Before I arrived at Steemit I often had ideas for stories, but never sat down and actually put key to screen, or pen to paper. Within a few weeks here I decided to have a stab at it. These posts were ok but lacked something. My point of view was all wrong, my tenses mixed up, and my grammar wasn't up to par.

Meanwhile, I joined the #minnowsupportproject and soon became a moderator there. I was overjoyed when I met the lovely Hive account@rhondak at PALnet. You see, among her other great qualities she is a published author and knows her way around a story. She is also a brilliant editor. She put this to good use by creating the #fiction-workshop channel and was soon joined by friend and mentor Hive account@carolkean - author and editor at Perihelion Science Fiction. The channel has since attracted many more writers - some requiring critique, others happy to help flesh out stories, suggest edits, etc. It has grown into a great community and a resource for aspiring authors of fiction. I have benefitted greatly from all the help available there and I feel my writing has improved dramatically.

Hive account@rhondak has also created @SFT - the Steemhouse Fiction Trail. This is a curation trail that shares first chapters and one off stories, excellent pieces of work that have gone through critiquing and editing at the fiction workshop. Eventually, the hope is to grow into the first publishing house entirely backed by cryptocurrency. A website, housing a library of SFT curated works, can be found at http://sftlibrary.com/ - also created by Hive account@rhondak.

Another excellent initiative, suggested by Hive account@aggroed - the founder of the minnow support project - has been set up, called SteemShelves. The idea is for you to have a place to link all your serialized posts, which saves readers having to manually trawl through your blog to find previous chapters. The site can be found at http://www.steemshelves.com/ - read more HERE.

To get an idea of what a SteemShelf looks like here is mine for my Virtual Mortality sci-fi series: http://www.steemshelves.com/gmuxx/

So in conclusion, if you are a fiction author or aspiring to become one, join us at https://discord.gg/t7Yz679 - you are most welcome to submit your work for review, edit, and critique. Please don't drop Steemit links though, we prefer to work with Google docs to allow the reviewers to make edits and comments. See HERE for a run through of how to set up a Google doc for editing and comments. Seasoned writers are very welcome too who may wish to help with critiquing or editing.