A long time ago there lived a woman in her thirties who had always wanted to be a writer. In fact, she had two books on her computer and three USB ports that she carried with her from apartment to apartment. Every once and awhile she would open the computer and research how to get published, she would write up some queries and send them out, only to get rejections. She knew this was normal, but she couldn’t help feeling a bit deflated.
She pursued some forums (that’s what they were called back in the day) but found about the same information. Mostly she ran into other authors or aspiring authors were not very willing to help out newbies. Everyone seemed to be holding on tightly to the information they knew hoping that if others didn’t know it, the market wouldn’t get as saturated. With a baby on her hip for five years and the growing ones still some how needing to be fed and taken to the park, the woman slowly advanced into the life of someday.
But waiting for someday was frustrating. Knowing she had no information on how to publish and never finding a writing class she could afford to join that lined up with her life from Europe, she set about to write another book. The other stuff she would figure out later.
After writing the book she found an editor who said she needed to cut about 50,000 words. Heartbroken and with no one to tell her how to deal with the emotions that came, she sought out her therapist and then set about cutting out the words. The problem was, she didn’t know which ones to cut. But she cut and she pasted, and she cut again. And two years later the book was done.
She set about self-publishing because she didn’t have the confidence to pursue an agent or a publisher. Publishing it and getting it onto Amazon would be enough, she said. She would figure out the other stuff later.
But it wasn’t enough for long and soon the day to figure out the other stuff came. So she set about researching during the next year and brainstorming what she was to do with her writing self. In the meantime she wrote another book and created a journal and tried to figure out what she was doing. Now in America and the internet ten years older she found the groups more supportive, though not much more informative, they were enough to find a rabbit hole on Google. And so she jumped into a black hole day after day to learn. Workshops, and presentations, books and ebooks and worksheets.
The learning piled on and she moved forward in her marketing, more confident than before. She also found a different editor for her second book. That was an important step!
But there was always a community lacking. Clearly that wasn’t always true for everyone, but it was for her. Lack of confidence to join writing classes, lack of time to go to the community college and distractions with other things (hello children testing issues, family deaths, new jobs, and quarantine)
She dreamed of setting up the community for writers last year, but needed time to think it through. After four months of brainstorming and searching and praying, the Creative Writing Community is launching!
It will be a place to find other writers who are seriously pursuing the art and to connect with people who write in your genre and out of your genre.
The CWC will be a community that is serious about learning all the other little steps a serious writer must pursue (newsletters, social media, speaking about their book, sharing with others).
It will be a kind and receptive community where we can share rough drafts without judgement because critiques will not come unless asked for.
The kindness will breed trust in each other to be beta readers and book launch collaborators.
We will have
—live hangouts to share about our writing and ourselves,
—live Q&As with experts who will teach us in one hour when a Google rabbit hole would eat up hours of our time,
—Live writing sprints where we will use prompts or ideas to write together and stretch our craft and abilities.
My dream is that together we will help each other with the technicalities of launching our books into the world, sharing each other’s work on our social media and newsletters and together make writing and publishing a wonderful and not-so-lonely experience.