbinger of bad news to potential readers, so I will just say that plenty of popular novels have incest almost as a punch-line, even in already unbelievable settings, typically somewhat fantastical ones. I'm not quite sure the point of putting something so outrageous in such a rose-colored light, as is the idea to show that siblings loving each other can one day shift to this, but don't worry it happened in a beloved book?

The message, whether it's expected or not, has spanned into countless of yes fanfiction that emphasize the sibling love, or the cousin love, which of course at least the people writing that know what's wrong and what's right in terms of legality and simply being safe. What I worry about is if someone reads the actual novel, comes across that, and doesn't have the experience or guidance from someone to know that if something like that ever happened, they need to go to someone and get help.

In addition, I just think it's kind of sad, the rare times that adopted or separated family members can fall in love and then realize the truth between them, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Overall, I'm not quite sure where I was going with this, and this turned a lot more serious than I had at first expected. However, I do hope that this can help explain that some ideas don't ever need to be similarly written by fans of a writer and that is related to someone isn't a good or smart way to throw drama into a perhaps otherwise dry novel.

APRIL MADNESS UPDATE

written by alliyah < PM: >

It's been a while since our last April Madness update, but the poets have been continuing to fight it out in the National Poetry Month bracket-contest! April Madness is an elimination-style competition where poets submit poems every week against the poets in their group, and then those with the top scores advance to the next round. The contest started out with 18 contestants, after Round 2, only six poets advanced to Round 3. They were @Querencia, @fraey, @Audy and then @Ventomology, @paperforest, and @alliyah. Audy and alliyah advanced through make it through the 'Redemption Bracket' and the others advanced from their Round 2 groups.

Round 3 was very tight as Round 2 had been, with many of the scoring differences just between tenths of points. But the judges determined that the two poets who would be advancing are Querencia and Ventomology. This final championship round will have entries submitted in this last chunk of April, and then results will be released in the April Madness Forum

What can we expect in the final round? Well so far Ventomology and Querencia have been at the top of their game - so there's sure to be some great poetry. I've been following both of their NaPo threads this month, so here's what I've been seeing with both of their styles. Vent often uses lines that are a little longer with short, tight stanzas with themes that tackle ordinary daily topics like laundry day, pasta day, or bathroom singing, often with some sort of question or "reveal' posed to the reader at the end. Ventology also uses a combination of casual and technical word choice.

Querencia's NaPo entries often use short sometimes un-even contrasting lines, breaking up phrases to weave together really direct imagery. She often pairs two images that one wouldn't naturally assume go together; like falling and love, she also sometimes breaks her usual formatting to play with punctuation, longer unexpected stanzas, or parenthetical notes - the poems sometimes read as an imagery-laden internal dialogue from the speaker. So, between the two I think their poems are going to end up very different from each other based on their poetic styles - it'll be interesting to see how the judges sort that out!

Congratulations to Ventomology and Querencia and to all those who participated in April Madness - stay tuned for the next April Madness Update when we'll hear who the champion is and take a look at the two final poems.

SHAMELESS PLUGS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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For more information: KotGR Information
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If you have questions: Send a PM to Captain of the Guard Jack (@LordWolf) or Knight Alliyah (@alliyah).


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