The Series

Introduction

When I started writing on Vocal I have been blogging for fifteen years on Seven Days In, which for some reason is still getting three thousand visits a day (mainly from Apple devices in Singapore), I do wish I could do that with my Vocal Stories but to be honest, how do you interact with three thousand consumers every day apart from announcements and providing more content for them. This post is about one of the methods I have for creating content almost every day.

In order to do that I need to have access to a computer, although I have created stories on my phone I find it very difficult to do that.

So here we go.

The Series

To me, a Series was something on television or in a comic or periodical. Dickens and Conan Doyle were experts as are many more real authors. I see writing a book as a series of connected events with commonalities.

I wrote a dystopian horror story early on in my Vocal journey and people started to ask what came next and wanted a follow-up, something I certainly didn't expect. So I wrote a follow-up and got a similar reaction, and thought that this could go on forever, so at the end of the third story I looped it back to the first one. I thought it was clever, but not sure anyone else did, but this is the first part here. I definitely think my presentation has improved.

Then I tried to write something that was not horror and that became a five-part series which caused me problems in having to cross-check that all the events in the stories matched up. The presentation in this improved.

A series can give you a situation where you always have something to write about, but a series can be anything, three friends below have done some wonderful interviews and they are worth delving into:

The interview is another series that we can use to create stories with, I have only done a few but they have generally got good reactions, but you can probably see that my techniques are maybe a little different than most other creators.

The Playlists

I have a love of music and the fact that Vocal stories are stored on an open digital platform means that as well as images we can share music and video. My writing is often sparked by conversations with close friends such as the one below:

Sometimes the music is about particular albums or artists and like the playlist above I just take a theme or connection and thread them together in the hope that people will enjoy listening. My playlists are hopefully, anything but mainstream.

The thing is I can always put a playlist together and write about the music using the knowledge and experience that I have gained over the years.

The Poetry

The biggest part of my work is poetry, though pre-Vocal I had written very little. Most of my poems use either the Sonnet or Villanelle format, these are not Vocal favourites, but have brought me incredible reactions from my friends and audience, who make me sure I am on the right path.

I created a series of fifty dark poems with encouragement from my good friend Dharrsheena.

The anthology is here

Recently I started a new series called Plagiaristic Poetry which allowed me to weave some words into incredible structures but I thought I would tell you about it here.

Conclusion

I don't know if it is the same for you but have some open series on your profile or portfolio, can save you from writer's block and ensure that you always have something to write about.