Community Creator Chat 11/5/24

For the first installment of this series, see here.

Greetings, all!

The last month has flown by. I can’t believe I’m doing another one of these chats and it’s going to line up at a four week gap! Seriously, where did the month go?

I hope it goes without saying, but I was very surprised by the results of my first Community Creator Chat (CCC) way back at the beginning of October. Thank you to all who read and sent it to the top of the Leaderboard that week! I honestly did not expect for it to get enough reads to warrant a repeat forum, nevermind riding the leaderboard.

So why, you might ask, am I doing another one?

Well, I got an unexpected email, and decided I should publish an update and the opportunity for anyone to respond. (Oh, feel free to write about anything, though, not just the email.)

Back on October 9th, I promised you that I’d send the comments to Support. I did exactly this once the comment section dried up on October 17th. I fully expected them NOT to reply, as they’ve been known to ignore emails like this in the past.

However, a couple days ago, I was proven wrong! On November 1st, I received the following email.

Hooray!! I’m so thrilled that Vocal will be continuing the official Creator Chat! (When is now the only question remaining, lol.) And the fact that they’re reviewing the comments and taking note is, I think, a good thing too.

What do you think? Naturally, we have to wait and see, and perhaps nothing will come of this for a while, even for a long while…but at least this gives us some hope, right?

Anyway, I just wanted to share this development! I’m glad the team got back to us. 😊

Now, back to this week’s CCC!

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Tell me your current woes, excitements, or questions. Has anything changed in the past month? Anything you want to vocalize, get off your chest, shout the praises of? Any feelings about the future of the platform, whether it be in regards to yourself or just in general?

I’ll go first.

I haven’t gotten my question about the Vocal Writing Awards answered. It’s frustrating, but I’m going to assume the answer is “no.” What a shame! I hope we can see them return next year, at least. I almost want to figure out how to do them ourselves, the way that we want to…That seems like quite the endeavor, though.

When are we going to get a really difficult challenge? Like Stephen Roddewig has cited a few times, challenges like the Lipogram are few and far between, yet pose a fun, difficult task for writers to actually stretch and grow. Limitations like removing a letter from our repertoire is a great example of this, and I’d love to see more challenges like it in the future. Really challenge us, eh?

And like Gina C. mentioned in the comments last time, I’d love to see an update to the judges panel, complete with bios and other details. It would even the playing field in a way, make Vocal more like other writing contests where the writers get to tailor their pieces to the judges’ tastes and experience, and bring to attention any potential biases or conflicts of interest.

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Let the conversations commence! ;D