|
|
For some time now, you’ve been hearing about Catch & Release, a mysterious project somehow relating to words, paper, and stories.
After months of hard work – writing, editing, coding, promoting, debating – it is time for the Big Reveal.
The Catch & Release Project has evolved into Catchn: Setting Stories Free. As it started out, it’s a simple idea: Catch a story, then set a new idea free. Share work from your own creative depths, and explore the work of others. Promote authors you love, and make contacts with new ones. Come together to advance the idea of the story, instead of relying on traditional publishing to make choices for you based on marketability and placement.
In today’s world, a trend that Bethany and I have noticed is that it’s increasingly more and more difficult to find good flash fiction, short stories, poetry, or one-act plays being distributed or published. Unless you are an already established author, it can be horrifically hard to find a place that will accept your short story or poem.
And if you write drabbles or drabble series, you can probably forget it. The 100 word story form is popular on blogs but not so with the publishing world at large.
So what’s a writer to do? Aside from that, what’s a reader supposed to do when you’re stuck on a train with no book and only your iPhone or other mobile device and you want to read something but don’t know what? You could attempt one of the fanfiction sites, but you take your life in your hands there, depending on the site you visit. It’s not at all uncommon to find fanfics with horrible grammatical errors and very thin plots.
So how does an author get their work out there, to build a following that might allow them to publish? You go online. But that takes a lot of legwork – you have to build an audience for your blog, and attract people to YOUR writing over everyone else’s – if they even know you’re there.
Catchn is a possible solution to this, benefiting everyone. A place where readers can go to find original short fiction, poetry, and plays, and where authors can gain exposure for their work while playing around with formats and ideas. Authors will retain all rights; the only thing given up is nonexclusive electronic reprint rights.
It will be free to both readers and writers, but there will be a submissions process and editorial board in place, just as at a mainstream literary journal or magazine.
Quality is key here – subpar work will not be published on the site. However, rather than getting a standard rejection form, work that is rejected will be commented upon, and any rejected author will be given a login for a locked forum on the site called “The Workshop.” In this forum, active writers from the site and a group of editorial board members will be present to offer workshopping advice and constructive criticism for any rejected author who wishes to take advantage of it to revise and resubmit. The quality control process isn’t meant to make this an exclusive club that revels in rejection – it’s meant to give aspiring writers a way to improve their work for the future. Another way to interact, another way to grow, another way to prosper as a community of readers and writers.
Again…social publishing. Bringing together a community, and sharing work that’s valued for its creativity, instead of determining the value of a work based on its form, its marketability, its commercial potential.
Today marks the launch of the beta. It’s rough-and-ready, nothing terribly refined or elegant just yet. But it works, it’s pretty darn searchable, and it has the basic functionality we want. In the future, as I build my web-development skills, I’m hoping to add more of the social-networking functions Catchn needs to really flourish – forums, individual news feeds on author pages, things like that. Someday, I’d love for it to have an Amazon/Netflix-like recommendation engine, too.
All of that will be coming. We hope to bring you an exciting, constantly evolving platform to play with and enjoy.
In the meantime, we have a beta. YOU have a beta. Let’s do this!
Come on in. Take a look. Sign up to read, or submit a story you’ve got lying around. Join in. Let’s see what happens.
Yeah, you read that correctly.
We’re partway there. More to follow later.
We haven’t forgotten about Catch & Release. I promise.
It’s just…well, I have a confession to make.
I love writing, obviously. I love reading, too. But there are certain things I just can’t bear to read. Horror novels, for instance (I have too vivid an imagination – you should have seen me after the first time I read a really good ghost story as a kid. I didn’t sleep for a WEEK). But certain other things, too.
Like Terms of Service.
You see, there’s more to being a badass creator of stuff than merely creating things. I knew this going in to Catch & Release, but I didn’t realise just how dire the situation would become. First, I discovered the technical challenges of putting together what is, in effect, an internet startup when you have next to no backend web development skills.
Now I’m finding that I really, really loathe legalese.
I used to work at a law firm. Several of ‘em, in fact. I’ve taken law courses. I can read and discuss court documents and decisions with surprising ease.
But I HATE Terms of Service. I think it’s something about all the parentheses and gratuitous capitals.
I have to read them, though, in order to figure out what is necessary, what is not necessary, and how to craft my own. Because every web venture these days needs a ToS, a privacy policy, and some other legal ass-covering in order to work. And I don’t have the money to hire a lawyer to gin this stuff up.
Beyond that, I don’t like your standard ToS. It’s crafted to hold up in a court of law, obviously, but does it really have to be so ruddy dense? So indecipherable to the average human being?
I’m an editor by trade. I like things to be laid out clearly, simply, comprehensibly. I don’t like them to be intentionally obfuscatory, as though a particularly angry (and juicy) squid has gone and freaked out all over a perfectly good document. So the standard ToS, with all its jargon and dense wording, irritates me. I want to write a better one, one people can actually understand.
Even if they don’t read it before clicking the “I Accept” button. Because, seriously, I can’t blame you. Ew.
There is, sadly, a downside to having ‘nads made of weapons-grade titanium. You end up with this nasty tendency to bite off more than you can chew. Because, really, when you’re convinced that all it takes to succeed at whatever you try is enough confidence, bluster, and elbow grease, it’s pretty easy to overreach.
You see, I’m not a technical person.
Strike that. I’m no longer a technical person. I put myself through school doing tech support – hardware and user support, mostly – and I can fix just about anything I break. I taught myself to hard-code html and to use CSS because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Hell, when most kids were running around outside or playing in the sandbox, I was programming QBasic and reading my mom’s FORTRAN books.
But in the last five or six years, I haven’t done much more than add some RAM to a computer here or fix a busted laptop screen there. My hardware skills are still there, but the software side of things eludes me now. I can almost see how things are supposed to go together, how the lines of code fit, but not quite.
Right now, I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating that is. Catch & Release is shaping up, and I want to get it off the ground. I want to launch it, and watch it soar. There are creative things to do with it, and managerial things, and editorial things, and I’m good at all of those. I like those. I can make those work.
First, though, we need a working website. One with a good, strong backbone that we can build on. We need good architecture, and good development.
And I just don’t have the skills to do it. I’ve been trying to teach myself – prodding first at WordPress, which is best left to Bethany the Blog Genius, then poking at Joomla, which is best left to a pack of crack-addled monkeys. Now I’m trying to make some sense of a few other platforms, and not getting much of anywhere.
I want so badly to make this work. I want to see the project get somewhere, because my titanium ‘nads and I know it can. But building the framework necessary to support my ideas…that may be a little more than I can tackle on my own.
I have definitely bitten off more than I can chew here. I have help with the marketing and the blog and the general “er, no, you really need to think about THIS” part of things courtesy of the indispensably awesome Bethany, but it’s starting to look like I need to track down more help. A lot more help. A lot of very technically adept help.
When you bite off more than you can chew, sometimes the only solution is to share the meal.
You’ve done this before. They teach it in school when you first learn how to write papers. Or what passes for a paper in second and third and fourth grade. You learn how to write down all your initial ideas down on paper and do a little research to figure out how you want to write about what it is you have to write about. The brainstorming process actually doesn’t change all that much when you get older.
What does change is how you process the ideas that your brain dredges up when you go through the motions of brainstorming. For example, when my friend asked me to be a part of this, we did a lot of brainstorming via email. Things that we wanted to do, what we wanted to accomplish, and also lists and lists of things that we were going to need to if we wanted to make her dream (rapidly becoming my dream as well) a reality.
One of the things I suggested in this brainstorming period was that we put up this blog and that we get a Twitter account, because one of the first rules of marketing is to know your audience and in knowing your audience, to familiarize yourself with the mediums that they use. Generally you first have to identify your audience, but Kate and I, in this sense, started this project up already knowing who we wanted to target and why. Which put us slightly ahead of the game, we know what and who we’re after, so we could immediately start working on some of the nitty-gritty parts that have to come before we can do all of the fun and creative stuff we really want to get to.
In this day and age, the single greatest marketing tool that exists is the Internet. Specifically it lies in the arena of blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, and other forms of what is called social media. A trend I’ve noticed often is that in researching anything these days, Google is inevitably the first stop. When it comes to looking for a particular service, more and more people are more likely to choose someone who can show themselves to be relatively current with the latest technology. Currently this takes the form of business websites, which while they are an excellent piece of marketing, sometimes a prospective client wants to know more.
Enter the world of the business blog. By providing thoughtful, provocative, field-specific blog entries and placing them out there for the world to see, shows that you are not just capable of providing the service you’re offering, but you are also showing off your expertise. Not solely your expertise with current technology but also your expertise within your field. They are an excellent way of getting your name out there/giving your business a boost in publicity.
The greatest part is that for the vast majority of blogging-specific platforms, you can set up a business blog for free, nine times out of ten. It depends a lot on what exactly you are aiming for in creating a blog. Word Press is one of the best(and most versatile) platforms and whether you set up your own privately hosted blog using the Word Press framework (WordPress.org) or a free blog hosted on the Word Press servers (WordPress.com), the interface is the same and it is very easy to use. Privately hosted blogs have a greater amount of flexibility than ones hosted on the Word Press server with regards to customizing, but other than that, there’s not a great deal of difference. It also comes with free widgets and plugins that can be used to improve the functionality of your blog, from adding Google Analytics (also free) to check your stats and analyze trends (so that you can better optimize your blog and provide even more direct and helpful content) to an automatic upgrade plugin that in five clicks can upgrade your Word Press installation to the latest released version.
Catch and Release’s blog is synced up to our Twitter account so that anyone following that can know when new posts are up. We’ve also got some cool promo ideas for it as we get closer to launching the project. You can find it here.
These are just two of the ideas that were brainstormed up during our initial email session, we’ve got lots of other ideas that we’re just as excited about! So keep an eye out here and on the Twitter account for more news.
Bethany
Balls of titanium.
I’ve got ‘em. Figuratively speaking, of course.
I haven’t the faintest when I went from being a shy, retiring person with no confidence to being the Adamantium Woman I am today, but it happened. Perhaps it was when I realized I could hold my own in high-level academic discourse as a mere undergrad. Maybe it was the first time someone actually took my ideas and imaginings seriously. I don’t know. I’m grateful for the change, though.
For some reason, it simply never occurs to me to not take a risk. To not put myself out there, and scream at the top of my lungs, “I can DO this! Just WATCH me!”
That’s how I got my job; I applied for a position I was utterly unqualified for. But I wanted the job, badly, and I knew I could do it. What would it cost me to apply, beyond a stamp? Nothing. So I wrote my cover letter, drafted up the resume, and sent it out. I never expected to hear back. And two years went by with no word.
Out of the blue, though, I got a phone call asking me to come for an interview. Not for that longshot position, but for another one that I was perfectly suited for. It was still a stretch for me, but the boss thought I could handle it. Anyone with the sheer titanium ‘nads to apply for the job I had originally had to be able to manage the pressure.
And for two years now, I have.
Catch & Release is like that. It’s a stretch – a huge project that I honestly have no idea how I’m going to pull off executing. I’m lucky enough to have a friend like Bethany who’s willing to take a look at an email sent early one morning, ponder my crazy idea for a few minutes, and immediately jump in with both feet. She’s got my back on this, and that’s reassuring. Because this is going to be a monumental undertaking, cats and kittens, even if it doesn’t end up becoming a media phenomenon.
But it’s going to be worth attempting.
Because I have balls of titanium, and an inherent conviction that I can will just about anything into working.
We can DO this. Just WATCH us.
So like Kate before me, I have an obsession.
I have a thing for words. Spoken or written, whether it’s a well crafted sentence or a phrase that rolls trippingly off the tongue, I have an almost uncontrollable passion for words.
Which is why my two favorite things to do in the world are reading and writing. It was a combination of these that have lead me to meet some of my favorite people in the world. In fact, every close friend I’ve had or have, I’ve met through one of my two primary passions.
And so it was with my friend Kate. We met (online), we laughed, we traded half a dozen IM’s, emails, blog comments, and thus our friendship was formed.
So when I got an email in my inbox about a Brilliant Idea, I told her I was all in. I’m good at lots of things and between her skills and mine, we’ve come up with Catch and Release. We’re excited about it, it looks like it will fill a niche both of us would enjoy and we’re hoping that other people will enjoy it as well. This secret project of ours combines the two things that I am absolutely over the moon for and it thrills me that I get to be a part of this.
Implementation is slow going at the moment, I’m a undergrad heading into my senior year and she’s got her job and we both have lives that border on crazyinsanebusy. But we’ve got a plan, and we’ve got this Idea, and if we do it right, it’ll knock your socks off.
And it’s all words. Awesome, wonderful, breathtaking words. So stay tuned. We’ll be bringing you more and more updates as we go along.
Happy to be on this ride.
Bethany
Catch and Release has now been Twitterified! And it is has been synced to this blog so any updates from here will be tweeted there!
The Twitter link is here for any and all who wish to follow: http://twitter.com/CatchnRelease22
Bethany
I admit it. I have a problem.
It’s a shameful addiction, really. I have to sneak around, hiding my stash, glancing furtively over my shoulder to make sure no one has noticed me slipping things under pillows or onto shelves or into drawers. It’s no way to live.
But I do.
My name is Kate, and I’m a paper addict. I love paper. All sorts of paper. Smooth, tissue-thin copy paper; thick, nubbly watercolour paper; the funny dingy-blue stuff that hippies make out of shredded blue jeans, old newspaper, and bits of plant debris – I love it all. I can’t help it. And I love the things you make out of paper. Stationery. Sticky notes. Books, naturally. And…cards. Oh, cards. Calling cards, especially. How wonderful they are! Little bits of cardstock, embellished in a thousand ways. Embossed, emblazoned, inked all over with colourful graphics or just printed with a simple name and number.
They’re dreamy.
I have a collection of the things. Both my own and other people’s. No, really. I have a collection of my own – I have no fewer than four different business cards, plus a personal calling card.
Yes, I know. It’s a sickness. But it’s also an inspiration.
Because, you see, I think about those little slips of cardstock a lot. And about what I can do with them. And about how I can get my hands on more of them.
And sometimes, those obsessive little thoughts lead to…other obsessive little thoughts. Which take root. And grow. And send little tendrils out, which twine around and start climbing and before you know it, an idea has taken root, and started reaching for the sunlight.
That’s how the Catch & Release Story Project started. With a sordid little addiction, and an idea that wouldn’t stop growing…
Welcome to the development blog for Candlemark and Gleam’s latest Secret Project, codenamed: Catch and Release.
Watch this space for more news on what’s coming, how we’re doing, and most importantly, how you can be involved. Here at Candlemark and Gleam HQ we’re working hard to bring this project out to you and we’re really excited about it. We hope that you will be too as you find out more and more about it.
Work calls and welcome once more!
Bethany
|
|
