Today, I am thrilled to be over on Writers in the Storm, one of Writer’s Digests 100 Best Websites for Writers! Come check out my post and the other great information they have to offer!
When I first started dabbling in writing almost a decade ago, the internet was only just starting to become social. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Even MySpace was still a place for musicians and high school kids, and I was neither by the time it gained mainstream popularity. The problem was, as any first time writer knows, what I needed most in the beginning was someone to talk to about my dream. Do regular people do this kind of thing or just the Published Author Gods? Was any of this dribble any good? Where could I find out more information about how to take my writing to the next level? None of this information was readily available to me without extensive Google searches, and even that wasn’t enough. Writers hadn’t yet taken to the web.
But if you build it, they will come. Right? That’s what I hoped. I started a small community on good ol’ Proboards.com called Writerz Bloque (see how clever I was?), where I posted some of my short stories for feedback. I can’t remember now if anyone visited–ever–but I got a taste for creating a space where people could come together and talk about common interests. I created more forums that eventually grew in size as I learned what visitors needed and how to provide it for them. I joined the MySpace craze where I learned how to blog and fell into the blogging community as I garnered reads of ranking numbers. And I finally got in touch with “my people” on WritersCafe.org. I reached out to those with specific community desires everywhere I went and 10 years later, I lead a writing goals group on Facebook and Twitter in a battle against the blank page, and I’ve met some incredible people along the way.
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