Hi! I wanted to take some time to re-introduce myself because we have a few more followers here and I have been offline for the last month.
For our first thread, I’m asking you all to introduce yourselves below. If you are a writer, let me know! A poet? Great! Do you have a website or a particularly funny meme to share? Copy & paste it here in the comments.
I want to get to know you! So if you are struggling to figure out what to share, maybe you could just tell us why you are here and what you hope to get out of this newsletter.
I’ll go first. I’m Alex Knepper, I love reading books and I am a writer. I started this newsletter as a way to share my writing. But I am really wanting to find other writers to want to share, learn and grow with each other!
I just submitted 3 poems yesterday. I have an older post about how to submit your poetry that I want to update— I learned a few things in my adventures. And I really like hanging out on twitter and talking to other writers and poets— most of the time. Which is why I love to hang out here a little more, where deeper discussion can be had.
Well that’s me. Where are you at in your writing journey? ⛰✏️📚
I'm Justin McBride. I write fiction and I'm serializing my novel on Substack. It's a sort of literary fiction/magical realist thing about a young man who spends the summer in Norway visiting relatives and encounters a little girl with 10,000 imaginary friends, a physics student who may have accidentally discovered the secrets of the universe and an art school student who claims her Siberian Husky has written a novel. I've written a lot over the last ten years, including parts of other novels, and I finished a companion novel to the one I described, but I haven't spent a lot of time on the business sides of things. I'm really into the craft of writing sentences and I love to revise (maybe a little too much). I also like to post the music that I've made (music that I credit to my characters) on my page as well. For my day job, I teach Literacy and Creative Writing in a middle school and I love it! Right now, I'm trying to meet more writers and build a little of an audience through my work through Substack, because I think this is the most high end platform out there right now.
I just started reading your serialized novel! I love Norse mythology and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I agree, substack is one of my favorite platforms to hang out on! And it’s just getting more and more sophisticated! What inspired you to write your novel?
It's weird. I had a goal of writing a novel for a long time before I got around to it. In the end, I started the book during a desperate time and it helped me to cope with everything. The book is a grab bag of stuff that interests me. My friend Magnus wanted me to write him a script that took place in Norway. He is from there and wanted the Norwegian government to help fund it. The script didn't go anywhere but I decided to turn it into a novel. The main character, Adlai, is a recurring character in my fiction and I decided it would be fun for him to go on a trip. Dagmar came to me in a sort of vision while I was working on the script. Adlai is such a sad sack, that I thought that it would be fun if someone was excited about him coming to visit. The Norse thing is just from me trying to research the novel and I ended up reading all this Viking stuff and I wanted to weave some of it into the book. The Jomsvikings were real, and they have their own saga, but they seemed to have lost more battles than they won. Many of the other elements come from various interests of mine. I used to do performance art off and on during college, so I made Freya a performance artist. The Professor and the story about him writing a novel come from the line of a song that I wrote a long time ago addressing a professor that wrote a novel. Part of the conceits of my songs is that the characters (Adlai in this case) wrote and perform them. I thought it would be something of an Easter egg if he alluded to someone he had encountered. The idea of a dog writing a novel seemed absurd enough to work. Ingrid comes from a series of people I knew with a interest/occupation in the sciences. I chose physics because I was always the most fascinated with it.
well, I'm a poet...I guess you could say I'm in the middle of my "career"...got some good stuff going on and still working hard at it...it's been fun to connect with new friends this last year on Twitter (like you!) and I've gotten some great publications out of it...but the main fun for me is learning new things in my middle age and writing them down, having new mild fun experiences and reporting back...I feel like I've got my second wind and have a lot of poetic energy!
Thanks for jumping in Matthew! It’s been awesome to connect with you here and on twitter. And of course, I really enjoyed our interview! Looking forward to seeing you and your work out there!
I’ll go first. I’m Alex Knepper, I love reading books and I am a writer. I started this newsletter as a way to share my writing. But I am really wanting to find other writers to want to share, learn and grow with each other!
I just submitted 3 poems yesterday. I have an older post about how to submit your poetry that I want to update— I learned a few things in my adventures. And I really like hanging out on twitter and talking to other writers and poets— most of the time. Which is why I love to hang out here a little more, where deeper discussion can be had.
Well that’s me. Where are you at in your writing journey? ⛰✏️📚
I'm Justin McBride. I write fiction and I'm serializing my novel on Substack. It's a sort of literary fiction/magical realist thing about a young man who spends the summer in Norway visiting relatives and encounters a little girl with 10,000 imaginary friends, a physics student who may have accidentally discovered the secrets of the universe and an art school student who claims her Siberian Husky has written a novel. I've written a lot over the last ten years, including parts of other novels, and I finished a companion novel to the one I described, but I haven't spent a lot of time on the business sides of things. I'm really into the craft of writing sentences and I love to revise (maybe a little too much). I also like to post the music that I've made (music that I credit to my characters) on my page as well. For my day job, I teach Literacy and Creative Writing in a middle school and I love it! Right now, I'm trying to meet more writers and build a little of an audience through my work through Substack, because I think this is the most high end platform out there right now.
I just started reading your serialized novel! I love Norse mythology and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I agree, substack is one of my favorite platforms to hang out on! And it’s just getting more and more sophisticated! What inspired you to write your novel?
It's weird. I had a goal of writing a novel for a long time before I got around to it. In the end, I started the book during a desperate time and it helped me to cope with everything. The book is a grab bag of stuff that interests me. My friend Magnus wanted me to write him a script that took place in Norway. He is from there and wanted the Norwegian government to help fund it. The script didn't go anywhere but I decided to turn it into a novel. The main character, Adlai, is a recurring character in my fiction and I decided it would be fun for him to go on a trip. Dagmar came to me in a sort of vision while I was working on the script. Adlai is such a sad sack, that I thought that it would be fun if someone was excited about him coming to visit. The Norse thing is just from me trying to research the novel and I ended up reading all this Viking stuff and I wanted to weave some of it into the book. The Jomsvikings were real, and they have their own saga, but they seemed to have lost more battles than they won. Many of the other elements come from various interests of mine. I used to do performance art off and on during college, so I made Freya a performance artist. The Professor and the story about him writing a novel come from the line of a song that I wrote a long time ago addressing a professor that wrote a novel. Part of the conceits of my songs is that the characters (Adlai in this case) wrote and perform them. I thought it would be something of an Easter egg if he alluded to someone he had encountered. The idea of a dog writing a novel seemed absurd enough to work. Ingrid comes from a series of people I knew with a interest/occupation in the sciences. I chose physics because I was always the most fascinated with it.
well, I'm a poet...I guess you could say I'm in the middle of my "career"...got some good stuff going on and still working hard at it...it's been fun to connect with new friends this last year on Twitter (like you!) and I've gotten some great publications out of it...but the main fun for me is learning new things in my middle age and writing them down, having new mild fun experiences and reporting back...I feel like I've got my second wind and have a lot of poetic energy!
Thanks for jumping in Matthew! It’s been awesome to connect with you here and on twitter. And of course, I really enjoyed our interview! Looking forward to seeing you and your work out there!
thanks much...and same here!