In "Tips to Using Twitter to Score an Internship" the writer mentions joining Twitter chats, and as someone who has hung out on Twitter for the sake of writerly things for at least a year now, I can definitely say that this is a good idea.

Writers love Twitter. I think it's something about the fact we can talk without actually hanging to talk. Oh, and we're also already on the computer basically all the time anyway. Writers have also developed a bunch of hashtags that are useful for writing discussion--these include weekly chats about various topics, genres, or age ranges (#fantasychat and #yachat stand out to me right now). Hopping in on these chats can net you plenty of connections, or even just make you aware of opportunities you had no idea about before. Some writing hashtags even get so popular that they trend worldwide, which is absolutely crazy to me! Only on Twitter will you see something writing-related right up there with the "big game" or crazy political news.

Hashtags are also how I found out about my dream internship with a literary agency (no, I'm linking you. I'm greedy). One of the writers I follow got an internship there, and I watched her move from intern to agent-in-training to full literary agent. It was amazing! I also watched her use a hashtag to tweet about the type of works she looks for--and it was through that hashtag that I found out about the agency to begin with.

Long story short: I freakin' love Twitter for these things.

Branding is something I am very familiar with. Time was, before I was a Writing Arts student, I was a web developer/graphic designer, which means part of my job was doing a lot of branding for others. It also meant doing branding for myself, and my personal website for getting freelance work (this no longer exists, so don't go looking).

  When I started getting serious about writing, it seemed natural to apply the same principles to introducing myself as a writer. Everything down to my pen name was carefully chosen, down to the fact that for a time I used “E. J. Lorre” as a pen name due to not wanting to be obviously female. Since I write primarily horror, often being a woman in the genre is seen as a determent, after all. No longer do that, of course, since I happen to like the name Elle, although my choice to never use my last name is also calculated in the same manner. Not only do I choose to avoid it do to previous safety issues, but it's also because my last name (which is literally the ethnic slur for “German”) just doesn't sound marketable. “Lorre,” my pen name-last name, in contrast, a.) sounds better with the name, and b.) happens to be the name of an old actor who got type-cast as a villain/horror actor upon coming to America. It's a fun reference that's a little less obvious than sharing a last name with Vincent Price.

That said, social media is still something I am occasionally wary of—especially if my normal last name is attached. The fact it's listed on my resume on this website, and on the website for this class makes me nervous, even. My LinkedIn account uses my last name, and, honestly, that's probably as far as I'd go because it's an exclusively professional website. But beyond safety concerns, I also think people need to be cautious of spending too much time on social media. You can brand yourself as an author all you want, but until you sit down and write, you're never going to be one, after all.

My brain isn't working, so I'll answer these questions!

Intellectual influences: Who were your favorite professors (and why)? Identify  the best paper you ever wrote, the most influential book you have read, and the single most important concept you have learned. 

My favorite professor is one I've never actually had. Rich Russell, a professor at Atlantic Cape Community College was in charge of Rewrites, the literary magazine I worked on during my time there. I was always very quiet around professors and never made much of a personal connection until working with Rich, and he's a large part about why I try to be friendly and relate to all of my professors--you all are pretty cool. In relation to professors at Rowan: Professor Tweedie was the first writing arts professor I had, and he made me feel welcome in the program. I had been two years out of school of this point, and very unsure of my major (which was journalism at the time), and his section of Introduction to Writing Arts really cemented wanting to switch majors for me. Also, at the end of the semester, he recommended me for my current job, blogging for Rowan!

The best paper I ever wrote was a paper on slang usage in the online community, Tumblr. I did all the primary research myself (as we were told), and worked my ass off on it! I'm still incredibly proud of it, and wouldn't mind editing/working on it more, because I find it an interesting subject.

The most influential book I ever read was when I was in middle school. I know it would be super cool of me to say something smart or literary, but honestly I wouldn't be who I am today--as a person, much less a writer--if not for the author Tamora Pierce, and her series Song of the Lioness. At the time of reading it, I was just getting access to the internet, and spent a lot of time on her forum where she was a big supporter of feminism, reading, writing, and education. Beyond that, she gave me a series of protagonists I could look up to as a young girl, and characters to aspire towards. I still reread all her books once a year, and they are the few things that have traveled with me through all moves.

As for the most important concept I've learned: I'm alive. It could be worse.

Encouragement: Recall and write out the actual words of a professor, teacher, or someone else in your life who encouraged you to go in this direction. 

The direction of writing? Honestly, I don't think it was any one person who said anything that made me decide to go into writing--it's probably been the first career choice I've made that was pure me. I will say, I was completely honored when Professor Carl Hausman told me he thought I was a talented writer, though!

Turning points: Where were you and what were you doing when you first thought of going in this particular direction?  How have your interests evolved? 

This is easy: I was in the hospital, November 2010--almost three years ago. Until that point I was working as a web designer/teacher's aid/costumer, and unhappy with almost all of it. Writing was something I started doing in earnest during the impossibly long days at the hospital when I realized all the books they had in the hospital library were Harlequin romance. Originally, I kept it as a hobby, but then the job I took after the hospital (which shall remain nameless) got rough, and going back to college seemed like a real option again. It took a long time for me to really settle with the idea of writing, though--I had gone the arts route before in my graphic design, and it made me miserable, so I originally considered business and/or environmental studies. Eventually I settled on journalism, which was "writing but practical" in my mind, even though I knew journalism wasn't for me. I did finally figure out that writing arts wasn't all creative writing, and switched over, though!

Experiences: List volunteer, travel, family, and life experiences that have inspired you to go in this career direction. 
See above; it's sort of a mish-mash of that.

Academics: How have you prepared yourself to succeed? 
I currently have completed one internship, worked on a college literary magazine (not Avant), and have a 3.88 GPA, currently. My GPA at ACCC was the same.

What skills have you honed through the experiential and educational choices you have made? 
Writing, editing, web and graphic design, costuming, publication design, layout design, social media expertise, and possibly other things I can't think of.

Personal attributes: What personal attributes make you particularly likely to succeed? 
I'm hard working, and I can work through anything. I've had a fair amount of jobs and experimented with a few careers to know that this is honestly what I want, which is something I don't think a lot of college students can say. 

This is a topic I'm kind of weird about talking about right now, so I'll probably rewrite this entry later. I know that's not much of an excuse, but this + my past entry are being heavily colored by a project for another class that left me very, very uncomfortable with talking about writing. I'll get over it! Just need a few days to sort my thoughts! This has been an excuse.

This time last year I would have told you with one-hundred percent certainty I was going to grad school, at Rowan if possible, but things change, and unlike a lot of people, I was raised with the idea that "school will always be there." It's the sort of thing I need to give some background on: After high school I went to Europe. After community college I worked at a special education preschool, did freelance graphic design, made clothing for wrestlers, and worked another job that I loved like crazy (but can't mention online). When I first came to Rowan, however, I was trying very hard to be someone different than that. In some ways, I felt a little guilty that I was going to college while my then-long term boyfriend worked a "real job," all my friends worked "real jobs," and I felt like I was getting left behind. I wanted to get everything done--college, grad school, the whole thing.

When things fell apart with all that, at the beginning of last semester, I tried to keep it up, but then I realized that I really was not being left behind. I've always tended to do things differently, and right now my focus, outside of school, is working on making livable money writing romance again, working on a horror novel, and looking into moving once the semester is over. I love Rowan, but I'm more interested in a change of scenery than a graduate degree. I have no doubt I will go for an MA eventually, but I don't want it to be right after getting my BA, that's all.

Are you satisfied with your current projects, or are you feeling unchallenged?
I'm not satisfied, but it's not that I'm unchallenged. I'm currently working on two projects, concurrently, and while one is going well, the other is suffering due to lack of time, and, if anything, proving to be quite a challenge. Unfortunately, it's this troublesome project that is the one that means the most to me.

Honestly, though, I probably just need to shut myself up in the arguably haunted fourth floor of the apartment my boyfriend lives in for a night to get the second project going again. The benefits of being passionate about horror is there are plenty of weird places I can lock myself in to write.

Where do you see yourself a year or two from now?
I honestly can't tell you where I'll be two weeks from now, much less two years. I'm not much of a long-term planner, beyond being so financially, and I'm from a family that encourages doing things on whims because it's better to regret not doing things. I am applying for an internship at a literary agency, however, and I know they hire from their intern pool, so if I'm there that would be pretty awesome.

What are your long-term career goals?
Write more. Be a literary agent. Be a lady Stephen King, if possible.

Which books, articles and blogs will help you branch into new territory?
Honestly, beyond what's required for class, I tend to only read about and keep up with the business side of writing. I don't really enjoy following blogs, although I keep one. If I read a blog article, it's because someone linked it on twitter. Truthfully, unless I'm working on something, I don't even really like being online or on the computer--if anything, the things that help me write are wandering around places in real life, not in cyberspace.

Who do you know who may be able to offer you advice on making a transition?
I'm friends with a few professors (both who I've had, and who I simply know because I'm in my mid-twenties and a lot of my friends became professors).  I've made a few connections off Twitter, and through the works I've published under a pen name.

This is weirdly  vague, but I'm not on naming names.

This is originally posted on my real blog, but since it was inspired by something someone said in class, I'm throwing it here, too:


Sol Stein, who I intensely dislike in most regards related to writing, early in his book Stein on Writing states that he often finds writers write for the wrong reason--the correct reason, he says, is to "provide a reason with an experience that is superior to the experiences the reader encounters in everyday life." It's a concept I'm not sure I fully agree with, but it does speak to something that I think many writers forget when thinking about publication: that the writing cannot exist only for the writer.

Stephen King addresses this when he writes in his own memoir, On Writing, when he says that one must write with the door closed, but rewrite with the door open--that is, when you write you can write for yourself (and, perhaps, your "ideal reader," another King concept), but when you edit you have to consider your overall audience. While it's easy and quite attractive to think that writing (for an audience) is an intrinsic ability and done only for the pleasure of the writer, it really is no different from many other arts in that it is dependent upon its audience to flourish, and that it's the audience's reaction and ability to interpret a piece that makes it lasting, important, and/or popular.

Of course, therein exists a problem with Stein's concept of what the ideal reason to write is. Stein, of course, is primarily interested in writing "literature," something he stresses mostly while degrading the concept of genre (which is one the reasons I dislike the man). In his mind, great writers write because they must, and those that must never feel the need to write about zombies, spaceships, falling in love with a lusty barmaid, or uncovering the mystery of a murder. However, I feel compelled to write as I imagine many of those literature-lovers do, but never do I feel the need to write outside of horror, romance, and other things to entertain. My goal, as a writer, after all, is to entertain--both myself and the reader. It's something Stein would no-doubt frown upon, since I know my romantic retelling of traditional Celtic folktales do not and never will fall upon his views of worthy prose.

The war between genre and literature is something I will never understand, but one thing I do know is that while it's noble to seek out superior experiences for one's readers, it's also noble to simply want to entertain--and if my entertainment (or my superior experience, for that matter) is a story wherein a family is brutally killed in a haunted house, I will never see a problem in that so long as I know I wrote for more than simply myself, and the readers are enjoying themselves--even if some stodgy academic in his ivory tower of literature doesn't think so.

It have always seemed like a precarious situation to me, sharing one's writing with family and friends. As such, I've never done it. Not my parents, nor my best friends--not even my best friend who is also a published writer. In fact, it's a rare day where I even discuss writing with writers, and even while in class I tend to talk more about the business of publishing than I do the art of writing.

I like listening to people talk about writing. I like reading their tips and tricks, and occasionally sharing them on twitter (even if I'm not too fond of twitter anymore). But when it comes to talking about writing I am not confident about my ability to talk about it. I can, easily, talk one's ear off about publishing, however, and I find myself fairly lucky that I happened to pull the discussion leader job on the day we're talking about publishing. Publishing is something that makes sense to me in a way that seems to reflect why, when I was getting my graphic design degree, my favorite classes were math classes--when you spend so much time dealing with imagination, uncertainty, and self-doubt, it's nice to look into something that makes sense. Two plus two always equals four, and limits in calculus always follow the same rules. Publishing is looking at what readers want, at money and market values, and occasionally makes me wonder why I did not pick up a degree in business, which makes me reflect on why I choose to be a Writing Art major. It's a lot of cause and effect (or reflect? Excuse the pun, I just woke up).

Despite not showing friends and family my writing, a few have found it, much like when I was working as an artist I few people I knew stumbled upon my old portfolio. "I can't imagine you not working a job where you're creative," is a sentence I've heard a million times, from the time I was a child until even now, at twenty-four. Even when I was, for a few weeks when starting Rowan, a journalism major I was encouraged to switch to Writing Arts for the sake of creativity--only this time it was by a journalism professor. ("If you've written books why are you in journalism?" "Because it's practical." "Journalism isn't practical.")

Of course, sitting here, writing this, is feeding into my own self-doubt, again, somehow, about publishing and jobs and internships and millions of other things (like my tendency to overuse the word "and" while writing instead of using lists. Who does this? I do this. It's not proper English). And in a lot of ways, I think this self-doubt is uniquely a writer's thing, one in which no matter how many stories published, professors impressed, or family and friends offering encouragement, writers will always have, and no one else will understand. After all, why else, when I'm dead-set on writing, do I sometimes wonder why I didn't listen to my Freshman year calculus teacher when he said I should be a math major? It's that doubt, always that doubt.

To start off the discussion: Purely out of curiosity, how much money do you think you'll make when publishing a book? A short story? What do you think the royalty percentages are?

Self publishing has a history of being considered the last bastion of poor writers, something that has been quickly changing in the past years--even the article we read Bypass Obstacles to Traditional Publication is fairly out of date, ignoring the options of ebook publishing. What are your preconceived notions or ideas about self-publishing? Is it something you would ever consider?

Was there anything about the publishing industry you found surprising while reading the articles?

We heard, in many of the readings, about various writer's successes and failures (publications and rejections): I feel it would be interesting to briefly open the floor to see if anyone in-class has any rejection/acceptance stories.

"You write to fit in," says Steve Salerno in the article Welcome to the Real World: 10 things college writing classes don't teach you--but should.

This does not scare me.

I've been published before, entirely off the notion of giving publishers exactly what they want. I may well have never read a romance novel in my life, but I've published around ten. Writing romance--for the money, when not only are you not a fan of the genre, but you'd rather be Stephen King than Danielle Steel--is generally a service industry. Also, like the "front of the book" magazine pieces Salerno says professors scorn, I doubt any creative writing class of mine would encourage writing similar to what I have published in class. Hell, I'm 100% certain anything I published, in a creative writing college setting would probably barely skate by with a 'C'.

But it also plays into one major fear, Salerno's third piece of advice: "You're going to need a clip file." Well, I have clips, and ten published works to my (pen) name, but none of them can get me a job after Rowan. As well and good as being published is, I doubt being the writer of "A Romantic Werewolf in Paris" (not a real title), is going to get me a job at any literary agency outside of Ellora's Cave (no, I have not been published there). And, I can assure you, I do not want to live in the Red Light district of writing my whole life.

"So write something other than romance!" seems to be the easy suggestion out of my predicament, but taking time from writing things that make money (romance, and Rowan's admissions blog, as it were), means opening up for a lot of uncertainty and probably a lot less money. And when I do stop writing for pay, I write what I actually want to write--particularly violent horror stories, which once more falls into "genre" writing, unloved by potential employees and professors alike. In the end, when all is considered, I feel as though in order to be readily writing in a job once out of here, I'll need about two more hours in a day.

And, well, that scares me.