Part of the challenge for writers, of any style or genre, is to keep their writing muscles active. Many moons ago I rambled about a ‘literary treadmill’, and that allowing too much time to pass without writing meant that the metaphorical extra tyre would form around my creative mid-riff. I was very much focussing on the writing of fiction, but being part of the Edinburgh based Meadow Bar Writing Group (their first anthology now published on the website and Kindle store), I have learnt that it’s more about keeping active in any way, not necessarily tying myself down to a specific style.
In my case, recent weeks have seen me writing a lot of emails related to Book Sanctuary, but I’m not sure those necessarily count. I have also, however, been writing reviews and features for a Nintendo website (www.nintendolife.com), something I’ve been doing since January. It’s been a particularly active past 4 weeks in that regard, and having recently agreed to contribute further as Features Editor, I’ll be busy working on that website in the spare time that I have. I’ve found that with each passing day the writing becomes easier, the fat of inactivity is falling away. In the coming weeks the writing group return, as well as my post-graduate degree, so adding those to Book Sanctuary and video-game writing will keep me on the treadmill for a good time to come.
One thing that will unite most readers of this blog entry is that they are writers. With that in mind we plan to introduce a ‘Book Sanctuary Writing Group’, an entity that will work outside of our publishing practices. We have an ‘eZine’ section on our website, which currently has an introduction page, but our goal is to turn this into a bi-monthly writing group eZine, available for free. It would feature short pieces from a variety of writers who want to take part, and it will be an easy way to browse pieces of writing, allowing readers to comment and rate that issue’s articles. Drawing inspiration from the Meadows Bar Anthology, the content will have plenty of variety: short stories, poems, biographical articles, opinion pieces, novel fragments and so on.
Each issue will have a theme, and there will be a ‘call for submissions’, of which around 12-15 would be selected. If this idea develops popularity, it could be monthly. I will personally explore whether this eZine can be published, for free once again, as a regular ‘magazine’ on the Kindle store.
Developing our range of published titles is a big part of what we’re doing at Book Sanctuary, and more publications are in the pipeline. However, we hope that the writing group eZine will encourage more people to share their writing, whatever form it takes, and engage with each other as part of a website community. We hope that you’ll join us with this part of our publishing adventure, and we’ll be announcing the first issue’s topic and call for submissions soon.
Until next time,
Thomas
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