Today is a very special day for me. On this day, thirteen years ago, I wrote my very first mass email. You may be wondering what that means, especially when asdf Publishing markets a product called "Mass Emails." As I mentioned in a previous post, mass emails were something I wrote to my friends; all of them, all at once. They were a special outlet for my creativity. Something I cherished. Something I worked on for no reason other than to make people smile. They were also the first real forum for my writing.
We spend a lot of time talking about how we write. Writing conventions dictate our use of grammar and punctuation. Literary conventions inform what features we include in our stories. And of course we as writers decide which of these tools and tricks to incorporate in our work and which to leave by the wayside. All this together culminates in our distinctive style; the way readers define and classify us.
No one is born with a voice all their own though. It's something we form, we practice, we hone. We adjust our language, our delivery. We study techniques to misdirect the reader and to create impact, and we need a training ground to develop these skills. That's what I found in the mass emails. They were a forum to express my thoughts. They were a way for me to take my experiences and turn them into prose, into entertainment. There was a certain ritual to them as I would return again and again to my computer to write these inconsequential stories. They were a setting for me to improve my art.
We live in a golden age of creative expression. We have a limitless number of ways to share our writing. The old traditions of novels and short stories still exist, and they are more popular than ever with our ability to self publish. Beyond that though, we may find our forum in all corners of the internet. In blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. We're all storytellers at heart, and each of these technologies provides a venue with its own perks and constraints to breathe life into the stories we want to tell. And if none of these suit you, then you can always create your own space as I did with my mass emails.
These arenas indirectly affect our writing style as we have to learn how to tell a good story within the confines of our medium. Typically we take our lessons from there and apply them to the larger stories we want to tell. There's another option though. We can take the forums we create for ourselves and scale them to reach a broader audience. That's what I mean when I say we want readers to experience literature in ways no one has ever imagined, and we need your ideas to do it. I've taken my mass emails and expanded them to the world at large through Much Love. Now I want to do the same with the forums you have created for yourself.
Often when I talk about asdf Publishing, people will ask me, "So what are you going to build next?" I'll rattle off a list of product ideas that I've been toying with, but the ultimate answer is I don't know. That's what excites me most about the future. As we at asdf Publishing embark on our journey to find and work with talented artists, I can't wait to learn what shaped your development, what is important to you, and what you want to bring to life.
If you have a concept you would like to explore, reach out to us via our contact page.