Word Smitten Media
Word Smitten Quarterly Journal
Native Shore Fiction
The Storycove Flash Fiction
The Query Letter Workbook
The WSM Writing Conference Report

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MEDIA NOTES

Contact J. J. Marino
Word Smitten, LLP
presswordsmitten.com
(727) 409-0500 Phone
St. Petersburg, FL 33737-5067

Word Smitten - A Webzine and haven for beach bums.
Where the writing is crisp, the towels are wet and the wit is dry.

Started by a group of journalists undergoing media-withdrawal symptoms in 1999, Word Smitten provides exclusive interviews for the book publishing industry. In a business that reluctantly changes
(with reasons for and against electronic books vis-a-vis the tactile worth of knobby paper), Word Smitten remains impartial. Perhaps a small personal bias creeps in since most of the work is done online and therefore requires a few electronic gadgets.
Electronic publishing is an inconstant attractor.

Initial missions change, companies find new directions, and our Word Smitten group of companies (Native Shore Fiction, The Storycove, and our WS Press) are like similar companies with ideas for the future in spite of and perhaps because of the dot-com watershed.

Our long-awaited print version of www.wordsmitten.com arrives in 2004. Why a quarterly magazine? Because the idea of print is as comforting to us as an old, good-fitting shoe is - on a too long walk. Current projects for the company include searching for notable individuals to interview, creating a new fiction department to showcase new authors (Native Shore Fiction: because everyone is familiar with their own native shore), two fiction competitions that provide more than $1,150.00 to writers selected by our award-winning fiction judges.

Founder and Executive Editor Kate Sullivan created the concept for the Web site in 1999 and after completing the business model testing went live in February 2001. A graduate of UCLA, she studied journalism with Jim Howard (formerly associated with the Los Angeles Times) and became a general assignment reporter with a Florida newspaper during the "salad days and cub years," she says. Later returning to Corona Del Mar, California she wandered aimlessly taking black and white photographs from her 1978 Volkswagen van, until she moved to the east to pursue a graduate degree in business. Between the grad school stats and snow, a decision formed to never again live anywhere but the tropics. Kate Sullivan booked the next flight to Hawaii and for more than ten years lived in the tropics, writing, drinking guava juice, and living on the side of a semi-dormant volcano, just as happy as if she had sense. She now spends time in her Zoetrope office writing and working on short story ideas in addition to participating in Zoetrope Studios workshops with fellow writers.

Bill Loewenstein who participates in with the Word Smitten site says of Kate Sullivan, "She's the kind of person who has poker wit.
When she talks, people listen and then
she gets them to blow coffee out their noses."

BACKGROUNDER
Word Smitten
Management Biographies and Business Model.

CONFERENCE REPORT
In-depth reviews of writing conferences, faculty, lodging, dining, and conference caveats.

CONSULTANTS
PETER MEINKE
An American Poet.
KATHERINE SANDS
Author of PitchCraft
and NYC Agent

FICTION COMPETITIONS
The Storycove
Flash Fiction Contest
Ten-Ten Contest

INTERNSHIP PROGRAM
For Virtual Interns with journalism or English Literature majors.

NATIVE SHORE FICTION
Showcase for published and unpublished writers.

WRITING TIPS
Query letters, manuscript format, contacting agents, working with editors, book promotion and public relations. The realistic before-and-after of getting the book published.

Read our exclusive interviews with:

Katharine Sands
Manhattan Agent

Peter Dekom
Entertainment Attorney

Marcela Landres
Editor at Simon and Schuster

Scott Manning
Publicist for Black Hawk Down among other great books

Elisabeth Scharlatt
Editor at Algonquin Publishing

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For more than thirty years, Bill Loewenstein has been a professional writer and writing teacher living both on the mainland and in the South Pacific. He has a bachelor's in journalism from Michigan State University and a master's in communication from Western Michigan University. He has written for and edited weekly and daily newspapers in the Pacific, served as a foreign correspondent for magazines and newspapers, traveled widely throughout Asia and Indochina, and advised government and non-profit agencies in the United States. He currently teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Baker College and Michigan State University. During the years he lived in the South Pacific he published a widely read island newspaper, and although he now lives on the mainland, Word Smitten's team delights in providing Bill with his own private cyber island within our editorial pages. As soon as he could, Bill Loewenstein left the daily grind of running a newspaper, moved from the islands and found teaching journalism to college students more interesting than standing watch for a Pacific Ocean tsunami. He moved from Hawaii to Michigan in the late 1980s and each winter
visits St. Petersburg, Florida where he writes short stories.

Kate comments, "I take Bill with me to my writing group when he's here on a visit. He then spends the next two days cataloguing the discussions, some rancorous and some unorthodox, politely guised as short stories. He's not to be trusted which is why I like him. I prefer having friends who need to be watched."

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A novelist and editor, Shelley Singer lives in Northern California where she teaches creative writing and for more than a decade has worked with writers as a manuscript consultant and editor. She is the author of twelve published novels and many short stories. The most recent novel is Royal Flush, the sixth Jake Samson-Rosie Vicente mystery, published by Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co. in 1999.

"Shelley Singer is simply the best. I'm reasonably certain that without her help, my first novel would be buried in my backyard somewhere, rather than going into its third printing. She encouraged me from chapter one to the end, gave me detailed and insightful feedback, and helped me take an amateur draft of a first novel and turn it into a polished manuscript. Nobody can guarantee you success, but if you're already in the ballpark, Shelley Singer is the coach who can help you hit a home run." Rick Riordan, triple-award-winning author of Big Red Tequila, The Widower's Two-Step, and The Last King of Texas.

Since 1991, Singer has taught fiction writing at the University of California Extension in Berkeley and San Francisco (Mystery and Suspense Writing) and at Santa Cruz. She holds private workshops as well as one-on-one manuscript consultations, working with writers individually on literary novels and in every genre from memoir, mystery, and science fiction to horror.

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Brenda Townsend Hall is a graduate of the Universities of London (BA honors) and Southampton (doctorate). A lecturer in English literature and then a language trainer, she crossed the English Channel and settled with her husband, a musicologist, in deepest rural France. She continued language training in French companies and started producing teaching materials and translating.

Following the acceptance of her first piece of creative writing, a verse play, The Crane, by BBC Radio 3 in 1992, she has continued to produce poetry, short stories, feature articles and a novel (published by Zander E-books, Necklace of Warm Snow, a finalist in the 2003 EPPIE awards). Now a freelance writer and editor, she writes nonfiction, specializing in the environment, sustainable development and issues relating to the European Union. However, she continues to write fiction and has just embarked on a novel set in the seventeenth century. As a British writer living in France she suffered a sense of isolation and so had the idea for the website, Worlds Apart Review, which she co-hosts with another British writer, Valerie Collins, who lives in Spain. The website features the work of other international writers and provides a supportive base for writers wherever they may be. Brenda Townsend Hall, Ph.D., lives in France. Future projects she has in mind include a travel guide to the Gascony region in which she lives and another novel in which she intends to abandon realism for fantasy.

Editor's note: If you are wondering, the bird pictured above is one type of a shorebird species known as the curlew. Worldwide, only fifty of the slim-billed curlew remain. We chose this elusive and rare bird as the mascot for our Native Shore Fiction department because as a talisman, a Jungian symbol. This shorebird represents this site's Zeitgeist, our native spirit for this decade. Think about it. We could have selected a zucchini.

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