Welcome to the New Digs!

Welcome to the new home of Writer Unboxed!

Kathleen: We are excited about our new digs, and we hope you will be too. We decided to move to a WordPress platform because it offered flexibility that the Blogger bloghost could not. In a nutshell, we were boxed by Blogger.

Therese: Isn’t the new site purdy? Aside from its beautifimous look, we now have a slightly different organization that I personally love.

Kathleen: Me too. You’ll notice our posts are tagged for your convenience. You’ll see subtags under the headers of Craft, Research and Real World. Check them out! We’ve also added a new sidebar feature, Craft Corner, which features books on fiction writing that have been road-tested and vetted by WU.

Therese: And we’ll be adding new craft books as we discover them. We’ve kept our old favorite bits, like Word of the Day and all our links, now listed under a new header…

Kathleen: Linky Goodness. Of course, interviews are still on the sidebar for you to check out whenever you’d like. Most of our two- and three-part interviews are combined under a single link now, making things nice and convenient.

Therese: We’ve also broken the interviews up into two categories: Authors and Industry. You’ll see an asterisk beside two names, Deidre Knight and Victoria Holmes. That means those two ladies are doubly talented and their interviews are related to authorhood and the industry, so their links appear in both categories. Conducting interviews for the site has been a terrific experience; we plan to keep them coming to you every Friday.

Kathleen: Absolutely. And don’t forget about those little icons at the bottom of every post.

Therese: Right. If you use blog services like del.icio.us or Y! or magnolia or blogmarks (or a host of others), you can now easily save a post to your personal page. Now let’s move to the most exciting new stuff; let’s talk about those new About tabs!

Kathleen: Our first six months of blogging about the craft and business of genre fiction has been exhilarating and rewarding. One of the things that make WU personally rewarding are the number of relationships we’ve formed with writers, bloggers and industry professionals. We hope to expand our interview slate to bring you, the reader, the best of unboxed fiction. And we are working to bring you a number of fresh perspectives about the crazy business of writing fiction. To that effect, we decided we wanted contributors to help round out the corners of genre fiction that were getting short-shrift by us. We are so pleased to announce new contributors to our site.

Therese: First let us introduce Marsha Moyer. I interviewed Marsha several months ago for the blog and have been a fan of her writing for years. She seemed to genuinely enjoy the blog and understand what we were about, so when we began considering who we might want to ask, her name popped to the top of my list. I was thrilled when she agreed to join us. She’s not only a very cool lady, she’s thick in the business and can give us unpubbed writers a glimpse behind that mysterious curtain.

Kathleen: I am also honored to have her with us and just as proud to announce our second contributor. Therese and I were admirers of Aussie Jack Slyde’s blog for months before he decided to take a break from blogging to enjoy his new baby. We were impressed with his colloquial voice and solid observations on craft and writing, and felt he had his finger on the pulse of the SF/F genre, e-publishing, and blogging. When Jack came back to his old site and said, “eh, I love blogging. I hate blogging,” we saw a window and made an offer. We’re excited that he agreed to post a column with us on a regular basis.

Therese: Jack has been a terrific addition to our site already, helping us plod along with HTML and plugins and other things. He even saved me from searching for knives one night when I thought I’d crashed the site for good. Heh.

Kathleen: He’s been a godsend. We hope to bring on other collaborators as we move forward, and in fact we have others we’re working out details with even now. Stay tuned! Hmm, anything else?

Therese: Yes, let’s just remind everyone for the hundreth time that there’s an AlphaSmart 3000 sitting here in my office waiting for its new home. If you haven’t entered out contest yet…

Kathleen: What are you waiting for? It’s easy. Check out the details HERE.

Therese: Peruse the new site, everyone, and let us know what you think! And thank you for supporting Kath and me, and the concept of Writer Unboxed.

Writer Unboxed

Writer Unboxed began as a collaboration between Kathleen Bolton and Therese Walsh in 2006. Since then, the site has grown to include ~50 regular contributors and a variety of guests on rotation throughout a given year.

In 2016, the Writer Unboxed team published a book with Writer’s Digest / Random House. AUTHOR IN PROGRESS: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What It Really Takes to Get Published is a comprehensive guide focused on helping writers over/around/through hurdles faced at every stage of the novel-writing process. It’s received some ***** reviews; we hope you’ll check it out.

If you’d like to be among the first to know about the next Writer Unboxed UnConference, which will likely tie-in with WU’s 20th Anniversary celebration, please sign up for our mailing list!

Write on!