An Update

Welcome! again to an editorial post from your forum moderator. A new semester has just begun and I have done a lot of work over the Christmas break searching through the SACI alumni pages and facebook in order to contact as many former students of this course as possible so as to invite as many interested parties as possible to join this forum. therefore I want to welcome all newcomers, both former and current students alike! We now have 27 authors, a growing number surely but only a drop in the bucket of the more than 1,000 students who have taken this class over the eleven years that I've been teaching it. Therefore, let me remind all alumni to actively search out any fellow students with whom you might still be in contact and make sure that I have their email address in order to invite them to participate, or that they contact me directly.

To anyone who wants to join the community: First of all, I need your email address. Once I have it, I must official invite you to become an author of the blog through the blog itself. You get an email from Google and, if you do not already have an account, they will ask you to make a profile (if you are a private person you can block it from view) and accept the invitation in order to become an author of the blog. Any former student or extremely interested stranger may email me with a request to join at leefoust@gmail.com.

A note on posting/formatting: I have updated the editing tools here to make it easier to post and to format our posts. Quick primer to newcomers to the blogosphere: First you must log into the site. Next hit the "new post" button. This will give you a page with two windows, one which shows your post in html format and the other in a preview mode. Obviously, unless you have had experience with html and laying out websites, it's considerably easier to use the "compose" box: you will find many formatting tools now at the top of that box such as bold, italics, justification, font style, color, and size. Feel free to add pictures or video to your posts as well. Also, there is a command that looks like a torn page which allows you to post a longer text and break it at a certain point so that only the first few paragraphs or so (you decide where to insert the break) show up on the main page of the blog and the other pages remain viewable with a click on the "read more" button--this will keep the forum easily browsable for people with shorter attention spans (wink).

Labels: I have been tagging my posts with their topics and categories (i.e. "place to submit poetry" and/or "Florence" or whatever seems salient). Feel free to do this to your posts so that both topics and categories will show up in the "Labels" column on the left which acts as a kind of browsable table of contents for all of our posts. 

For creative posts will you plase tag your post with 1.) your name, 2.) the title of your piece--in quotation marks for poetry--and 3.) the genre in which you are working--i.e. poem, short story, creative non-fiction--again to fascilitate browsing by form, topic or person or to find a specific piece. Now you know that if you are looking for the work of a certain student, a particular form, or even a topic, you can browse by using the labels list on the left.

A plea: Besides posting work, notices, youtube videos, whatever should be of interest to your fellow creative writers, please also take the time to read some other people's work and comment. As self-gratifying as posting on the internet can be, there's nothing more depressing than returning to your post and seeing no comments and wondering if anyone but you has even looked at it. Chime in, even the simplest thumbs up means a lot.

Thanks to all who are participating and forza/coraggio! who will be the next to post?

Lee