Will you find it surprising that the phrase from Jeff's interview in Wednesday's post that stuck with me most was not the one about mutant alien vampires who will eat my brains?No, the one I kept hearing again and again was "All the dispossessed authors and readers are beginning to walk around in the sunshine and find each other. And that’s only going to increase." It delights me to think that the Novel Matters community is one of those sunny places where great things can happen.
Here you have begun the kind of friendships we so often have urged you to seek. I love it when I see comments on our posts that are not addressed to us, but to other Novel Matters readers. I hope you will find ways to contact each other by email, or if you are so lucky as to live near each other, by phone or even in person.
Here you have shared the kind of epiphanies Megan shared after Latayne's post on Monday. If you are a writer, I urge you to take those kinds of emotional, life changing experiences as opportunities to study a novel, to reverse engineer it by asking what the author did that affected you to such an extent. This will teach you valuable things about writing those kinds of niche novels you love that you may never find in a book about writing. (And there is no better teacher than Sharon Souza.)
I'm going to let you in on a secret, and to give you an assignment.
We six at Novel Matters are at present actively dreaming of ways we can change our site to offer you more. In fact, tomorrow we will have one of our fabulous conference calls (you really have to listen in sometime) to dream of ways we can make this little patch of sunshine a better place to form community, to introduce readers to great writers, to encourage the great writers among our readers to write their very best and send it out into the world.
So here is your assignment: tell us what to talk about tomorrow. What would make this an even better place for you? Please do dream big. It's what we like to do around here.
