After all the gift giving, charitable donations and holiday trips away this time of year, you’ll find the free resources listed below particularly attractive. Each link has inspiration and information to help you fill the well of your creativity. Stock up and let the generosity of writers, editors and publishers help you make and keep a New Year’s resolution to write more, send your work out more, and study more about writing.

1. Freelance article writer and book author Jenna Glatzer is offering a free e-book on book promotion. You must have Adobe Reader 5.0 or higher to open it– a free download is available at www.adobe.com if you don’t already have it.
2. Poet Allison Joseph offers the gift of the Creative Writers Opportunities List. Visit the site and follow screen prompts for “Join This Group.” You’ll need a Yahoo ID and then have to follow on-screen prompts to complete sign-up. However, here are instructions for joining the list by email: To join the mailing list only, send a blank e-mail message to crwropps-b-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. You will be sent an e-mail with further instructions on joining the list. The one to six daily notifications are about writing contests, manuscripts wanted and writing job openings, however the list is on hiatus right now until the New Year. ENG_PREVIEW
3. Leafio.com, a new ebook publishing site makes it possible for you to almost instantly convert material you have into an ebook you can sell or make available for now cost. If you have something you want to share–a collection of poems, essays, articles, a beginning of a project you want feedback on–here’s a place to easily get it out to others. It’s a new venture out of the Bay Area dedicated to helping us use less paper as writers, teachers, information hunters and gatherers.
4. Short story wizard Bruce Holland Rogers has many samples of his sudden fiction (short shorts) available on his website. They make for good reading and might inspire you to dabble in this genre.
5. For reading writing about writing, check out Inkbyte.com. Writing It Real subscriber Diana Raab has an article posted December 19, 2007 of this year.
6. I’ve shared this link in articles before but include it here again because it is one of the best values for your reading time: Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction edited by Dinty Moore. The online magazine includes craft essays and book reviews of literary nonfiction.
7. Tiny Lights, my favorite literary journal devoted to the personal narrative, has an online collection that you’ll find fulfilling. The writing posted includes writers on writing topics and literary nuggets. Have a good read!
8. Want some inspiration from reading a book you read in high school or college English class–The Scarlet Letter, Tom Sawyer, This Side of Paradise? Check googlebooks.com to see if there is an excerpt online. There are hundreds in this list and many of them are presented in full.
9. The Gutenberg Project has made books in the public domain, three million of them, available online for download. They keep a list of the 100 most popular downloads each day.
10. Poetryfoundation.org has a wealth of information including a monthly podcast highlighting work in the current issue of Poetry Magazine. A poetry tool allows you to search for poems and poets by name, dates, geography and more categories. Nicely laid out and a big selection.
11. Do you regularly miss Garrison Keillor’s daily Writer’s Almanac in which he recounts the highlights of the day in history and reads a short poem or two? It’s also offered as a text.
12. Poet Billie Collins Poetry 180 project has great poems–one for each day of the school year. In Collins’ words, “Poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race. By just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed.”
13. I also learned about an exciting project called Quotidiana. According to the website description, “Quotidiana is a collection of materials concerned with the everyday, just like essays themselves…It is an anthology of hundreds of classical essays, all published before 1923, all partakers of the ruminative, associative, idea-driven form that predates and surpasses the current “creative nonfiction” trendy stuff. Although most of these essays are available online elsewhere, some are not, and already Quotidiana is one of the biggest online anthologies of classical essays anywhere.”
14. Write4kids.com offers many free ebooks on writing for children. A treasure for all of us, no matter our genre, is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Essays in the Art of Writing.
15. Read excerpts from memoirs published by Random House. One of my favorites is from The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber. There are categories for Language and Linguistics, where you can check out an excerpt from Danell Jones’ 2007 book, The Virginia Woolf Writer’s Workshop, Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing.
16. Mark Twain quotes will get you thinking in a clever vein.
17. Need to feel in the company of writers who think about writing? Visit Quotable Quotes on Writing and Writers and you’ll feel like you’ve spend an afternoon at a roundtable enjoying quick repartee.
18. Wishing you could attend more author readers? Visit WGBH Forum Network, a site “an audio and video streaming Website dedicated to curating and serving live and on-demand lectures given by some of the world’s foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policy makers and community leaders. These events are hosted by world-class cultural and educational organizations in Boston and beyond.” Hear Katha Pollit read from her memoir Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories. Listen to Ishmael Beah read from his memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier. And there are many other fiction and nonfiction writer’s you’ll enjoy.
19. Want to hear book talk that will inspire you to read more and love books more? Radio reviews by literary National Treasure Nancy Pearl are archived online by Seattle’s National Public Radio station KUOW. Tune in to hear from “a librarian with a love of books so strong it has been officially classified as lust. No matter the mood, moment or reason, she can recommend the perfect literary companion. Author of two books, Book Lust and More Book Lust, Nancy joins hosts Dave Beck and Megan Sukys every Monday on Sound Focus to share the most recent books to tickle her fancy. From thrillers to memoirs, international fiction to overlooked authors and even young adult novels, she plays matchmaker for the bibliophile in all of us.”
20. Need to brush up on the nitty-gritty of style skills–punctuation, abbreviations, citations? Dictionary.com offers help and the ability to download style guides. Want a reference for grammar issues? Visit Jack Lynch’s Guide to Grammar and Style sponsored by Rutgers University.

And last but not at all least, a suggestions from Kurt — If you’d like some free tunes to listen to while you write, you can stream music using iTunes from Apple Computer for your Mac (OS X only) or Windows (Windows 2000 or later). After you download and install iTunes, click on the Radio button to see all the different genres of Internet Radio stations that Apple has lined up for you. My suggestion: give the Ambient genre a try. Ambient music is specifically designed to be background music, it can be upbeat or downbeat, soft or loud depending on your mood, but good ambient music plays more on your subconscious mind and won’t use up much brainpower in your frontal lobes at all. Note: this won’t work for you if you’re still on a dialup connection to the Internet. All the radio stations tell you how much bandwidth the station will use. Higher numbers are better quality, but the stations with the lower speeds are fine if you have trouble with the plusher stations.