#writer's network

(Working) Title: Atlantis

A Summary: Mara spent her summers growing up in her family’s Long Island beach house. She hasn’t been there in years, but when her mom passes away, she has to go back and clean it out. It should only be a two-day job, but then Mara runs into her nighbour and childhood friend, Gabi Valdez. Suddenly, selling the house and leaving the beach forever seems like a bad idea.

Tags: LGBT+ fiction, coming of age, romance, angst with a happy ending, emotional hurt/comfort, grief, mutual pining, friends to lovers

Where the Story is at: currently i am writing my first draft through a mixture of planning and pantsing, this blog will give you updates about the story, excerpts and insight into the narrative. i’m currently unsure about publishing prospects, though it will probably be published for free online before anything else

Welcome to the Writer’s Network! The point of this network is to bring together writer’s on tumblr. The reason for creating this network is to create a group that will not only promote each others work but also give feedback. Whether your blog is big or small, the Writer’s Network will help you promote your work and encourage you to keep going.

Reasons to Join

promoting your work

getting feedback on your work from other members and admins

supportive environment to share your work

open to all levels of writer’s

open to fics, one shots, short stories, poetry, original works 

nsfw works is allowed but will be tagged with a warning

good community to help develop your skills and communicate

Rules to Apply

follow this blog (following the admins too is optional but do check them out on the members page)

reblog this post

read the rules

fill out application form

After Becoming a Member

follow the #thewritersnetwork tag

when posting any writings that you want to share with the network, tag #thewritersnetwork in the first 5 tags

if we don’t reblog your work within a week of you posting it with the tag then please message us 

put a link to the network somewhere on your blog

there’s a group chat on kkt and if you have filled out that section in the form then you will be added to it, if you’re not added within 3 days please message us

if you’d like feedback on your work please add #feedbackwanted in the tags

When I was a child I thought that writing was filling a notebook with words and walking to the next editorial to get it published. I could fill a notebook, but I didn't have any place to walk into or ask for a ride to the publishing world.

When I wrote my first novel I thought to myself I would always write for an empty audience, so it was okay not to try. I didn't know anyone who was a writer, and everyone I used to know was long gone away. I wasn't thinking about having readers at all.

(Note to reader;

Sorry, I lied. When I wrote my first novel I was thirteen, I took the notebook with me for a travel, wrote the last sentence in a cabin by the sea. I was sitting at the table, in front of an open door/window and the sea was truly blue, and the sand was truly white.

Of course, I was thirteen and you can't take anything from that age to be serious. It was a horrible draft and it had around fifty written pages, with drawings in the middle.

I told my parents I just finished the first draft and they didn't say anything more than ‘Well, okay'.

So, that one doesn't count. Let's continue.)

When I had my first couple of (truly) bad horror stories, writing about rats the most, I started thinking for a name for my blog, and that made my head fly because I never thought I would be the kind of person so extrovert to promote myself into a bunch of strangers. For me, it was like getting naked in front of a crowd.

By the way, the name for lorenwrites is taken by a blogger dad of two girls.

That's how the internet works. You do get naked in front of a crowd, but everyone is naked too, and everyone, include you, is wearing a mask. The first time is weird, by the third time you are used to it. The beauty stands that you don't care about the mask anymore, and at the end, your mask reflects more of you than your face ever will.

So I started doing things that the person without a mask wouldn't do. Taking photos is one.

At first, I took photographs of what I found interesting. I made some photo-shoots in my garden; I worked out some portraits to hand in my social media. I posted it all, all together because I didn't know better.

Later I would start taking photos of whatever I found on hand that it was old enough to be reconsidered. I didn't write anything, I wasn't sure what to say that genuinely could catch your attention.

‘Is anyone reading this?'

Those are the kind of questions that don't get the writing done.

I traveled far away, to Japan to be specific, which got one of my dreams come true.

There I started talking about my photos. I wrote everything on the cell phone, directly on the Instagram app. Whatever I put below each photograph, it was, for sure, horribly written. I ran out of stamina quite soon, as I ventured deeper and longer inside the country. When I came back home, I felt a little bit broken.

It's been months, and still each morning I wake up wanting to come back.

I've been having ideas for coming back there. Like applying for an internship. Seriously wondering how much one of those one-room-apartments would cost. I never work on those plans. If I go I would have to leave many people behind and I don't know if I can.

I guess that's the double face of being in a place so soul changing.

When I came back I started working every day, and in the mornings I immersed myself into a, what I thought, a horror story called The Yurei. When I reached page fifty I realized that I wanted to go back to the beginning to better it. It wasn't a story anymore, but I wasn't ready for that novel.

 On July I had a crisis. By the end of the month, I had left everything.

When August started I came back to some old notes I had for a novel I was planning to write as soon as I could. It took me some more time to realize that if I really was planning on writing and publish that new novel, I needed to get in touch with my audience. I opened the Instagram app again and realized I still had a certain amount of followers. So, I grabbed an old notebook and made a To-Do-List.

It had been months since the last time I published something on my blog.

While working on it I started writing about the photographs I was taking. Cell phone grew short on me and I started working on the computer. I grabbed mom's camera.

(Another note;

The same camera from when my mother took a year-long course of professional photography. I never saw any of her photographs. The camera, at the moment a fairly expensive Olympus, was always empty.

Now the Olympus is still a good camera, but not a new professional one. It's so old that I couldn't find a new memory card for it. It's still the camera I would worry if it broke. It works, perfectly).

A couple of months ago I opened my Tumblr to post my daily stories.

I don't know why I wanted to write about me. You know, I still live with my parents. I barely leave the house. Everything I have done, I have done it from my room. The other day I bumped into a table while cleaning the floor and I blurted ‘sorry' to it.

My friends left me as their careers became more difficult and even though recess has already started, they never called me back.

Why would someone be interested in my life?

Those are the kind of questions that don't get the writing done.

Because, at the end, the twenty thousand characters Instagram allows were few to me.  I wanted to keep on writing, but it was like a plant inside a crystal cage, pressing the glass, looking for air. The characters were fighting to break the page.

It surprised me the most how easy it was to find the right people to be with. The incredible quantity of good, positive messages you could find on the site. I learned things that I wouldn't have learned otherwise because there are a lot of themes that are not talked about here. This is because of ignorance, or indifference, against many kinds of people, and I don't want to be ignorant, either indifferent, anymore.

When December came I got somehow anxious.

It’s the time when everyone is seeing back on the year and counted how much they had achieved. I had to lives to weight, separately: My life as a freelance artist and my life as a writer.

I wanted to see back, but I’m having a hard time seeing my professional evolution. I lost some months due to depression and worked on dead-end projects. I filled drawers and drawers of pages, not to ever be published. I got a deal, a small one. I haven't been paid a cent yet, on my first working alone year.

I was afraid of some big eye looking at me and telling me I have failed at everything, and how everyone (younger, more talented, more worthy than me) was doing better.

But on the writer part of my life, I have ever reached so far. I never knew I could. So, I guess, I didn't lose this year, or at least, not all of it.