Congrats to vdgg81 for an intriguing poem, and many thanks to Le Ministre, as always, for organizing this.
Great job, everyone, and congratulations to vdgg81 (the approbation for the poem is well deserved).
Thanks always to Le Ministre de l’au-delà for running these things.
It’s part of the atmosphere of this particular message board that there is a strong undercurrent of support for the creative endeavours of the membership, whether amateur or professional. It’s board policy that things like a gig announcement, CD release or book launch are to be posted after asking permission of the Mods, and that permission is rarely withheld.
In the case of both the Poetry Sweatshops and the Short Fiction Contests, the Mods have very kindly given their permission for me to run them as frequently as seems appropriate - that permission is something which I greatly appreciate and I do not take it for granted. Although this particular Poetry Sweatshop required the barest minimum of moderator involvement, they have shown their support many times by dealing with
- extra editing to fix my egregious errors, (You’d think that cutting and pasting from gmail to the SDMB would be pretty straight-forward and beyond the capacity of even a mediaeval scribbler like me to fwck it up, but it ain’t!)
- adding a ‘sticky’ to the Anthology Thread when requested (We haven’t requested for the last few - the vote to ‘hits’ ratio seems pretty steady at around one vote for every 20 - 25 hits whether the sticky is there or not.)
- verifying that Le Ministre de l’au-delà has written the poem that he publishes in the hour between the receipt of the auto-reply and the sending of a CC reply
over and above their general moral support and encouragement.
And I’ve said before, and will say again here, your thanks are gratefully acknowledged, you’re all very welcome but running these Sweatshops and Fiction Contests is a tremendous source of pleasure to me. There exists nothing like a public deadline to get me off my butt and into writing, and the mutual support and encouragement of fellow writers and poets is extremely useful to me. Especially for the people who contribute month after month, we are an unusual blend of some of the best aspects of a writers’ group and a contest, and I look forward to seeing everyone’s work each time I run one of these.
I think I speak for all of us when I say, we deeply appreciate all you do. Even if you do have fun doing it!
Thanks for indulging my curiosity. Turns out it’s even more involved than I already thought! Thanks to all who make this possible. Looking forward to the next short story thread!
I’m imagining trying to set this sort of thing up within the short editing window. Now I understand!