I am a 23 year old writer from the wonderful state of Illinois. I graduated from college last December and spent some time abroad teaching English. I recently got back in the country and applied to grad school. I found this website a few weeks ago and thought I'd make an account. I've been looking for a good writing community to join and this seems to fit the bill. A little about my writing experience: I started writing silly little stories when I was a kid and continued until high school, when I started writing poetry instead. I did that for a few years, though I did find the time to write my first serious story as a college freshman. That won a local writing contest, but I didn't write any other stories for a couple more years. I self-published my first book, a collection of short stories, in January 2011. I sold about seventy copies on campus and to some friends. I'm currently working on my second collection and hope to have it out early next year. My favorite writers include Gil Scott-Heron, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, Henry Rollins and Langston Hughes. I'm looking forward to sharing my work with all of you and reading other writers' stories as well.
Welcome to Writing Forums, Motorvision! I hope you find what you're looking for here, whatever your interests in writing. This forum aims to provide the best workshopping resources on the internet, and to that end we have a few rules which you should familiarise yourself with before you get stuck in. The main section of the site is the Writing Workshop, where members can post their writing in order to receive critique of their work. However, before we allow members to post their work, they must have met some basic requirements. Firstly, you must have been a member for fourteen days, and have made twenty posts on the forum overall (please note, posts in Word Games do not count towards this). This is so that members, when they post their work, have familiarised themselves with the forums and contributed to them (as well as hopefully learned something for themselves). Secondly, members must provide two constructive reviews of other people's work for each piece of their own that they wish to post. This is because we believe that the focus of workshopping should be equally upon giving reviews as receiving them, as they allow a writer to practice and improve their editing skills, which they can then apply to their own writing. Beyond the Writing Workshop, you will find that we have extensive forums for discussion of aspects of writing, as well as a community area for general discussion. We also run periodic short story and poetry contests, which are good for challenging yourself and expanding your skills. If you have any questions or problems, then the moderators (myself, Cogito, Lemex and Dante Dases) should be your first port of call. Any technical problems with the site itself should be directed to Daniel, the site administrator and owner. I would recommend you have a look over the rules so that you know what to expect, and what is expected. But aside from that, I hope you enjoy your time here. Banzai
