January 2022 News and Announcements from The Ink Well!

_{Image source: Alexandra Koch on Pixabay, edited with Canva}

Hello Beautiful Community!

First, a word of appreciation for all in the community who have been posting stories, providing feedback on one another's posts, and helping our community to grow and thrive!

Okay, onto the news. Here are the topics in this newsletter:

• Meet Our New Admin!
• Exciting January Collaboration with DreemPort, and How to Participate!
• Rules for Posting and Engaging in The Ink Well Community
• Creative Inspiration and Skill Building

Meet Our New Admin!

Great news! The Ink Well is growing, and you know what that means. Our admin team has to grow to keep pace. So it is with great excitement that we announce @wrestlingdesires has agree to join our team. You, of course, know him already if you have read any of his excellent stories.

For a few weeks now, astute readers will have seen his name in the list of The Ink Well admins at the bottom of our prompt posts and weekly highlights. We wanted to give him a few weeks to make sure the shoes fit, but now he's off and running.

Please give him a warm welcome!

Exciting January Collaboration with DreemPort, and How to Participate!

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We are thrilled to announce that The Ink Well community has been chosen for the DreemPort challenge for the month of January. Huge thanks to @dreemsteem, founder of DreemPort, for the opportunity. (This is @jayna writing this post, and I'm also happy to call her my friend. We have traveled together, cooked together and laughed together. But that's a story for another time.)

DreemPort, if you're not acquainted, is a platform that accepts content from multiple social content platforms, including Hive. And they have their own token, which you can earn by curating and publishing there. So... what all this means is that you can publish a story based on The Ink Well writing prompt of the week here in our community, and then share it on the DreemPort platform. Note that you will need to create a DreemPort account, but it's quick and easy. And you can then earn DreemPort tokens!

Be sure to read the DreemPort Challenge announcement for details and post your story between Monday when the new prompt is published and Thursday. You can also read more about how to use DreemPort.

Rules for Posting and Engaging in The Ink Well Community

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As always, we ask that you get to know our community before posting here. Learn who we are, read our rules, meet our participants by reading and supporting their work. The following are a few highlights of what we expect and what to know about The Ink Well.

Community Rules

If you're new, or you're not aware of our rules, please take the time to read them. If you are on a desktop or laptop computer, you can find them at the top of our community home page. You will also see them at the top of your post in The Ink Well if you hover over the blue "Rules" button. Can't see them? You can find the rules here.

Here are a few examples of our rules that we most often have to reiterate and explain to unaware members:

• We ask members to avoid certain themes like sex, violence (stabbings, violent murders — that sort of thing), gore, blood, guts, brutality of women, children or animals, and anything NSFW (not safe for work). Why? Because we are a community that is open to anyone and everyone. Even your dear, sweet grandmother. And these topics and images are unpalatable or even traumatizing for some people. We also have no way of preventing children from viewing our community content.
• We ask that people only post short stories in The Ink Well, because that is the focus of our community. There are other communities for poetry, essays, freewriting, etc. We have a tiny admin team of four very busy people, and this is partly to help manage our time.
• We also ask that our members do not post chapter stories or "to be continued" stories. The reason for this rule is so that readers do not need to have read a preceding or future piece in order to read and enjoy the current piece they are reading. Each piece must stand on its own.
• We require images to be non-copyrighted (e.g. from sites like Pixabay, Pexels or Unsplash) and for your story to have a linked source.
• Plagiarism and re-posting are not allowed. We only accept 100% unique, original content in The Ink Well. This is to ensure that The Ink Well community follows the highest standards for content, and that rewards go to those who have developed and shared their own creative work in the community.

Rules Support and Protect Our Community

The goals of The Ink Well are to foster creativity and growth, and to help writers develop their writing skills and earn an income for their work. We want The Ink Well to be a safe and welcoming place for writers and readers. As community admins, we are staunch defenders of truth, honesty, and creative integrity.

Be sure to check out The Ink Well Manifesto, if you have never done so. It provides the mission of The Ink Well, information about rewards and income, and more information on our policies.

Community Involvement

No community is a true community without involvement and engagement! We ask that you read and comment on at least two other writers' work each week, or two for each story you publish in The Ink Well. And remember that the rewards for Hive posts are split between the writer and the curators! You are paid to read and support other writers, just as you are paid to publish. Your support of others also builds your following.

Creative Inspiration and Skill Building

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In The Ink Well, we're not just about posting content and getting rewards. We are about building skills that make that help you earn the best possible rewards because your readers love to read your stuff!

We are here to nudge you to strive for greatness. You know how it feels when someone says, "Wow, just wow! I loved your story!" That's what it's all about. And the good news is that the rewards follow! If people love your work, they give you great upvotes. They seek you out. They want more of your creative content. And curation accounts like our Curie, which we utilize and support, will give you the best possible upvotes too.

So what are you waiting for? Use our resources to build your skills and improve your writing. Here are some of the resources we provide:

1. Creative inspiration
   We encourage and support ideas and creativity by publishing a weekly fiction prompt. Watch for them in The Ink Well on Monday nights. Additionally, we have a nearly inexhaustible list of ideas to spur your writing. And these resources are included in every weekly prompt for reference: 50 Loglines, 50 Story Ideas, and 50 Imagination Ticklers
2. Skill building opportunities
   We have a great catalog of fiction writing tips that can help any writer learn and grow. You can learn about characters, conflict, scene building, dialog and more. We hope you take advantage of it. And here are some important tips that can help you improve your writing craft:
   -- Draft your content in Google docs, or use Google docs for spell checking and syntax checking. It is very easy to do and it is explained in the post Help for the Grammatically Challenged.
   -- Make sure your story has the key elements of a story, including character development, scene setting, dialog, a conflict and a resolution. We provide resources to help you with all of these important fiction elements in our catalog of fiction writing tips.
   -- Review your work before posting. You will most likely find a missing word, a grammatical error, a misspelling or a sentence that does not start with a capital letter.

Thank you for reading our newsletter. And thank you for being a part of our community. We are here to encourage you and help you on your writing journey.

@jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo and @wrestlingdesires

We would like to invite lovers of creative writing to visit The Ink Well, a Hive community started by @raj808 and @stormlight24 and run by @jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo and @wrestlingdesires.

We also invite you to follow The Ink Well curation trail on the Hive blockchain, at https://hive.vote/. Simply navigate to the curation trail section and search for theinkwell (all one word with no @ symbol) and our trail will pop up as an option.

Similarly delegations are possible on Hive using the fantastic https://peakd.com/ Hive Blockchain front end. If you wish to delegate to @theinkwell, you can do this from the wallet section of https://peakd.com/

A big thank you to all of our delegators:
@jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo, @iamraincrystal, @generikat, @marlyncabrera, @preparedwombat, @marcybetancourt, @zeurich, @stormcharmer, @adncabrera, @vision-of-esca, @josemalavem, @morey-lezama, @sayury, @evagavilan2 and @bertrayo.

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