There is a place on the interwebs. It’s hard to find, in fact, you have to be in the know to find it. It’s not a website, yahell loop or chat room. It’s a little corner of IMville carved out by a small group of people. People, I mean writers.

Now what you have to understand about writers is that they are a very ‘special’ breed. Writing, as I’ve said before, tends to be a solitary activity. Job specification includes parking your rear end in the seat and applying your fingers to the keyboard for large amounts of time. Hours a day. HOURS a day I tell you. You become hermit like, and rather crabby, carving time out of a day where-ever you can to get the words down on the screen. Like at the time of this writing, I’m up this morning at 5am to get some ‘me-time’ before the house becomes bedlam with people getting up and needing to be herded towards their day, where-ever that might be.

So, solitary endeavour, check. PC, check. Interwebs, check. Heard the phrase ‘birds of a feather flock together’? That’s what happens in this little room. Writers are people and need contact (in fact some of us are attention loving little bunnies) so we tend to gravitate into groups. Hence ‘the place’.

Here there is an arcane little atmosphere. Discussions are wide and bizarre, anything from dicussions about cock rings, right through to the mating habits of the lesser spotted patagonian fighting hamster. Cries of ‘to the google’, and ‘to the wiki’ abound as vital information for the writing going on off im-screen is sought. In this place the posting of a link to a picture of a hot guy can halt production for at least ten minutes as various attributes of said hottie are debated and various characters he may be suitable to represent are suggested. (which normally results in pairing up with a heroine and we deny any responsibility for plot bunny formation as a result of this process or resultant spamming of publisher’s inboxes with submissions)

Stories are formed, written, posted, debated, picked apart and polished. Writing partnerships are formed, Critiquing is arranged. Reading is paramount, especially the sexy bits. Characters are named and renamed. It’s a melting pot of creativity.

*plot bunny hops into view, looks at screen, spilts into two, both hop off. In different directions*

Yeah, that happens a lot. And starfish? They do poop…