renaissance2010
Turning to photography as a creative outlet during a valiant fight with breast cancer at age 34, renaissance10 survived and set up a photo contest to help raise funds for the Lavender Trust, a nonprofit that provides information and support to younger women with breast cancer. In the first two years, the competition brought in over £65,000 (that's $107,260.73 U.S.!), with entries from 130 countries last year. Renaissance10 recently joined LiveJournal to meet other passionate photographers and find supportive friends.

curiouscupcakes
Holy buttercream frosting! If you have a sweet tooth for sugary goodness or a wandering eye for whimsical confection, this is pure ecstasy iced in deliciousness. Hailing the beloved cupcake as the artisinal canvas of choice, you'll enjoy recipes, photos, and bountiful tips to bake up a batch, whether your taste leans toward French classics or funky and flavorful.

mission101
With New Years in the offing, it's an ideal time to reflect on past accomplishments, make peace with disappointments, and refocus the lens on future goals. This community welcomes you to create a bucket list of 101 things you plan to accomplish in the next 1,001 days. Offering support, guidance, and inspiration, this is a great way to jumpstart those pesky resolutions.

So I'm writing my first synopsis and it has my brain log jammed.  I don't know  what the heck I'm doing. I have searched for examples other than tips (i.e., first paragraph do this . . .).  I'm so visual in nature I need a concrete example to spring board my own ideas.  I have gone to Story Sensei and searched agent blogs, but have come up empty.  Help! Websites. Books.  I'm open.  Feed me Seymour!!!

The coffee shop in which we had been sitting was a dimly lit kind of place with all kinds of pretentious art crap cluttering the walls. I’m sure that at any given moment, one could easily find a patron there who enjoys the kind of garbage I’m asking you to read. I can say with some certainty, however, that finding a Nicholas Sparks lover there would be very unusual. It was not the sort of place someone who reads Nicholas Sparks would sit and read Nicholas Sparks. That would be embarrassing in such a hip and intellectual place as the coffee shop.

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So, I have been writing an outline/ key scenes for a graphic novel. It is a sci fi adventure that takes place in 1930's dustbowl. I had some questions about research.

1.) How in depth do you all go into for research. I mean should I be a stickler or can I bend the rules a bit and make things not so historically accurate?

2.) what is a good resource about writing and letting your audience know it is in a certain time period without starting the first chapter, "It was a cold morning in the fall of 1932."

Thanks in advance!

Torn Slippers: Chapter One

Rating: light R
Word Count: Total 58,120/ this chapter 4,738
Genre: Fairy tale retelling; drama; romance
Author: liadan14 

Summary:
"Do you trust me?" - "Well...no." - "So, you see? You can't be completely crazy yet."
A retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, originally written by the Brothers Grimm. Catherine DiConta is one of thirteen princesses who have a dangerous secret, a dead mother, an overbearing father, and far more trouble than they can deal with. She's faced with a few more fairies than she'd like, the complexities of spellwork, two men who like wearing the colour black, and, possibly worst of all, trying to figure out what on earth is going on in the first place.

Notes & Warnings: The whole thing is written and finished. If anyone wants, I'll gladly post the rest too, though not all at once. I hope someone out there likes it; this is the story that ate my brain. Contains some swearing and slash; also very mild descriptions of sex and violence.

Chapter One here

Title: Solace In Shadow
Rating: T
Wordcount: ~950
Warnings: Angst, Mental Illness
Summary: I remember him well.
Author's Note: Another short story with Cameron. She's really starting to grow on me.

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At that moment, Lee showed up.  I always thought that Lee looked more like a Tom than a Lee.  He was tall, his head was shaved, he was large—overweight I think, actually, although I would never say that because he’s so sensitive about things like that (although his nonchalance makes it seem like he isn’t)—and yet somehow looked like he was nine years old.  Maybe it was the way he dressed that made him look that way.  Anyway, he should have come off as intimidating, given his god-given bodily figure.  Instead, he came off as very nice and very sociable but somewhat insecure.  You could tell he was kind of insecure because of his humor, which was self-deprecating without being dark.  Sometimes he would make jokes about being ugly.

Personally, although I swear I don’t subscribe to any stupid universal-love-like beliefs, I find it easy to find things beautiful that are not, really, classically beautiful.  Even those things that someone like me might, every once in a while, in a conversation, forgetting for a moment that I can find beauty in everything, say is “the kind of ugly that just can’t be beautiful,” or “really profoundly mundane, so that it just can’t be beautiful,” or “like a scrap of white plastic, like, plastic all the way from the 70’s, sitting on a granite counter, and maybe from being beaten up it has a couple of grooves in it filled with dirt.  But the contrived contrast between the plastic and the granite makes it impossible for the situation to be beautiful.”  The reason I let you in on that fact about me is that I want to tell you that I didn’t find Lee ugly.  Lots of people would reassure him that he was not ugly, but I really meant it.  They didn’t.

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Title: Lost Time Can Never Be Recovered
Rating: R
Wordcount: ~1100
Warnings: Angst, Profanity, Violence, Mental Illness
Summary: Is this story true? If I can trust what I was told, then yeah, apparently it is. But I've learned that I can't trust her. I'd say this is probably only maybe true. I don't know. I don't remember.
Author's Note: Critique is totally welcome. Be as brutally honest as possible. I would eventually like to write Cameron in a novel that I could possibly eventually sell, and I'd like to know if it's a waste of time now. Praise is also welcome, of course. If you hate it, tell me why. That is all. Enjoy!

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