As mentioned in The Ink Well newsletter, 
I've been around Steem and now Hive for a little while and some of you will already know me from other communities and activities. As I'm taking on a new role with The Ink Well, I thought I would write a little about my interests in creative writing and story-telling.
Me and Writing
I was a passionate reader from a very early age and I loved getting lost in a book. Later, I came to poetry and drama and, later still, to writing myself. My early efforts were around screenplays and in the past few years, I've become interested in creative non-fiction.
Source Frontline Books, featured in The Guardian's best uk bookshops.
For a while, I was an independent bookseller and part of a network for independent publishers. I organised a week-long literature festival every year for five years, promoting local writers and creative writing workshops, including poetry, screenwriting and graphic novels. We commissioned writers for the bookshop blog and ran a heavily oversubscribed Radical Fiction reading group, where The Death Ship was voted top of the readers' poll.
Source The Death Ship tells the story of an American sailor, stateless and penniless because he has lost his passport, who is harassed by police and hounded across Europe until he finds an 'illegal' job shoveling coal in the hold of a steamer bound for destruction. The Death Ship is the first of B. Traven's politically charged novels about life among the downtrodden, which have sold more than thirty million copies in thirty-six languages.
The book shop led to working in the Humanities Department at De Montfort University, where I co-ordinated Narrative Laboratory. This was a cross-disciplinary project that aimed to introduce writers to new ways to earn a living through social media. I went on to do a masters degree in digital media and society, where I became fascinated by fan culture and convergence culture, where old and new media collide.
Source The Matrix franchise - a superb example of convergence culture.
Source The film is considered to be among the best science fiction films of all time ... [and] ... led to the release of two feature film sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions ... also box office successes. The Matrix franchise was further expanded through the production of [interwoven and spin-off] comic books, video games and animated short films ... [and] has also inspired books and theories expanding on some of the religious and philosophical ideas alluded to in the films.
We've had our own little convergence culture in The Ink Well - the Torundel story and all its younglings, bringing together diverse writers and artists, some of them new to fiction.
Thoughts About The Inkwell
As
To start, we've set up a Fiction Summer Season Challenge with weekly prompts. The launch post will be later today. There will be a similar Poetry Summer Season Challenge which will launch on Monday 11 May 2020. The prompts for both challenges will be the same but the criteria for curating poetry will be slightly different.
Hive Give Away
Tell me in the comments below:
- what you like most about The Ink Well and
- what activities you would like to see.
Each of the best comments will receive a free Hive.
Give away closes when the post pays out.