Feeling the Need for Community

I am trying to decide what role a blog plays when a newsletter exists.

(You can sign up for mine here.)

(See how that worked?)

Though I suppose this is a better place to do a single dive into one issue. Not everyone wants my rants in their inbox, I suppose.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I interact with the writing community and how that’s changed, and if there are ways I can do it better. Twitter is noisy. And it’s going to get noisier because it’s an election year in the United States. (Okay, it’s always an election year for some races somewhere but this is a presidential election year for us, and in case you’ve had your head in the sand, we have an autocratic corrupt as heck despot in charge and we’ve got to get him out.)

Twitter’s also The Worst place to have conversations.

Twitter’s also The Worst.

Just in general. It’s very good when there are not Nazis and people slow down and think through things. But the platform is not interested in getting rid of the Nazis and it’s not a platform conducive to slowing down and thinking through things.

I like in person spaces with writers, but it’s hard to get people together with different schedules. Us dayjobbers are free at night, and often full-time writers aren’t because they have family/childcare necessities at night. But I want to figure out how to coordinate more of these. I’m not sure how to do that. I have the outdoor space at my apartment in good weather, but we won’t have that for another five months, at best.

I also really struggle with the lack of craft-focused conventions, conferences, and workshops for mid-career writers, especially that are affordable. I want to work on this, but I struggle to find people who also have the bandwidth to work on it with me as it’s not a one person show.

I want places to really chew on one topic for awhile. Let’s get together and talk about Macmillan’s war on libraries through their ebook embargo. Let’s get together and talk about purity culture in fandom and the ways it is seeping into Young Adult. Let’s get together and talk about the ways that Young Adult has shifted up and how we can reach those readers who are being left behind in the gap between MG and YA. Let’s get together and talk about the ongoing disparity in how authors of color are treated and paid for school visits versus white authors. Let’s get together and work on professional development.

But I don’t know how to bring that all together yet. It’s frustrating. I want to do something. But I don’t know how to do it yet. And I can’t do it alone.

More than ever, I feel like writing communities need to go deeper, be more inclusive, and be willing to have hard and deep conversations. Not just about issues, but about craft, about the face of our industry, about the ways we want to grow. Those can’t happen on Twitter. And not all of us have spaces to have those conversations. And I find myself hungry for them.

So this year, I think that’s what I’m going to try and do here on the blog. I don’t know if it’ll be too one way or not, but I’m going to try and use this blog to talk about craft and issues that affect the way I move through my career and my industry and my art. And you are always welcome to jump in. Please do comment. Please do talk. Please do ask questions. I’m here for all of them.

(Unless you’re antisemitic, transphobic, racist, misogynist, Islamophobic or in other ways a bigot. Then I’ll delete your comment. My blog, my rules.)