New Feature – Writing Workshop!

I finally feel like I’m getting going with this blogging malarkey. I have been posting regularly now for just over three months and have been both surprised and overwhelmed with how warm and encouraging the response has been. My readership is growing in a way I never would have expected (in the month that this new domain has been active I’ve had over 6,000 visits alone!) and your comments and positive feedback have been such an incredible boost and validation to me.

Thank you. I hope you are enjoying reading, I really do. Connecting with you through here is becoming such an amazing source of inspiration and support to me. So please do keep coming back.

Now I’ve got my feet firmly under the table, with a carnival under my belt and a debut place in at number 73 on the Monthly Tots 100 Index of Top Parent Blogs and Bloggers, I feel it’s time to crank this party up a gear.

Alongside my regular post, I’ve been thinking of running a weekly feature for you all to participate in. Something fun that will get your creative juices flowing and hopefully introduce you to some new blogs too.

So here’s the deal-io. Alongside this fledgling blog, as many of you know, and partly as a result of it, has been a growing interest and passion for writing. I know I’m not the only one who enjoys writing, in fact I know that it’s a driving force behind many of the blogs I read and enjoy – people, like me, looking for a way to express themselves and in the process falling back in love with words and language. And I wanted to do something to encourage that, to help fire us all up creatively and get us blogging and writing about the things that inspire us.

Once a week I’m going to issue you with a choice of writing prompts, with inspiration taken from blogs I have read that week and any ideas suggested to me. You’ll then have a few days to think about and write your response to the prompt (or prompts) of your choice and publish it on your blog. If you like I’ll take email submissions too from all you non-blogging weirdos folk, and publish them for you. You can even do it anonymously if you prefer!

Then come back, and via a very handy little widget you’ll be able to publish the link to your post and share it with the world. You’ll be encouraged to read and respond to other entries and comment on your favourites and share perhaps if they’ve inspired you in some way, or made you think about something in a different light, or moved you, or made you laugh. Who knows. I’ll do it too of course, and post my entry along with the widget for your links.

What do you think?

Now I should point out. This isn’t an entirely original idea. In fact it’s a complete rip-off. My American blogging buddy Mama Kat has been running the same concept over at her fab blog for quite some time. But, because she’s lovely, Kat is quite happy for me to start my own UK version of her own writer’s workshop (they’ll be more tea, “bloody hell”s and stiff upper lips over here), and it’s far too good an idea not to spread about a bit. Kat has her audience in the US, and I have mine here in the UK and Europe (and beyond!) so between us I think we’ve got pretty much all of the globe covered (yep, we are that good and you know it).  I’ll be running it on a different day (so you can even pop along and participate in both if you’re extra keen) and very firmly in association with her blog to give all credit where credit is due.

Prompts will be up on Monday so pop back then if you’d like to participate! And don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed if you haven’t already to make sure you’re kept up to date with both my day-to-day posts and the writing prompts as they are published. And stand by – because I am going to require some mad promotion on all of the social networks of your choice.

In the meantime here’s a handy badge link for you to copy for your blog if you’d like to take part, or to use in your workshop posts once we get started (kinda funky don’t you think?!):

<a href=”http://sleepisfortheweak.org.uk”><img src=”http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj90/flowerfairy82/WritingWorkshopBadge.jpg”></a>

Happy writing!

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