Twitter Party Recap

Wow, tonight's Twitter party was a bit of a whirlwind.
Cheryl, Katie, and I are always thrilled to see familiar faces alongside many new ones.

We talked about the Red Writing Hood prompt and many of you are excited about tackling it, while others are intimidated by bringing the funny. Though many of us have a difficult time with humor, the general consensus seemed to be that we'd give it a go and see where it takes us.

We clarified the way our prompts work now.
The Red Writing Hood prompt is posted on Tuesdays and links up on Friday.
The Remembe(red) prompt is posted on Fridays and links up on Tuesdays.
Repeat after me... ;)

We talked about how difficult it is to visit the other posts that are linked up, but it feels great to get comments. So, we encourage you to visit and comment on as many as you possibly can when you link up. It is that give and take that makes a community like ours strong. It's also a great idea to start at the end and work your way up so that we can distribute those comments. We know that it takes time, but we exist here for one another.

We talked about avoiding wordiness, since we lose our readers when we bury them in excessive words. We also discussed the importance of not burying the lede and using shorter paragraphs.

We spoke, again, about turning off word verification. Many readers will not comment if they have to jump through hoops to do so. If you use word verification and don't know how to turn it off, ask around, you'd be surprised by how many people can help. It was suggested that word verification kills puppies. And unicorns.

The idea of shaking things up and not writing in chronological order came up. Moving things around often makes for a much more interesting piece.

We asked if any of you would be interested in having a writing partner, someone to help you with anything from proofreading for typos to heavier content editing and we got an incredibly positive response. If you didn't attend the twitter party and would like a partner, leave a comment and I'll add you to the list.

And all of that is probably about fifty percent of what we talked about.

So, here's where you come in. Cheryl, Katie, and I need your help with a couple of things:

1. If you attended, please share in the comments what your biggest take away was. What resonated with you and left you thinking?

2. Whether you attended or not, tell us what you'd like to discuss in coming weeks. What, specifically, would you find helpful?

Thanks to everyone who attended, even if only for a few minutes. We always have so much fun.

(If you are not on Twitter and are curious about it, just ask one of us and we'll happily walk you through it.)