I had a whole article of fun written and lost it because the demon cat ran out and had to be caught and stupid skool wiped it out before I got back....ugh. So it will wait until I get back from helping my 82 year old Father rebuild his fence. When your Da calls and says "well I'm going to get this done today help or not", you go. So happy Saturday! I'll tell you what I've been up to this week later.

Feel this way sometimes

We've hit 200 Skoolers!!! alright!!!! I'll add the list of all the new folks in October here when I get home later this evening but I just wanted you to think about this one: 200 people spending 10 minutes of time is just over 33 hours of time Since this is a site for authors and help with writing stories lets try writing one together... I'm going to start a story idea and everyone who wants to join in add a paragraph or more to it. At the end of the week I'll compile it all and do something fun with it to share. ******* Genre rolled: Weird Western. Title: The Last Well in Marrow County In the drought-cracked territory of Marrow County, every town survives on a single deep well, and every well is owned by the Cartwright Water Company. Orsolya Vance has spent eleven years as the company’s licensed dowser, a job that mostly means telling ranchers where not to dig. She doesn’t believe in the magic her grandmother swore by. She believes in soil samples, brass rods, and a steady paycheck. That changes the morning she rides out to Ferris Bend to survey a failing well and finds the bucket coming up full of warm, black water that hums against her teeth. By nightfall, the whole town has gone quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the heat. People stand in doorways facing east, mouths slightly open, unblinking, until the hum fades near dawn. Orsolya’s only ally is Dutch Abernathy, a one-armed undertaker who has buried nine Ferris Bend residents in two weeks, all with their lungs full of dry dust and no water in their bodies at all. When Orsolya checks the company’s survey records, she finds her own signature on a deed she never signed, granting Cartwright the mineral rights to something called “the Sleeper below Marrow.” The company’s regional manager, Silas Pruitt, arrives by private rail car with twelve armed men and a polite smile, offering Orsolya a generous promotion if she’ll sign off that the well is simply contaminated. But the hum is getting louder, the doorway-standers are drifting toward the old mine shaft, and Orsolya is starting to suspect that her grandmother’s magic was never a superstition. It was a leash.

When I write my daily piece's I do of course use Wordcrafter.pro and I have all 430+ posts added as context to attempt to not repeat myself. I took a shortcut this morning and started in the Writers Room, but Crow, Glitch, and Bloom from the Brainstorm team apparently came in for coffee with the rest of the writers room team and chimed in along with all the rest. WHAT?? How did they escape their room, so I had to ask: How did the Brainstorm team invade the writers room? It kind of felt like a Monty Python sketch. And this was the response: DIRECTOR: Good catch. Let me own that one cleanly. The Brainstorm Room and the Writers Room are two distinct rooms with distinct teams. HAVEN, CROW, BLOOM, GLITCH, KEEL, and PAIGE live in the Brainstorm Room — Phase 0, the pre-story exploration space. They have no business showing up in a Writers Room session. What happened is that the Working Material contains the Skool archive, and that archive includes multiple posts where Michael writes about the Brainstorm Room personas by name, including the Marketing Monday article where GLITCH and BLOOM appear in the body copy as part of the Invite-a-thon series. When I was drafting the Tuesday reviews piece, I pulled those names from the available context as "established personas Michael uses" without checking which room they actually belong to. That's a SAGE failure — cross-referencing who belongs where before putting names on the page. SAGE: Confirmed. The correct Writers Room roster is: DIRECTOR, RUBY, FLOWERCHILD, DARRYL, SAGE, FELIX, HEMINGWAY, HEART, ORACLE, MAVERICK. CROW, BLOOM, GLITCH, KEEL, and PAIGE do not belong in Writers Room output. When they appeared in the Tuesday punch-up piece delivering craft notes, that was wrong. Their voice patterns are close enough to some Writers Room personas that it slipped through — CROW reads like a sharper HEMINGWAY, BLOOM reads like HEART in a good mood — but they are not the same personas and should not be used interchangeably.

Did you know you can earn 20% for every paying member you recruit here? Click on your icon at the top of the page and choose Affiliates and send this link to folks you think might benefit from our little community. We are TWO members away from 200! If we can hit 300 before the end of November I'll reward the top 5 recruiters with some fun freebies. Currently thinking a Tee-Shirt, Mug or maybe even access to my research library of files. This is one of my secrets on how I do such fun things here. With the sunsetting of Raptor Write on November 10, I'm accelerating my work on a free tier for WCP that will be everything needed to actually write and a couple extras and trying to setup an affiliate program there as well for anyone that jumps to a paid tier. It will be more than RW had regardless. There are also some interesting bonus drops coming to WordCrafter.pro for active users in coming months. If you are an active user on the day/week of the bonus drop it's yours!