Day 157: How Not to Be a Jerk and Actually Care About Community

Today, I worked on some IWW stuff, I wrote a quick flash fiction piece, and I had a great brainstorming session with the amazing Jen Finstrom (who has an equally as amazing blog at this link here.

And then something really weird happened.

I saw a friend outside of Stonecoast manipulating other friends in order to achieve an outcome. This person was pretending to care, only to so very blatantly ask for professional support. It was made clear that this person had only taken interest in these people in order to gain.

While that was going on, some cool Stonecoasters came up with this really awesome idea to do a book exchange at our next residency.

The way you make a community is by forgetting about what exactly you can get out of a situation and actually making a community. In our profession, you can tell the people who are talking to you just to have that connection, and then you can tell the people who really like what you're doing and want to be supportive and friendly. It's just so painfully obvious. Stop it. Stop being bad people. Stop sucking up to others. Just be you.

The thing I love about the writing community ... and especially the writing community at Stonecoast ... is how supportive we are of each other. We don't back-stab, we don't use, and we aren't fake. That's exactly what we need as new writers.

I think this is the most Mean Girly I will ever tread when writing about writing. You're welcome.