OK. A new year. 2016. Let’s go.
Here at Writers Bloc we’re going to make it our mission to help you with your writing. Yes you! You! You glorious thing! You are our protagonist, our hero, our humble peasant who, with our intervention, will be empowered to achieve great things! Just like Luke in Star Wars! Or Rey in the shot-for-shot Star Wars reboot!
Let’s start with some motivational facts!
Did you know Rimbaud never wrote again after 21? And was dead by 37? Why are you worse than Rimbaud? Work harder.
In the time it took you to make breakfast this morning, a dangerously incompetent but powerful man who makes more money than you’ll ever see has already banged another nail in the coffin of his career by calling a journalist a ‘Mad witch’! Just think about that for a minute when you approach your writing-craft. If you work hard maybe one day you can be that journalist!
Jack Kerouac famously wrote On the Road in just three weeks! Sure it took buckets of dangerous amphetamine and years of revision and decades of self-aggrandising, but he did it! If you were more of a boastful speed-hound you could be a famous Beat poet by now!
You don’t have to wait until NaNoWriMo to frantically write a novel. Start now, and think how smug you’ll be tweeting your pomodoros come November.
And to move onto some exciting news:
This month we’re going to be concentrating on tips and tricks to motivate you for the New Year and keep you on track to reach your goals. This includes advice and tools from working writers in different fields, interviews with gatekeepers and editors who have the power to publish you and help you reach your goals this year, and tastemakers and thought leaders in the writing industry.
Bookmark our homepage, or better yet, make it your homepage, or even better, subscribe to our Twitter, Facebook and Email News to stay in the loop.
Oh, and subscribe to our Youtube channel to follow the adventures of Bri Lee, whose enthusiasm for writing is both heart-warming and contagious. Click here to watch her right now! With that kind of chutzpah, she could write On The Road in, like, two weeks. And doesn’t even need benzedrine and Allen Ginsberg to sponge off for ages!
And now THE MOST EXCITING NEWS SO FAR THIS YEAR
We think it’s important to invest in literature, and in the future of Australian writers in particular, so starting today, we’re going to start curating and publishing a selection of original creative writing.
Each month, we will choose one short story, poem, or otherwise brilliant piece of writing to be our Bloc Feature. The Writers Bloc team of professional editors, teachers and award-winning creative writers will then work with you to polish the piece and publish it along with specially commissioned cover art. A little like this.
Best of all, we’ll pay you professional rates for the story, and include you in our end-of year anthology of creative writing.
If you’re interested, all you have to do is upload a completed draft of your story to our Workshop section, and join in our community of creative writers helping each other to grow. Every piece uploaded to our site is automatically in the running to become that month’s Bloc Feature.
Cheers, and looking forward to creating great things with you in the New Year.
