Write Side

AUTHOR BIO

“Madcap” Mary Mendoza is an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in regional magazines, newspapers and on the Internet. Madcap writes a monthly humor column–"Udder Nonsense" for Country Pleasures magazine, is the author of three humorous story collections: The Adventures of Madcap Mary, Embracing Lunacy and Udder Delights, and penned a travel guide entitled Europe for the Savvy Traveler. She also dabbles in editing, press release, résumé, catalog and newsletter writing. Madcap occasionally teaches Continuing Education classes-"Enchanted Italy" and "Europe for the Savvy Traveler," at Centralia College. Check Travel Blog for updates.

Madcap Mary grew up in a quaint Scandinavian fishing village close to the Canadian border. The years between puberty and her present state of inertia in a not so quaint village close to the Oregon border were filled with adventure, romance, intrigue and high drama. Madcap is currently working on a boxed set of her memoirs—something along the lines of Carl Sandburg’s six volumes on Lincoln. Just kidding.

Madcap lives in a cottage she and her husband and son are remodeling. She enjoys gardening, decorating, home improvement projects, cat herding, goat watching, gourmet food, international travel, anything Italian, “French perfume that rocks the room” and being a full time Madcap.

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CLIPS
 Magazine and book publishers receive thousands of submissions a year. The odds of an editor visiting this site to read my clips are the same as Cher being elected president or Laura Bush becoming a singing sensation.

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HUMOR COLUMNS

“Madcap Mary,” my ifloor persona (formerly known as “Hurricane Mary”) was a ditzy home decorator with a host of personal problems. If you Google "Hurricane Mary" you can access some of my stories--all based on my real life encounters with aggressive appliances, apathetic contractors and remodeling projects gone horribly awry.
My humor column, “Udder Nonsense,” appears each month in Country Pleasures Magazine, based in Camas, Washington. I also wrote Laugh Lines for the Journal newspapers and Country Lite for the South Sounder.
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KUDOS
“I can take any amount of criticism, so long as it is unqualified praise.” – Noel Coward

Were it not for my devoted fans I would be nothing but a dame without a name. I adore you all! Here are some of your words of praise:

“Your stories are so wonderful. It has been a rough couple of weeks for me as a friend has passed away unexpectedly but your stories offered a nice little retreat from all the sadness that goes with saying goodbye to a friend.”  —J.A., Canada

“Loved the Hurricane Mary article. I don't know if it's really true or not, but boy did I laugh. I had to because it's me to a T. I often wake in the middle of the night searching for the tape measure because I just have to measure that window for the 89th time at 3:02 a.m. I drive my husband nuts watching HGTV.” —T.M., via e-mail

“I laughed so much at your delightful article on feng shui. I, too, am in a small house, trying to find a way to enlarge it. I dream of finding doors that I hadn't noticed, and when I open them they open into big bedrooms with master baths. I also have a few bricks in the backyard and I think of what to do with them, could they be used for the addition we will never be able to afford.” —Your cosmic twin, Sally

“Thank you so much for your funny, heart warming, easily-related-to humor.” —Mary P., Seattle

Reach me here.

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ESSENTIAL READING FOR WRITERS

 A dictionary is the writer's most useful tool. Sometimes I stand in the reference section of Powell’s and fantasize about owning one of those monster $200 editions—the kind you display on an expensive mahogany stand in the front parlor. If I'm ever stranded on a desert island with Tom Hanks or incarcerated in a Turkish prison I hope I have a dictionary with me.
Also indispensable is The Time Almanac, which features "over a million fascinating facts" plus handy maps. The World Book on CD is also great. And you really should invest in a good thesaurus.

Magazines
 The crème de la crème are: The Writer and Writer's Digest.
Books
 The following books are my valued and trusted helpmates:

Familiar Quotations, John Bartlett (my edition is so old George Bernard Shaw was still alive but I still prefer it to the online version.

The Quotable Woman from Running Press (1991)

Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights edited by Jon Winokur

Wit & Humor Quotationary edited by Leonard Frank
The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes
Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual by Rita Mae Brown
On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual
The Word by Rene Capon
Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Lapsing into a Comma: A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print and How to Avoid Them by Bill Walsh

How to Write Funny edited by John Kachuba
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
Last, but not least, The Writer's Market (available in print, on CD and online). Remember, it's only an expensive paperweight unless you actually use it.

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COOL ONLINE SOURCES

 Moira Allen's Writing World 1500+ Online Resources for Writers is the mother of all sources. It's been recently updated.  Writers Digest online offers a wealth of information including Tips and Updates, a weekly newsletter featuring writing instruction and useful writing resources, as well as updates about Writer’s Digest and Writer’s Digest products.

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TOP SITES FOR WRITERS

 There are many well-intentioned e-zines for writers but most fall short of the mark. Stick to well-established publications that are managed by professional writers who know where to place quotation marks.
The following sites cover the bare bones for beginners to the sticky wicket of finding an agent and negotiating contracts to the latest publishing trends and industry buzz. Several offer classes, also.

Writers Weekly
Absolute Write
Writing World
Serious professionals find Media Bistro indispensable and worth the annual fee.
Humorists may find the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop newsletter useful.

Also see the May 2007 issue of Writer’s Digest for their annual list of Top 101 Web sites.

MORE FAVORITES

The Writer at Work, produced by genius cartoonist and writer Richard Krzemien, who takes a humorous look at the daily fears, hopes, dreams, and disappointments the writer (or any creative person) faces.
Madeleine Begun Kane offers an exhaustive list of links to all sorts of sites as well as her special brand of political satire in Dubya’s Dayly Diary.  The Slot is a must for all compulsive obsessives interested in journalism. It’s produced by award-winning NY Times writer Bill Walsh, author of Lapsing into a Comma: A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print and How to Avoid Them.
Judy Gruen, a highly successful humorist and book author has a free online newsletter called Off My Noodle.
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THOUGHTS ON WRITING FROM MADCAP MARY

Writing for free is like smoking, overeating or dating a bad boy—don’t even start. I feel strongly about this subject, as does writer Angela Hoy. Read what she has to say about the pitfalls of giving your talent away in her article in the May 2003 issue of Writer’s Digest.
I certainly don’t claim to know it all about writing but I have picked up a few tidbits along the way. Here are some:
Steer clear of publications that do not honor, value or respect writers. Seek out editors who will give you a byline, publish a short bio, and promote you in print or on their Web site. This rule applies even if you are just starting out with your hometown paper.
Inspect the Web site and/or print publication and if there are glaring errors in content, grammar and punctuation, bag it. Don’t associate with mediocre publications run by nonprofessionals. You’ll regret it in the long run. This especially applies to most Craigslist ads.
Beware of so-called editors and publishers who are bean counters or sales execs because they are clueless about writing— money is the only god they serve.
Arm and educate yourself with as much information as you can about your genre. But don’t overdo it—a MFA does not a writer make.
Develop the hide of a rhino because that is what you need in the snarling, hissing, competitive world of writing.
Attitude counts. Ernest Hemingway said, “Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”
Set long and short-term goals, formulate a writing schedule, make a plan and stick to it. Realize, too that there will be times when you will alienate and annoy your family. If you are female you'll need twice the energy and ambition of your male counterparts.

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THE STRUGGLE — ON THE EDGE

 The agonies and ecstasies of writing are well documented. One of my favorite quotes on the subject is from Herbert Gold: “Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to have an emergency manicure after hanging off the edge of a fictional cliff.
Are role models valuable? I read two of Lillian Hellman’s trio of memoirs: An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento (the third is Scoundrel Time) and felt inspired to be just like her when I grew up. For a while I took to sitting in front of my antique Remington typewriter with a cigarette dangling from my mouth and a glass of bourbon in hand. Nothing came of it.
In the long run passion and dedication to the craft of writing, plus self-discipline and persistence are crucial. And of course, as Papa said, talent.

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ENCOURAGEMENT
 I have always found great solace in cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. If that doesn’t work for you, there's always booze, prayer, and aerobic exercise.

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WRITERS’ CONFERENCES & GROUPS — THE EGOS HAVE LANDED  

The case against writers' conferences:

They're costly and often require long distance travel and all its accompanying hassles.

Speakers at any conferences are often self-published, aged reptilians who published decades ago, obscure poets, or braggarts there only to hype their own forgettable books.

Associating with a large number of wannabe writers who will never publish, let alone succeed, is a real drag.

Reasons to attend a conference:

To collect material for you humor column.

To feel superior, smarter and more successful than fellow attendees.

To have a reason to get out of town. A conference in Maui or Santa Barbara is especially appealing if you live in Fargo or Lubbock.

Writers Groups are more insidious than conferences because they waste your time on a consistent basis, if you let them. Maybe they work for novice writers but I never went to one I liked. Here’s why:

The “leader” is usually some smug smarty-pants who has achieved a small degree of success and thinks it’s his/her mission to impart wisdom to the lowly unpublished masses.

The group will consist of frustrated dreamers, an elderly man on oxygen who insists on reading from his 900-page book based on his experiences one afternoon in 1942, pale starving poets with greasy hair, plump housewives working on romance novels, eager young writers of bad science fiction, weirdoes claiming to be witches or warlocks, mousy little men interested in nonfiction about migratory birds or tropical snails, numerous “novelists” who can’t spell novelist, sanctimonious “educators,” and touchy feely women who “journal,” and are blissfully unaware that journal is a noun, not a verb.

Deadlines and the demands of writing for a living are completely foreign to these people. They all want to jump from the “I have a dream” aspect of writing to an appearance on The Today Show. They stubbornly refuse to educate themselves despite the enormous amount of free and low cost resources available to writers and few want to do any serious work. They are amateur hobbyists.

Finding a group, whether live or online, that matches your level of experience, jives with your particular interests and fulfills your needs at this stage in your career is extremely difficult.

I investigated Web Rings and Forums and found them to be nothing more than Internet pollutants. A serious professional who writes for a living has no time for these trivial pursuits. However, don’t let my crankiness dissuade you. You should attend at least one conference and try a writing group one evening to see how you like it, then come on back here to Madcap Mary and we’ll talk.

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Madcap Mary Copyright © 2008 by Mary F. Mendoza. All rights reserved.
For information on reprinting material from this site, please e-mail me.
Book cover photo from Victorian Traditions, a division of The Stock Solution
Excerpts from “Hurricane Mary” reprinted by permission from iFloor.com