Links to other SpecFic communities

Thanks for posting this, Kristen. One of my points of woe is the number of Christian speculative fiction author groups that have cropped up on facebook. I know I belong to no fewer than 4, and I tend to ignore all of them because it's just too much chatter coming from too many directions to keep track of. The trick, I think, is going to be finding a bright center that the vast majority will agree is the authoritative place to convene. And then the next challenge will be helping people to hang with that central hub, despite differences in theology or creative approach.

How do you get to a group on Facebook? I try searching and it only wants to show me people and pages...typing "facebook.com/lostgenregild" takes me to a broken link page. :/

Whoops, I do believe I was spelling "guild" as "gild". *facepalm* Thanks!

I think we're increasingly coming into agreement that where we need to seek readers is in the secular community. I'm convinced -- because I was once one of them -- that most Christians are reading secular fiction because that's all they can find.

The idea of a hub sounds good, but we also need to work on building connections between the sites that currently exist. Interlinking our memberships will make all of us stronger.

We are the links. God sews His kingdom together with us, His people. I believe that many of the groups on that list were started by people with links to the Anomaly and some were active in the Anomalous Sandbox back in our early days of operation.

I suspect that they broke off into different groups because of different genre interests and regional affinities. I know Grace and her people are mostly from New Zeeland.

As our lives and authorial skill matures our support and participation focus of necessity narrows down to the subgenres we work in. Also our time usually becomes more constrained. So any common group we might seek would have to offer some kind of added authorial craft value across regional/sub-genre lines or we won't spend much time with it.

I know my membership with several of those groups on the list just collects the weekly emails and most of them go unread in the rush of life. The natural progression as we reach professional status is to join one of the Professional Associations like CFWA and concentrate on networking opportunities for marketing purposes.

In the midst of my writing evolution I found Kristen Lamb's #mywana (We Are Not Alone)Twitter thread + blog. It is searchable in Google (links to her blog and maybe to a Wiki by now) and it provides a good common meeting place and quick communication pipeline in Twitter for writers to keep in touch. It also gives us visibility to the wider world. Independent agents and editors for hire have also started tracking the #mywana twitter stream.

Most #mywana participants include links to articles and online resources which are value adds. This is one way to build good will and a Possee to advocate for you in word of mouth marketting campaigns.

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Suggestion:
Perhaps a subtag under #mywana for Christian Spec Fic writers might allow the group to connect better through twitter (I would suggest #XtSF for our sub-hashtag) [Xt {Chi Tau in greek} is how the early Greek Fathers wrote the name of Christ]. I already see various of the more successful Sandbox and Anomaly member tweets whenever I check twitter.

If we follow Kristen's model, someone with an interesting blog (read offering value to the fellow authors) should post a blog entry as to how this new hashtag can be used to unite us within the a larter #mywana Twitter forum. A larger forum where others outside of the #XtSF community might notice us and check out our genre'. All we'd have to do is add #Xtsf after #mywana whenever we tweet.

Just a few thoughts of how we could form a movement to pull ourselves together.

Write on beloved siblings

SGD
dave

Kristen;

You might want to look up the #mywana blog entry on Kristen Lamb's site for a reference, she makes the case quite well.

SGD
dave