SPAWN Office Hours #128
Pirate hours every Thursday from 6pm-7pm BST or 7-8pm CET onwards. Get over here with your comments, questions and support.
We’re here for our weekly writing community! Here for you to check in and let us know what you’re up to and how you’re doing.
Here’s one of my latest podcast episode:
NaPoWriMo
Greedy winter Greedy winter lingers With snowy winds and thunders Sky greyed a monochrome wonder White diagrams its only decor A rare phenomenon They call you thundersnow Thunder’s gonna wear White wedding snow Your dress that will distract and disappear as you lower the hem When it will melt in front of your eyes To…
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). How long should a post be? Where do you stand on that? There are many factors that will decide how long someone stays to read your post beyond opening it.
2). Should each theme have a separate post/article or do you think you can put several different ideas in one and the same post. Could you for example talk about the politics in the middle east, then a personal school story of yours and Cape Verde’s musical history as if your publication is a magazine with various articles? If you write poetry or stories or non-fiction this might look different on your publication, ie you could post four different poems, or two different stories that aren’t linked in any way. How does that work?
3). What are your August plans?
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Hello everyone for late night SPAWN!
I've been a bit quiet recently on the Muse. My last post was on the 22nd of July, where I talked about the idea of Cavendish Spaces, and proposing to make a new space, which I call the "bakery". Its purpose is to be a sort of "creative" space, where things are synthesized. You can find the article here: https://theautisticmuse.substack.com/p/the-bakery-extending-the-cavendish?r=1v3058
I've also learned in the past week that a poem of mine will be published in the digital magazine Poetic Reveries in August. That issue will come out on August 8.
Anyway, onwards with the questions...
1. My general philosophy with posts is to ensure that I encapsulate everything that I want to cover. I tend to cover things in quite a lot of detail, so my posts can be quite long. This is more evident when I cover things that have happened in real life, or I'm trying to explain something that has been festering in my head.
The poetry I write is a bit different. A lot of the poetry I write is in a specific form (usually haiku or tanka, although I have played with the limerick form recently), and usually these have either syllable or line requirements that I must follow. When writing free form poetry, I stop when I feel the picture that I wanted to "paint" is complete.
2. For my thought pieces I like keeping ideas separate. This makes it easier for me to reference them later, in the case that my thoughts have evolved or changed.
For poetry pieces I use sections to break the post into two distinct parts - the poem itself, and then my reflection, which is usually steeped in my own experience. Of course, each poem gets its own post.
The Imperfect Singers Club kind of works differently as I highlight last month's entries, and then post the current month's prompt in a post. It utilizes the chat feature quite heavily; each month gets its own thread. This way I can keep track of all the entries easily.
3. August is the month of county fairs! I'll be at both the Niagara County Fair and the Erie County Fair, working on health outreach. I will also be digging into torrin a. greathouse's poetry work, as I've bought her first poetry collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, a couple of days ago. It should arrive at my door on Saturday.
The first question is very apt for what I’m doing right now!
1) How long should a post be? Where do you stand on that? There are many factors that will decide how long someone stays to read your post beyond opening it.
As long or as short as you like. If I see a post that has a read time of over 15 minutes, that is one I know will need my sustained attention, so I’ll want to savour it, especially if it’s from an author I like. My fiction chapters usually hit the “post too long to read in email” because if I made them shorter, we’d still be reading book 3 instead of being into book 4. However, there’s an almost daily fantasy writing challenge going on right now and I am challenging myself in addition to make it a short daily serial, so maybe a 5 minute read. (And today’s might be shorter as I’m struggling. Ahem.)
2). Should each theme have a separate post/article or do you think you can put several different ideas in one and the same post. Could you for example talk about the politics in the middle east, then a personal school story of yours and Cape Verde’s musical history as if your publication is a magazine with various articles? If you write poetry or stories or non-fiction this might look different on your publication, ie you could post four different poems, or two different stories that aren’t linked in any way. How does that work?
Well, you could if you could tie it all together it could go into one post/article, but your example very much sounds like three different articles, in which case your entire publication is that magazine with its own sections.
3). What are your August plans?
I have a hurty knee (it’s getting better), but my goal is to continue plugging away at the WIP, and re-establish both an art studio practice (which requires going up and down stairs) and a proper chair yoga practice (which was not the cause of said hurty knee. I’m pretty sure I banged it and then the ligaments and or kneecap complained, because yesterday I heard a loud click in that region and it has been improving since.