Two Proposals

Monday, January 2, 2006

I have a couple of small proposals to start off the New Year and the New Blog. [MI]

Over the several years that I've been running my community site (these days called The Big Red House), I have tried without much luck to motivate the gang to engage with me in a couple of activities: reading and writing.

Well, not in the most literal sense. What I mean is that we've tried a few times to organize a reading group project, and I've tried again and again to get people to do writing exercises with me. Neither has ever gotten much traction.

I've sort of come to believe that all reading groups are basically doomed to fail, whether they're online or not. People have excellent intentions and join up for them, then they don't read the book, or aren't very good at discussing them, or whatever and they sort of slink away, leaving one or two people to fend for themselves. But I also know that the online world does not lack for people who probably are good at reading groups. So I wanted to throw out a general invitation to anyone who is interested in doing one with me to drop me an e-mail.

As far as a writing group goes, I am not looking for people who are banging out the Great American Novel. I am looking for people who like to write and need a place to practice without having to engage in the ego-jostling competitions that most writing groups turn into. If you're trying to polish your novel/screenplay/book of poetry, this is not the sort of thing for you. Again, my forum friends are generally not writerly types, and so they've occasionally joined in to make me happy, but it has never panned out for long.

These are standing invitations, by the way. If anyone responds, I'll get in touch with you privately and we'll figure out how such things might actually work.

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Two Proposals

Monday, January 2, 2006