Wordsmith Workshop · 1:08am Feb 2nd, 2018

I officially released a new group today called the Wordsmith Workshop!

Before I get into the details of this group, I should tell you a little bit of a backstory leading up to this group's creation. The tale begins with my joining of the Reviewer Café in March of last year. I believe I spent a full month in there before I decided that it was a good fit for my training into becoming a better writer.

As most of you are aware, I've spent quite a bit of my free time reviewing, which remains my main distraction from creating more stories to this day. I've done quite a bit of reviewing. I think I've logged somewhere on the order of forty by now, the third highest number of reviews within the group.

Then, late fall last year, I was promoted to an admin. As a result of this, I deescalated my output of reviews in favor of getting the group back into what I perceive as being "in shape". That is to say, reintroduced the Weekly Reports, kept the story folders up to date (which the reviewers absolutely need in order to properly review, lest they begin taking already claimed stories to review), and reintroduced the feature board system. I also helped out with statistical analysis of reviews and output.

Bottom line, there was a lot of work to be done in it, and that's not even counting the fact that I had the Discord chat to keep up with on top of that. All of this while trying to get you all more content, which I am still seeing a lack on my part in that department (shame on me! ). All of this resulted in the de-escalation of my review output.

As an admin, I learned from the café creator's aspirations for a network of groups, his own niche within the community. As a whole, his community has been growing this entire time, and it inspired me to give more to it. I wanted to create my own group within his network, which is now known as The Creator's Guild.

My involvement with this project has been on-going for approximately three months now, starting off as merely an idea. "I want to create a group," I said to myself. But what kind of group would it be? I had several ideas, but I wasn't quite sure which one would best fit in alongside his aspirations.

It could have been a library, which would have been an easy one group to maintain. The downside to that, though, is that there are already a ton of those kinds of groups out there. It didn't stand out to me as a group that was worth running. If I had gone with that idea, it probably would have dried up within three months or so due to lack of interest on my part.

It could have been a contest group. I briefly held a contest back in September of last year, and I had so much fun running it that I thought that it would have been an excellent idea to run with. Unfortunately, it didn't jive well with our current theme. Furthermore, the idea doesn't seem to stand strong on its own. Upon closer inspection of the system it would inevitably have to adopt, it seems more appropriate that it would be a subsystem within an existing group. Likely the café, if we can ever settle down with our ideas for long enough to implement it.

Then there were a ton of other ideas, but I don't think it's worth mentioning the specifics here. Suffice it to say, the ideas were washed up or half-baked.

The idea I ended up settling with is an editing service. It's something that people would constantly be searching for, and if I did my research correctly, a "market" -- if you can call it that here -- that, while has been tapped only a few groups. The number is actually larger than a few, but from what I saw there were a number of ones that had gone dormant from inactivity.

With the vision in mind, I have spent these last three months designing the structure that would go into this guild. I implemented design features from two of the Creator's Guild groups. Not only does this help mesh together with the other existing groups, but the design appears to be the simplest route I could take without bottling up my crew, enforcing an inflated number of completed jobs, and muddying it down in numerous record-keeping documents.

My design was with 'fun' as the goal in mind, because that's what we're all here to have in the first place: fun. The moment I turn it into a job is the moment that the group loses its focus. Having fun while doing it also means jobs well done, but that's another story.

Three months later, I have finally released the Wordsmith Workshop today. I'm excited to see where this leads!

There is still the chance that it could be a wash, but even if that were the case, there is something to be learned here regardless of its success or failure. Another small step on my journey of self-discovery. So far, it looks promising. As I am writing this, the number of members in my group has risen to a total of thirty-eight, and reached number four on the trending list of groups. It's slowed down a bit now, and there are no requests yet, but I am hopeful.