Online writing community

Looking to join an online writing community?

At www.wattpad.com you can both discover stories of others as well as share your own writing. Get feedback from other writers and find out from them how to make your stories more engaging. You must register for membership to this free site, but once logged in, you can access and share writing in a variety of genres, including, of course, historical fiction, poetry, nonfiction, action and many others.  At the community tab, you can participate in a blog and/or join a specialty club, which includes Improve Your Writing, Multimedia Design and Industry Insider. There is also a Café Club that allows members to connect socially.

I use wattpad as a sounding board to see what others are writing. Many of the stories I find there are written by young, undiscovered writers. Because I write for children and young adults, I find it a good place to get a good sense of what young people say they want to read in the genre of historical fiction.

This afternoon I went on a field trip to the Smithsonian’s Museum of National History—a virtual field trip, that is. The 22-minute video tour of the site is introduced by author David Baldacci and divided into four sections:

1.       Welcome; Lewis and Clark Compass

2.       Star Spangled Banner

3.       David Drake Pottery

4.       Lincoln’s Pocket Watch

The field trip is designed for K-12 students and their teachers who want to explore historic objects and connect them with American history. Anyone can take the free field trip and download the supplementary materials and activities at the site, however.

As a writer of historical fiction, I often use objects (such as a compass, a flag, a pot, a watch) as symbols for something going on in my plot. Exploring the objects on the virtual field trip reminds me that I should do more of that in my narrative text.

Create a pdf file of your writing!

Today I experimented on the free site simplebooklet.com. I am thinking of writing a few historical picture books to share with my little grandsons, and I was looking for an interactive website that would allow me to do that. I signed up for the free Simple Booklet account, using Firefox as my browser (IE won’t work with this site). Then I was prompted to upload a pdf file, so I uploaded the first few pages of Writing Historical Fiction: Digital Age Advice, including the preface. You can also add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet, and I will certainly try that for my grandsons.

It took a few minutes for the pdf to convert to the ebooklet, but when it was finished, I was prompted to click on a button that created a custom URL so that I can share my publication. Here is the link http://simplebooklet.com/writinghistoricalfiction

My PDF has been turned into a web optimized flip booklet that I can now email, share, and post the introductory pages of Writing Historical Fiction across the web. Of course, the free account means that my ebooklet will contain ads, but for a small fee, I can have the ads removed. Now, to get busy on that historical story for my grandsons.

Writing historical fiction for young readers?

Do you write historical fiction for youngsters? Want to share your writing with young readers online? Or maybe you just want to read the work of others online. Wattpad is a site that allows you to browse the work of newbie and published writers. It contains work in all genres, including historical fiction, with a special appeal to young readers (teens). For the published writer, Wattpad might be a place to increase sales if you post a chapter and then include a link to the title in an e-store. Then a reader could go to the link and purchase your book.

The site is free, but you must create an account to use it. I was able to create an account via Facebook. I plan to use this site as a reader in order to discover what young people are reading and writing in the genre of historical fiction. I think an exploration of the material on Wattpad will inform me as I create my own historical stories for young readers.