Some weeks you burn through. And you feel in some ways you get little done you were aiming for. I am not sure about this week, because there were some targets met, but there were a few missed. It seems to split evenly between admin and site creation and actual writing at the moment.

What is the site building about? Helping people. In my aim to create a paying market I am obviously helping myself too. Not being altruistic isn’t a sin, I just came to the conclusion a while back that I go nowhere if I try to travel by myself. Sure, I’ve said it a lot, but it bears repeating. I think I haven’t been asked why? so much lately, but I think what is it for? has snuck in. Maybe I got a what do you get out of it? Determining someone’s motivations probably isn’t a bad idea – I know people get burned all the time. It’s hard though, to engender a situation where you achieve something more than the shallow engagement that plagues most social networks.

writersprizefighters.com has been a reality before – it spawned a poetry evening, and the Poetry House, and it did some good work. Magazines were planned, and more, and then it collapsed under the weight of my own personal problems … but still the people I’d met stayed in contact. The aim is get those guys in and running again, and then to see if I can turn it into the thing I always wanted it to be – a collective; a movement; a retreat.

Time is a factor that needs to be cancelled out with better planning, which creates more space around me. Being better rested probably wouldn’t hurt. There are a lot of things I am working on to improve my contribution to my friends and the independent writing community, and to say that it has been a labour of love, and to say that it has taken some time is no exaggeration. Has it been worth it though? It has.

I helped get some writers back writing. I got to publish some people, and got some others fired up to publish themselves – not a bad effect. But have I done enough? No.

And I have so much of my own work waiting in the wings. Just have to sit down and edit. Just have to. Just have to do this and that. You know how it goes. Help me out – send me writers, send me writing. Engage.