Singalong
songbooks
now for sale

Easy sheet music
for 300+ favorites

$39.95*

Including free templates
for audience lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for more than 300 oldtime favorites. songbookIdeal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences or just at your own home. Bound in a loose-leaf binder of durable vinyl, unsnaps for access to pages. (To see a photo of the book, click here.)

Each songbook comes with templates for copying lyrics of more than 240 songs to hand out to audience members, a great way to get audiences involved.**

To order Sing along with ease, email sidleavitt@yahoo.com directly or enter your email address as a comment in our latest blog entry and we will email you. (Your email address won't appear in the comments section.)

To review our sales procedures and philosophy, click on our entry entitled We trust you.

*plus $5.79 shipping in U.S.

**An electronic version of these templates is available free to customers who wish to reformat lyrics sheets on their own computer.

Free books
still offered

from frustrated writers
to adventurous readers

This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors. To find these, please visit the 'Works' section in the upper righthand column of this page. This site does not claim copyright to any of these works, and no modification of any work has been done except for style formatting. No work may be reused commercially, and any noncommercial reuse must give credit to the author.

To upload...

Sorry, we're not accepting any new works right now.

To comment...

Readers are free to download any listing from the 'Works' section, subject to the aforementioned restrictions, and to provide comments to the site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com for publication in the 'Comments on works' listing. To comment on any excerpt or other post shown in the center column, simply do so directly beneath the post by clicking on the '(No) Comments' link. Unless otherwise specified, all comments will be published, subject to libel guidelines.

About us...

This blog was started as a nonprofit website giving writers a place to publish their work at no cost and readers a chance to read that work and, if they chose, to comment on it. Now we are concentrating on a singalong songbook, also an idealistic project that promotes volunteer music programs at nursing homes and senior residences as well as family singing at home, all through easy, low-cost sheet music. Although we no longer accept new works from authors, all previous submissions are still available in our 'Works' section. We also maintain a blogroll of diverse sites, all well-written, for readers to explore, although at present, no new sites are being accepted for listing. The site's founder and administrator is its first nonfiction contributor, Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor who lives in Lake Katrine, N.Y.

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The truth behind fiction

May 27, 2007

truthfiction

Fiction writers, compared with newspaper writers, have a disadvantage: A newspaper writer finding a good story needs only to tell it straight, without embellishment, because it is, after all, a good story. And it is real — at least most readers will accept it as so. Fiction writers have to make up their stories, and making up a good one, pathological liars notwithstanding, is not easy.

But it doesn’t stop there. Now the fiction writer has to convince the reader that the good story is real. And that’s where Ray Rhamey comes in.

Rhamey is an editor who gives novelists advice that is knowledgeable, straightforward and, get this, free. His website, Flogging the Quill, is the latest addition to our blogroll.

The site surely will interest a would-be novelist, but it also has a general appeal as a behind-the-scenes workshop showing just how difficult writing can be and just how determined a writer must remain.

Since the beginning of the year, Rhamey frequently runs a feature he calls the Flogometer that challenges authors to submit a manuscript with a first page that compels him to turn to the second page. About once a week, he reprints the first page of a submission — authors submit the first 15 or 20 pages of their manuscript — and he reviews the page line-by-line, giving his advice with an honesty that can be blunt but not disrespectful.

Still, it’s not for nothing that Rhamey calls these exercises “public floggings.”

A writer named Steve is told in the Feb. 22 entry that the prologue to his novel amounts to little more than “info-dump narrative” that has left Rhamey “stymied”:

I don’t see how a mere description of a man who is, according to this prologue, a person of not much accomplishment, will snare a reader. If the writer had included the ‘few unusual quirks’ (cited in the text), especially if he showed them in a lively scene, then maybe. That would be a character, someone I could be interested in. Sorry, Steve. I suggest you browse through the (Flogging the Quill) archives for posts on storytelling.

To the writer of the Feb. 12 entry, identified only as ‘number 21,’ Rhamey says:

Thanks, but no thanks. If the task for a first page is compelling narrative, for me a phone conversation in which two people I don’t know (read ‘care about’) bicker over which way to turn out of a parking lot doesn’t clear the hurdle.

Still, it’s not all negative. About Steve, he says, “Clearly the author can write — I had few nits.” As for number 21, Rhamey concludes that he or she “has done many things right. Your writing is clean, and the dialogue works (as far as it goes).”

And some entries are clear winners, such as the March 14 entry by Eugenia about a man looking at Egyptian coffins in an antiquities shop. The text is reprinted here.

The entry caused Rhamey to turn the page:

(It) was the promise of an intelligent story with interesting characters and insights. What really did it for me was this dealer’s speech:

‘Yes, we all want kings and queens, don’t we?’ The dealer smiled, revealing small pointy teeth. ‘To remind us that even they can come to this, mere merchandise.’

I really liked the touch of philosophy, and perhaps theme, in the dealer’s speech. And if the dealer could be such an interesting fellow, what must the main characters be? I was interested in finding out . . .. Good, professional stuff.

Rhamey, at one time a top Chicago advertising writer and creative director, then a Hollywood screenwriter, understands the slings and arrows of writing novels — he’s written five himself. As an editor, he does complete manuscripts on a variable per-word basis for clients throughout the world.

The free offerings on his website, besides the Flogometer feature, have included other sample edits, book reviews, guest articles and a wealth of other information and guidance for writers since the site was launched in October 2004.

– Sid Leavitt

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