Poet and translator Sasha Dugdale presides over this month’s poetry workshop at the Guardian. This time, readers are challenged to submit a dramatic poem.

I would like to encourage readers to try writing and submitting a dramatic poem.

Dramatic poetry is poetry in which a character or characters discuss a situation. It can be monologue or dialogue. The important thing is that the poet assumes the speech patterns, interests and personality of his characters when writing the poem.

Email your entries, with ‘Poetry workshop’ in the title field, to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk by midnight on Wednesday March 21. The shortlisted poems, and Sasha’s responses, will appear on the site soon afterwards.

Read the rest of the instructions here.

Update: Read the poems that made the workshop’s shortlist, along with Dugdale’s comments and reviews. Some interesting works here.

Oort-Cloud is a new writing site that lets readers and writers be part of a “social publishing” experiment. It uses web 2.0-style features, such as tag clouds, rss feeds and post rating that makes it easy to keep track of a favorite author and find other good writers.

…authors create and distribute their work, and readers, individually and collectively, including fans as well as editors and peers, review, comment, rank, and tag, everything.

For writers, Oort-Cloud offers….

A place to share experiences in writing, publishing and help one another in dealing with the challenging decisions associated with copyright.

A place to reach out to readers, develop stronger ties to them, find new ones, and keep them up-to-date about new and coming works.

A place to learn what ideas and issues readers are interested in.

A place to help readers understand the issues concerning writers, especially in light of intellectual property issues.

A place to share opinions about trends in science-fiction and encounter new ideas that might inspire new creativity.

Oort-Cloud is geared mainly toward science fiction and fantasy writers, but genre definitions are flexible: “there’s nothing to say your science-fiction or fantasy contribution could not also be, in part, a romance, mystery, horror story, or even a western.”

Link (via BoingBoing)

For a month now, Dr. Eskander’s intermittent diary entries have been appearing on the Web site of the British Library (bl.uk/iraqdiary.html), and they detail the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq’s central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive.

The New York Times article can be found here, and the journal itself is here.

…according to the British Library, government-imposed spending cuts may soon put the proud traditions of a national institution at risk. Ahead of the Treasury’s 2007 spending review, library officials have drawn up a briefing paper outlining measures they would have to take if the widely speculated cuts of between 5% and 7% come to fruition.

You can read the rest of the article over here.

Holly Lisle is a fantasy author (two of her books are available for free from the Baen free library) and author of several books on writing.  Her popular website has a large collection of helpful articles, writing FAQs, and some great workshops.

I make a full-time living from writing. I know a lot of writers who would like to do the same. So I’ve written over 100,000 words — all of it available for free in the linked articles to your right — on how I do what I do.

Check it out.

Interesting psychological study from Germany:

U.S. and German researchers found that people who have lower levels of self-esteem get more enjoyment from crime and detective stories that confirm their suspicions in the end, while those with higher self-esteem prefer a surprise ending.

“Personality plays a role in whether a person wants to be confirmed or surprised when they read mysteries,” Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, said in a statement.

“People with low self-esteem like to feel they knew all along who committed the crime, probably because it makes them feel smarter.”

Link to the Yahoo News article

Yesterday Microsoft launched a beta version of its Live Search Books that makes thousands of public domain and noncopyrighted texts scanned from its library partners searchable online. Sometime next year Microsoft hopes to expand the searchable service to include copyrighted books from publishers with their permission.

Guren categorized yesterday’s beta launch as a first step in providing searchable non-copyrighted books andeventually copyrighted books with publisher permission. Books available in the beta were scanned from Microsoft’s library partners at the University of California, the British Library and the University of Toronto. Its new partners include Cornell University, the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine. The books are either in the public domain or with copyright belonging to the library.

Link to the Publishers Weekly article, link to Live Search Books