Here’s are eight links for writing sites I’ve visited during the past week:

The Writers Chatroom hosts two chats each week. On Sunday you’ll find writers chatting there at 7pm Eastern Time. Here in California, that’s 4pm Pacific Time. The Sunday chat is moderated as there are guest speakers. The second chat takes place on Wednesday from 8pm to 11pm Eastern time, or here on the West Coast, 5pm to 8pm Pacific Time. This is an open chat. Sounds like fun! You might see me there with the screen name, LindaJM, or LindaJo, or something similar. If not, you’ll surely find me on their forum as I’ve been posting there the last couple of days and plan to make it a regular thing.

The Copperfield Review is a quarterly journal for writers of historical fiction. They are currently accepting submissions, and are especially interested in getting non-fiction articles including interviews with writers of historical fiction, essays pertaining to the writing life and historical fiction, and history-related creative non-fiction. There’s also poetry and fiction in the journal. I read quite a bit of The Copperfield Review earlier today and love it. Great stuff!

Forward Motion is a huge writing community for novelists. There’s a heavy fantasy/scifi population there, but all novelists will find it a very helpful and welcoming site. I noticed today the schedule for writing and edit marathons for the rest of the year has been posted. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of these marathons, and recommend them. There’s also a lot of support for NaNoWriMo writers, and critiques are available. It’s a pretty impressive place.

2nd Annual Golden Coffee Cup - Now suppose you are a die-hard anti-NaNoWriMo writer. Perhaps your writing style doesn’t allow for writing 50,000 words in one month, or you think it is silly, or you just don’t want to suffer that much. Well, there’s an alternative for November: The Golden Coffee Cup competition. Good luck to all who enter!

NaNoWriMo - In case you are one of those people who still don’t have any idea what NaNoWriMo is, I’m putting this link here. I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo for the last six years. This November will be my seventh journey into novelist insanity. You can see my collection of NaNoWriMo awards here. I recommend it to anyone interested in having fun and writing a novel at the same time. Though a blog I read today inferred that NaNoWriMo writers produce only “incomprehensible words” - I can attest that this isn’t always so. I think my NaNoWriMo novels are worthy of eventual publication, even though some of them are still first drafts and will require a lot more work before I could submit them anywhere. Many authors prefer to write their novels quickly. Whatever works is best, don’t you think?

The 2008 Muse Online Writing Conference is a mailing list at Yahoo. This link is for those of you who missed the recent online conference in October 2007, or for anyone else who isn’t aware of this mailing list. The conference organizer will be sending messages through this list to keep us aware of conference sign-ups and other vital information. The conference is free, and requires only a time commitment. And here’s a secret I’ve been saving to share with you. I’m planning to be one of the presenters there next year. More on this and my topic some other time.

Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Chat Board - This is Verla Kay’s very active and helpful message board for writers of children’s literature. I’ve been posting over there for a few days now, ever since I discovered I’m reconnected to the system. It is a great place to meet new friends and get feedback on all your questions about writing or illustrating for children.

WeBook is an amazing new website where you can contribute your writing and get thoughtful, helpful suggestions on short stories and nano stories (200 words or less). Four advisors who are qualified, talented writers themselves, staff the site. It is a bit like a free writing school where you can find out what works and what doesn’t. You can participate in writing collaborative novels, read posted novels, or contribute novel ideas. The site owners plan to have the novels and stories printed, so you might get your work into a book! It is in Beta testing now and fairly new so currently membership is by invitation only. I have 40 invitations, so leave a message here if you want me to email you one. I think this is a great way for new writers to get lots of productive writing practice.

So that’s it for my writing link roundup this week. I’ll be posting something similar about a week from now.