The Ink Well Newsletter - Badges, Prompts and Challenges

in The Ink Well5 years ago (edited)

Newsletter Title 1.png

Hi Inkwellians... Inkwellers? Wellinkians?

Ha ha, I think I'll leave it at valued members for now until a collective noun for our tribe of poets, story tellers and imaginative writers evolves organically.

This is your friendly admin @raj808, here to tell you about some of the upcoming activities we have planned, as well as some breaking news about the community.

If you are not already a member of The Ink Well and would like to check out the first creative writing community supported by @curie please follow the link below:


The Ink Well


Breaking news - The Ink Well's Badges are now Live

For those who're not in the know, @steempeak steem front end decided to make badges available to the first fifty communities to apply.

When I saw this opportunity last night there were only four free badges left. So, I got a shimmy on and applied then and there. When I woke up this morning our community had been approved, and the shinny new badges were on everyone's homepages 😃

These badges are displayed at the top of the homepage of your blog on steempeak only, another reason to use the fantastic steempeak front end. The Ink Well's badges are currently awarded to anyone who has posted to the community in accordance with our rules and guidelines.

Check it out, here are a selection of some of our contributing members who have already received a badge.

adurgabemi.png@aduragbemi

billykeed.png@billykeed

carolkean.png@carolkean

owesco.png@owasco

poemsofasickmind.png@poemsofasickmind

warpedpoetic.png@warpedpoetic

If you have posted to the community, please do go check your steempeak homepage to see your shiny new badge.

They are a nice addition to the community and a great way for us to say thank you for contributing to The Ink well.

N.B. We are still deciding how we feel about cross posting, so for now cross posted authors will not receive badges.


Prompts and Challenges

Starting tomorrow we will begin a schedule of writing prompts for both fiction and poetry. The fiction prompt will be posted early in the week, usually on a Monday and the poetry mid to late week, usually on a Thursday.

The first writing challenge will be posted by my my colleague, and moderator of the community, @stormlight24. I don't want to ruin the surprise so no spoilers on the content of this challenge.

Keep your eyes peeled for that one. I am looking forward to it myself, and will be joining in with the community writing my own story based on his prompt.

Poets, we haven’t forgotten you!

For the sublime rhymers
freeverse warriors
and form diviners,
bards creating ballads
weaving syllabic magic,
drawing poetry like swords
from scabbards.
Come one, come all,
heed the creative call
cast your spell and dip
your pen, into The Ink well.

The poetry challenge will be equally exciting. I'm brimming with ideas to inspire and challenge the poets at The Ink Well. Keep your eyes out for the prompt post on Thursday.


Future Competitions at The Ink Well

For the first few weeks at least we will only be posting prompts and challenges without steem prizes. This is because I need to get my promotional marketing mind networking to hopefully find some funds for competition prizes.

I am confident that some friendly orcas or whales may be impressed with what we are building here at The Ink Well and gift us some prize funds.

But you know what they say 'the best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray.' We shall see.

If anyone with large accounts read this newsletter and would like to help, please don't hesitate to reach out to me on discord where my username is also raj808.


How the @theinkwell Steem Account will be Used.

The @theinkwell account will be powered up with all earnings, adding extra value to the community by voting contributing members. In the future if we receive delegations, or the account grows through curation, we will also use the steem generated for prizes.


A Quick Word on Delegations

@riverflows, community leader of the @naturalmedicine community has already delegated 500 steem power to the @theinkwell account. Many thanks riverflows. Please do check out the @naturalmedicine community, especially if you're interested in alternative medicine, sustainable living and spirituality. I have been a member and content contributor there for over a year and it is a wonderful place.

I will match her gift of a 500 SP delegation at some point in the next week after my voting power recovers when my 35000 SP leased delegation runs out.

If any altruistic whales, orcas or dolphins are reading this newsletter and are impressed with the community, we would be eternally grateful for any level of delegation. It would greatly improve our ability to incentivizing high quality creative writing on steem.


If you would like to delegate to @theinkwell you can do so by clicking on the following links:

50SP100SP250SP500SP1000SP5000SP

As the @theinkwell's community steem account is brand new, with very few followers, I am tagging everyone who has subscribed to our community so they see this newsletter. Please follow the @theinkwell account to see our future newsletters, prompt/challenge posts and competitions in your feed.

@kimberlylane @lisalansing @theinkwell @vida-blanca @felt.buzz @mers @mandireiserra @rakushasu @sn0n @soveenathesquid @johnjgeddes @silviu93 @carolkean @saltycat @moquero @whatwillbe @moeknows @eutuxismenos @free-reign @mistakili @inka8 @sudutpandang @akasyofa @aceaeterna @joseda32 @marcybetancourt @nobyeni @elisea @straykat @sunsethunter @buttcoins @evagavilan @billykeed @steeminganarchy @lewizard @niallon11 @oblivioncubed @hotbit @artist1989 @letalis-laetitia @sarakey @stormlight24 @chinyerevivian @aduragbemi @manuelramos @litguru @kevinwong @airiam @worldbuilder @lacking @oacevedo @artemislives @creativetruth @cliffagreen @riverflows @sumit1998 @owasco @shanibeer @nonameslefttouse @poemsofasickmind @kaelci @agmoore @agmoore2 @bashadow @acolucky @manoldonchev @trucklife-family @meesterboom @flemingfarm @alcibiades @fenngen @warpedpoetic @joeyarnoldvn @menoski @phage93 @teofilex11 @raj808

It is not my intention to spam, as stated I am just concerned about getting this information to people who are genuinely interested. If you would rather not be tagged just let me know in the comments and I'll make sure to remove you from the above list.

Thank you for reading our first newsletter.

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One thing I have noticed about a lot of the community accounts (@theinkwell, for example), is that the introduction post have missed making it easy for people to see and view the actual Community page The Ink Well Community this link will take people directly to the community page and they can click on the subscribe/join button very easily. There are so many new communities using the explore functions to find them is not an easy task. They are also pretty new so people may not understand that they can click on the green community tag and be taken directly to the page. I look forward to some of the stories and post that will come out of the community.

You make a good point @bashadow, and I will add something into this post now.

However, this isn't the introduction post.

I posted the introduction from my main blog @raj808 because I've been on steem for ages and I knew that it would get seen by more people that way.

The introduction post:

https://steempeak.com/hive-170798/@raj808/introducing-the-ink-well-a-curie-curated-creative-writing-community

Does have links directly to the community page.

Thanks for the suggestion though, it is valid and especially helpful for this post.

I think that communities are still missing a lot to make the experience seamless, which is what we need in the long run.

Cheers for your helpful comment. Glad to have you here at the ink well :)

You might want to think about making your end banner a link, right now it is just an image example:

<a href="https://steempeak.com/c/hive-170798/created"><img src="https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/theinkwell/uOuowX65-The20Ink20well20Banner201.png"></a>

Makes it pretty easy to get to the places, I don't know why more communities don't have image links back.

Again, a great suggestion. I know how to do this as well (making link images), I've just been really swamped with work and forgetting certain things when I've been writing steem posts.

thanks for this @bashadow, really useful suggestions.

Congratulations @theinkwell! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You published your First Post
You made your First Comment
You got a First Vote
You got a First Reply
You received more than 100 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 250 upvotes.

You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!

The badges are so cool. I've ignored steempeak for a very long time. I might start using it now.

Looking forward to the coming challenges.

Awesome chiny.

This is raj808 responding from the new @theinkwell community account.

I'm so pleased to hear that you'll join us in creating wonderful stories and poems with the prompts. Your writing is great and I have watched it go from strength to strength since those promo-mentors days back in 2018.

A fiction prompt is coming out later today, watch this space.

P.s. yes, steempeak takes a few hours of exploring to figure out as it has so many more features than steemit. But when it clicks how to use it, there are so many useful functions like scheduling posts. If I have a busy week I can write 5 posts on a Sunday and schedule them to go out at prime evening time when most of my followers might be browsing steem.

I'm obsessively visiting the ink well today for that poetry prompt! No pressure though. I assume I'll have a whole week to write it. Yummy.

 5 years ago (edited)

Hi @owasco

I'm so pleased that you're so keen as we've been really quiet in the community since all the steem Justin Sun drama kicked off... and ya know, all we want to do is write, create and reward all the creative folks. I have to admit I got myself involved in it all writing an article and it has drained me no end as I'm not a natural at writing journalistic analysis... but felt it had to be done.

Drama is something I'm actively against at The Ink Well and in life in general lol... but the wider steem world is its own animal and when things get hairy, burying your head under the sand does no good.

So you don't have to keep refreshing your page and checking your computer, I'll let you into a secret ;-)

I wrote the poetry prompt/challenge and it is scheduled to go out exactly 7pm GMT which is 11am PST... I;m not sure what time zone you are in but for some reason I thought it might the USA or Canada. Dunno where I got that from.

Look forward to see what you come up with :-) XX

Hopefully I'll be sound asleep by then, but I'll go to sleep looking forward to waking up. Thanks for the info!

I have been very upset about a few things this week, old steem and new. I spent hours writing out my disgust with pre-tron-steem, and never posted it. Why not just go? I asked myself. Then I wrote a story and a bit of nonsense and remembered why I am here in the first place. I'll be backing all my work up though. The stuff here is only permanent until it isn't.

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