SPAWN Office Hours #18
Pirate hours now! Get over here with your questions and support. Thursday 6pm-7pm BST and 7-8pm CET.
Welcome to SPAWN, Substack Pirate After Work Network. We’re here on Thursdays 6pm BST UK, 7pm CET. For those who are unable to join live, post a question out of hours and tick the box to have it on Notes so you get more chances for an answer.
If you’re here for the first time introduce yourself. Ideally, answer questions from others and engage with newcomers and veteran stackers.
I’ll start us off with a few questions/tasks for today’s SPAWN:
1). What’s the most daring piece you’ve written on Substack. Why do you feel like that around it?
2). How do you feel about publishing on Substack, pressing the Continue button?
3). Share 3 annoying facts about you as a writer and how you tackle them.
SPAWN is Office Hours and hang out with
and our lovely crew. We’ll talk all things Substack that we love or don’t understand. The floor is always open to your questions.Thursday 27 June
Vancouver PDT 10am -11am
Phoenix, Arizona MST 10am-11am
London BST 6pm-7pm
Paris CET 7pm-8pm
Athens EEST 8pm-10pm
New Delhi IST 10:30pm-11:30pm
Sydney AEST (28 June) 3am-4am
Fiji GMT+12 (28 June) 5am-6am
We are live for an hour and many stay for longer. Mostly, we chat about writing and Substacking; we celebrate each other’s successes and find new readers and subscribers in the process. Before we go on to this week’s SPAWN here’s what we did last week and make sure you check the comments as there are some useful resources in there:
Time zones differ and our community is all over the world so naturally comments spill outside the live hour. You’re welcome to join pre or after hours. We have novel, short story, poetry, non-fiction and travel writers, podcasters, youtubers and journalists. Between us, we solve most questions.
I invite you over to comment about what’s been eating you on Substack and what’s been good this week. Share your questions and achievements.
This session is about sharing what you know about writing or Substack, asking questions and socialising with others. Everyone’s welcome to join the conversation. Politeness and kindness are our rules. Offer advice if you can, no guesswork and no spammers. We haven’t had anyone’s comments left unanswered so far. SPAWN readers are a supportive community and many of us support one another outside this weekly event.
Tip: Read a book you like.
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There is also a live in person 10 week Writer Pilgrim workshop for which you sign up here, starts this Friday for the Greater London crowd. (This event is now sold out).
It's hard to say what my most daring piece would be. Writing and art are the places where I feel I can be the most candid. in that regard, I rarely shy away from being open. To me that's point, to see what it is I most need to, what I can say in no other way.
Maybe it's for that reason that the publish button doesn't often trouble me. It's a necessary part of my creative process. It's teh way i clear my desk and my head so i can move on to teh next thing.
Writing, itself, can be very annoying to me, lol. It's excruciating and difficult, is never effortless. never comes easy. It's always a matter of digging and pulling and exhaustion and agony. I'll put it off for as long as possible, until it becomes absolutely necessary.
Hi everyone!
So this week, I've been exploring Song Title Fiction a little more, and put up a brand new story that wasn't part of the May Challenge. This one features the songs of Green Day, and has a green message. It's a really fun format to write for and I think it adds a little something extra to the stories to have the Song Titles in there for people to spot, so I'm definitely planning to expand my collection of these on here in the future.
You can find it here, if you missed it: https://chrisjfranklin.substack.com/p/run-the-titles-volume-two
Another thing I've been noticing this week, is related to the View Counter. Did you know if you click on the Total Views box in the Dashboard, it takes you to a place where you can see where all those views have been coming from?
We were talking about SEO a few weeks ago, and it turns out I have been getting some views from search engines. Google, Bing and Yahoo. But I've no idea how. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you what search terms were the ones that did it, so there doesn't seem to be any way to capitalise on it or make sure it happens again.
I've also been getting some traffic from TikTok. Which is astonishing, because I'm not even on TikTok. Haha. But again, it doesn't seem to tell you exactly what's causing that to occur, which is a shame.
But yes, I definitely recommend going in there, because you'll probably be amazed by where readers are coming from!
What have you all been up to? 😎