Almost a year ago now, I met a local author who tended bar throughout the neighborhood. We got to talking about writing and reading and the problems with branching out in an endangered medium, and he told me about his brand new Literary group called Literate Sunday.
Every Sunday he takes in submissions from the now hundreds of members and prints them out to be presented at the Bar for everyone to read. And each week a selected story is emailed out to the other members as the featured story.
The catch? There are no names.
The entire group is anonymous, and it's never been more logical to do so. Matthew D'Abate started the group with the intention of removing the Ego, the Expectations, and the Inhibition in writing.
It's helped my craft like nothing else. Having me burn out stories every week and reading what the rest of the world is still writing, because contrary to popular belief, people still read. And people still write.
This week The NY Times featured an entire article on Matt's group and even used a nice little quote from me to finish it off. It was a wonderful boost of confidence to be referred to as a Freelance Writer, and its even more rewarding knowing that I've not had to jump on any level of entitlement to move forward. Within this group I'm just another anonymous writer, and when I see you at the bar and we talk about these stories, you could be talking about mine right in front of me or I could discuss yours right in front of you. There's nothing holding anyone back from the truth.
Although, because you're reading this on my website, there's plenty of links to all my work online in my blog... but we'll keep that hush hush...