the writer's block |
The blog
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the writer's block |
The blog
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If you follow members of the writing community, odds are you’ve noticed #FollowFriday or #ff trending at the end of every workweek. The tradition started with a tweet from entrepreneur Micah Baldwin back in 2009 and, even though Twitter has grown exponentially and its landscape has changed dramatically over the last ten years, it’s still going strong.
In case you haven’t encountered it, #FollowFriday is precisely what it sounds like. Every Friday, individuals in the writing community (amongst others) tweet a list of people they think others should follow. It’s a good way to broaden your sense of the writing community and bring writers, readers, and publishers together. But #FollowFriday has become closely intertwined with #writerslift, which is dedicated to boosting writers with follower counts below a certain number. The combo is steering the community away from Baldwin’s founding intentions and putting an excessive amount of attention on a vanity metric that will have limited impact in the long-run. Read the full article at LitReactor. Yes! We are less than one week away from Barrelhouse magazine’s Conversations and Connections! While I’m not able to attend this spring, I’m planning to attend in the fall (fingers crossed). For those of you who find AWP intimidating, overwhelming, and/or too damn expensive, I would highly recommend checking out Conversations and Connections. It's a bi-annual, one-day writing conference that brings writers, editors, and publishers together. Barrelhouse has been hosting it in Arlington, VA during the spring for over ten years, and has been hosting it in Pittsburgh, PA during the fall for the past five years. AWP 2019 is almost here and I could not be more pumped! Not only will I get to go to one of my favorite literary events of the year (with some of my favorite people), but I will also get to go to Portland for the first time (win-win!). Every year it seems someone writes a tip sheet about how to make the most out of you AWP experience. And while I certainly have my suggestions, the number one thing I would like to emphasize is do you because there is no one way to go about AWP. We are all attending with our own agendas in mind. Whether it be to go to as many panels as our schedules will allow, network at the book fair, sneak into the after-parties, or just trying to get your hands on as much swag as possible, do it.
The only thing more terrifying than letting another human read your work is having to pitch your work in two sentences or less. Two sentences that have the power to peak or deter interest in the idea you may have spent days/weeks/months/years working to create. Let’s be honest: No one enjoys being dismissed or rejected. In fact, it sucks. But unfortunately, as writers, we are playing a game of failure and so it is important to make sure we are taking the time to do the little things that will help us decrease this margin of failure.
If there is only one thing you take away from this blog let it be this: Publishing is a people business! At some point, whether you are a reader, a writer, an editor, a publicist, a marketer, or whatever, you are going to need to interact with people inside and outside the literary community. How you go about these interactions will greatly impact your present and your future. One conversation, one job, one panel has the potential to make or break you.
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