I’m currently looking for someone to join forces with me at DIY MFA.  This position will involve helping me develop upcoming DIY MFA products and materials so the intern will get an advance-look at what’s coming up at DIY MFA.  This is also an opportunity to help shape what DIY MFA will become and have a lasting impact on this project.  It’s also a unique chance for a writer to get an inside-look at a writing-based business and learn about entrepreneurship, marketing and platform-building.

What I’m Looking For: Someone with entrepreneurial spirit, lots of initiative and a creative streak.  Someone who believes every person has a unique story to tell, and is committed to helping those writers share their stories.  Someone who is passionate about books and all things literary.

Commitment: May 1 – August 15, 2012 (though dates are flexible) with the possibility that this internship can extend into a more long-term collaboration with DIY MFA.  This internship will require approximately 8 hours per week, but the intern can set their own hours.

Geographic Considerations: As long as we can schedule a weekly Skype meeting the intern can be based anywhere in the world.

 If you know of someone who might be interested in joining the DIY MFA team, please feel free to direct them to the internship page for more information.

poets.org

Today is April 1st and it also marks the beginning of National Poetry Month!  Personally, I’m a huge fan of National Poetry Month because it allows me to focus on one area of writing for one month out of the year.  I don’t usually write or read a ton of poetry so National Poetry Month serves as a nice reminder, a way for me to reconnect with poetry and look at literature through a new lens.

Some time ago, I began planning what I would do for National Poetry Month, and after several months of preparing, the plans finally crystallized into what I am now dubbing the DIY MFA Master Class project.

The idea behind DIY MFA Master Classes is simple: each month, I will dedicate one week to focusing exclusively on one genre or type of writing.  Since I myself am not as familiar with some genres as I am with others, I have decided to bring in experts to share their insight during Master Class weeks.  This way, you can learn directly from the “masters” of the craft: writers or teachers who have dedicated themselves to the specific genre at hand.

As for the topics of each Master Class: sometimes the genre will be determined by events going on that month (like this April, we will focus on poetry and in May I’ll be collaborating with StoryADay.org to bring you a fresh look at short fiction).  Other times, we’ll take a seasonal approach (I’m thinking Romance in February and Horror/Thrillers in October).  My hope is to represent every major area of writing over the course of one year.

As I learned from the surveys you filled out last week, DIY MFA writers are a diverse bunch.  I don’t think there was a single genre or category that didn’t get at least a few writers expressing interest in it.  At the same time, I think there’s a lot that writers can learn from studying work outside their chosen area.  For instance, poetry can teach prose writers a lot about choosing exactly the right words and being precise with their language.  Fantasy and science fiction can teach writers of any genre how to build more realistic settings and mysteries are among the best books for learning about plot and story structure.

While on an ordinary week, I post Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, for Master Class weeks I’ll have posts every day, plus bonus downloads, guest posts and even videos.  A typical Master Class Week will look like this:

Monday – Guest Post by an expert in that genre.
Tuesday – Post on craft by yours truly.
Wednesday – Interview with a different expert.
Thursday -  Suggested reading list for that genre.
Friday – Prompt so you can apply techniques from that genre to your own writing.

To kick off the Master Class series and because National Poetry Month is awesome, I’ve decided to dedicate two weeks to this month’s master class with one week focusing on poems and the other on novels written in verse.  The series starts on April 9th so stay tuned!

This week, we’ve got a couple of different freebies available from DIY MFA that I wanted to showcase.  Are you ready for some awesome free stuff?  Of course you are.  After all, who doesn’t like free stuff, right?

First off, next Wednesday we have a super-exciting thing happening here at DIY MFA: I’m leading my first WEBINAR!  For those who don’t know what a webinar is, it’s like a seminar, only given over the web.  You join the conference by clicking a link in the confirmation email and you’ll be able to hear me speak LIVE and watch the presentation slides on your computer.

The topic of this webinar is: 7 Ways to Boost Your Writing and it focuses on what to do when you hit the wall in the middle of a project.  For more information and to sign up for the webinar go to the webinar page.  Sign-ups open TOMORROW!

Also, if you haven’t already done so, you might like to subscribe to the DIY MFA mailing list.  Why subscribe?  First, let me make one thing clear: your email is safe with me.  This means, you won’t get any spam and I will absolutely not share your email with any other person or business.  And when you subscribe you get not one, but two awesome freebies.

• Writer Fuel – This is a weekly email boost sent out on Fridays with recaps of the blog, DIY MFA news and other fun stuff to kick-start a weekend of writing.
• Jumper Cables – This workbook download is available exclusively for people who sign up for the mailing list.  When you get your confirmation email, you’ll get a link allowing you to download Jumper Cables.  Aside from giving some basic information about DIY MFA, this workbook will also help start you off on your DIY MFA journey.

Have I convinced you?  Awesome.  You can sign up in the sidebar.

Hello all!  Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t do a check-in post this past Sunday.  What I’m realizing is that for me posting on the weekend is just really tough.  Between family and other commitments (and preparing lots of juicy new DIY MFA materials for you all) the Sunday posts are becoming a challenge, especially since they’re check-in posts so I can’t write them in advance.

So here’s what I propose: how about we move our DIY MFA check-in updates to Twitter and tweet them using the hash tag: #DIYMFA ?  I think this will offer more flexibility for everyone and make it easier for more people to participate.  After all, you to just need tweet a quick update rather than spend time reading a post and commenting.  Much easier!

I say we try this for a couple of weeks and see how it goes.  In the meantime, while I had been using Sunday posts to share DIY MFA news and updates, what I’ll do from now on is whenever there’s something new to report, I’ll put up a short post on Tuesday or Thursday (i.e. days I don’t have regular posts scheduled), to keep you all in the loop.

What do you think of this new plan?