FROM THE MANAGEMENT It is the end of the year and I am happy to say I survived 2014. Considering the nature of the world today, that in and of itself may be considered an accomplishment. We will likely reach 600 members by the end of the year or early in the new year. Granted, given the number of people on Facebook that is not necessarily an accomplishment since Facebook has almost as many people as CHINA using it. But our goal was never to be the largest group here, it was to be the best focused on on the craft of writing speculative fiction. In that, I have been remiss. I have focused so much on my own writing that I neglected to do as much as I could for people seeking help or information as I thought I would when I first established this group. My goal is to do better in that regard. I cannot, however, do this monumental thing alone. I need everyone to help. Writing is a solitary endeavor for most of us. We rarely interact with anyone while we are engaged and when we are done, we drop our bottles filled with our messages into the ocean of the internet and hope someone will read them, find them worthy and share them with others. As I am sure most of you with finished products can attest, it is a very large ocean, filled with a great many bottles. And it would appear not all that many readers willing to take the time and effort to read, given the over-abundance of other highly addictive entertainment (See: Candy Crush, Call of Duty, Peter Jackson movies, Marvel movies, legalization of marijuana and the increase in Oreo sales, to name just a few...) PRAISE FIRST: For those of you who have contributed articles, blog posts, inspirational or humorous nuggets of writer or artist-related information this year. I APPRECIATE YOU AND YOUR EFFORTS. I do not take it for granted knowing how difficult it is to find laudable and worthwhile information nuggets to share. Please continue to share with us your trials and tribulations (as well as your awesome success stories) as they occur. THEN CONDEMNATION: I have noticed there are several of you who have been exclusively posting your book advertisements without adding anything of value to the stream. SHAME ON YOU. YES, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. AVERT THINE EYES IN DISGRACE. Your posts may disappear and you may be banned from the group without warning. In the group instructions it specifically requests you introduce yourself AT THE VERY LEAST before you inundate us with ads for your books. We have tried to be tolerant because we understand people want to sell their books but we also want this to be a LEARNING forum, not an advertising one. If the only reason you are here is to advertise your books, there are at least 2000 other boards dedicated to that sole purpose. In the coming year, we will be far less tolerant of such anti-social behavior. IN THE COMING YEAR I would like to begin some structured writing exercises for anyone who wants to participate. I am not quite sure what that will look like but I think I will talk it over with the great people at SCIFIIDEAS.COM and see if we can come up with something interesting and challenging. Not to leave fantasy writers out, there will be fantasy challenges as well. If you have ideas for creative writing exercises which can help writers perfect their craft, please feel free to share them in the comments below. Off the top of my head: Visual challenges - writing a short scene or story based purely from a visual prompt. Written prompts - take a provided prompt and create a short story from the words or theme provided. Chuck Wendig does something similar on his website every week or every other week. It produces very fine results over time. Public prompts - we take a prompt from a site like Startyournovel, which creates elaborate and challenging prompts using visual and text based thematic elements and challenges you to post them in the public domain. We could even have a place where such works are displayed on Facebook! For you artists among us, a good way to be see would be to create something we might use for such a visual prompt. Any other writing or creativity boosters would be appreciated. ONE OTHER THING If you get the time, you should take a look back through the articles posted here. There are many fine writing ideas, story seeds, scientific articles discussing space, biology, the environment, which could inspire you to be creative. I think we can be proud of the quality of the information stored here on writing and speculative fiction and hope there will be more participants in the future as we grow in 2015. Excelsior! Wanderers: A film by Erik Wernquist - What drives Humanity to greatness is our urge to explore: https://vimeo/108650530
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:45:20 +0000
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