Are you writing alone? — You Need the Right Writing Community

Meet Dianna Gunn

Dianna Gunn is a fantasy and horror author known for her Moonshadow Rising Duology (completed in 2024), Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror (released in 2025), and Woman of Sorrow and Blood (releasing in March 2026). You can find out more about her books at authordiannagunn.com. She is also the founder of Weeknight Writers, a social enterprise dedicated to providing support for fiction writers.

Full Transcript.

Are You Writing Alone? — You Need the Right Writing Community with Author Dianna Gunn

Laura Williams: [00:00:00] Are you ready to stop writing in isolation and learn how to build a thriving, deeply engaged creative community that keeps you inspired and accountable? My guest today is Dianna Gunn. Dianna is the incredible force behind Weeknight Writers, a thriving online community designed to support, educate, and champion science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers who are balancing their creative passions with busy everyday lives.

Laura Williams: Through virtual conferences, unique events like #FirstDraftFall, and a highly engaged Discord hub, Dianna's mastered the art of bringing authors together to find genuine connection and accountability. Today, we're diving deep into her secrets for cultivating a supportive, active writing community from the ground up.

Laura Williams: Dianna, thank you for joining me today. Writing, and running a writing business, can be a really lonely endeavor. So let me just ask you — why did you start Weeknight Writers, [00:01:00] and what's the concept behind building the community?

Dianna Gunn: [00:01:05] It actually started as a Twitter chat back in 2018. There were already a few different Twitter chats for writers, and they all looked really cool, but they were run by people either in the UK or on Pacific time. Since I'm on Eastern time, that meant they landed either smack in the middle of my workday, or after I'd already finished writing for the day and was just watching a show before bed.

Dianna Gunn: So I wanted something in my own time zone, at a good time in the evening. It was clear a lot of other people felt the same way, because you'd see these posts the next day with plenty of engagement, or you'd catch a chat during your two-minute scrolling break at work and want to join in, but you [00:02:00] couldn't.

Dianna Gunn: So it was really about creating something in that time slot. That chat still runs on Blue Sky now, Thursdays from 7:00 to 9:00 EST, and everything else grew out from there. It became clear that a lot of people were craving deeper community, more chances to connect and build real relationships, get to know each other and help each other — and to do it all in virtual spaces, because travel is hard. There are plenty of great in-person conferences, but if you don't happen to live near one, there's a ton of logistics involved. So it really came down to meeting people where they already are, on their phones, their computers, giving them a way to connect from the devices they're already using, in their own [00:03:00] homes.

Laura Williams: [00:03:01] This takes a lot of time out of your life, both to set up and to keep running. I'm really impressed you've given it this level of dedication and built such an active group.

Laura Williams: That's a lot of work. Let me ask you this — you structured the Weeknight Writers Pro community around three main pillars: community, accountability, and education. How did you land on those three as the areas that were absolutely critical for writers today?

Dianna Gunn: [00:03:38] I think community is just a huge need for everyone right now. There's such a sense of isolation. Some people believe the counter to that is getting involved locally, in person, and so on, but that's not always possible. There need to be spaces where people can genuinely connect online.

Dianna Gunn: [00:04:00] Social media can be great — I've built real friendships before on Twitter, and now on Blue Sky, people I talk to regularly and know really well. But a lot of those interactions are brief. Even with the people in the chat week after week, there's only so much you can get to know about each other in two hours a week.

Dianna Gunn: I wanted to build something where this is a space you can chat in — you can come for just two hours a week if that's all you've got, but people are also around throughout a much bigger chunk of the day, since we've got members across different time zones. So there's pretty much always someone to talk to.

Dianna Gunn: There's a lot of focus on — some really deep friendships are being built in this community, and some really cool ways we help each other, and I think that's so, so needed, [00:05:00] both in general, because so many of us work so hard and struggle so much that there's not a lot left in the tank for even the time it takes to go somewhere, even somewhere relatively close. I work from home, and even a thirty-minute bus ride away means another thirty minutes back — and that alone can feel insurmountable when you're genuinely busy. So having something that meets you where you are, to fulfill that sense of community, which matters so much for our enjoyment of life — and they've actually shown it matters for our literal health and survival — is a big deal, especially for writers, who by the nature of the work tend to spend a lot of time alone at a computer.

Dianna Gunn: As for accountability, I've actually been toying with the idea of making our new tagline ‘Stop procrastinating and start finishing projects,' because [00:06:00] that's a huge problem for writers. We have a lot of neurodivergent writers in the group — folks with ADHD and autism.

Dianna Gunn: That happened as a bit of a happy accident, probably because I have ADHD myself. It can be really hard for us to stop procrastinating and actually get things done. I did NaNoWriMo for a number of years, and one of the most useful parts of that experience was the accountability — the check-ins to see who was writing.

Dianna Gunn: Having the chance to do writing sprints and write-ins together, working toward a shared goal. So I wanted to build something similar — we run accountability check-ins every night, [00:07:00] plus more relaxed ones at the beginning and end of the week, and the beginning and end of the month. It just reminds people to keep writing.

Dianna Gunn: It gives people space to celebrate wins, to talk about when they're struggling, but really it keeps everyone's eye on the prize. When you join Weeknight Writers, you can actually sign up to get tagged in those check-ins every single night, including weekends, if you want. It keeps you genuinely on track.

Dianna Gunn: As for education, that became a real focus in 2020 — we all know what happened. Everything went virtual, and up until that point I'd been running everything myself, but I brought in my friend Jade, and said, let's do a virtual conference.

Dianna Gunn: It was such a cool experience. Having gone through a lot of financial and health [00:08:00] difficulties in my life, I hadn't had many chances to attend in-person writing conferences, since that kind of travel is so expensive and time-consuming.

Dianna Gunn: It was really cool seeing what happened when we brought everyone together into a virtual space for something like that. It's become one of my favorite things to do. We host panels where we can learn from each other — I always learn a lot, the attendees always learn a lot, the panelists learn from each other too. We also have other educational programming — a monthly workshop, a monthly worksheet. We're actually considering shifting the workshops to quarterly so I have time to build bigger things. But workshops, worksheets, the kinds of resources you'd normally only get through an in-person course or conference — I really want to make those available [00:09:00] to people who can't attend in person.

Dianna Gunn: There's so much I've personally gotten out of the handful of courses and conferences I've been able to attend, and I really just wanted to make that available to people who otherwise wouldn't have access to it.

Laura Williams: [00:09:27] I love that so much too. I really like the symbiotic nature of your group, and how you get to genuinely affect people's lives. That must be a great feeling.

Dianna Gunn: [00:09:44] Yeah, it is. Last year we actually had a couple of longtime members publish their first books, which was really cool to see. I'm so proud of them, and I love that I've been able to help them find the confidence to actually do it, and build the skills to finish a book, take it through edits, [00:10:00] get it published.

Dianna Gunn: It's so rewarding. I always say I get as much out of the community as I put into it, because these are just incredible people, and I love watching them grow — I grow a lot watching their journeys too.

Laura Williams: [00:10:16] You mentioned you host some incredible events, like Story Crafting Sessions and the NaNoWriMo alternative, #FirstDraftFall. How important are these shared, scheduled events for keeping the virtual community engaged and connected?

Laura Williams: And I'm also curious — do they act as magnets, bringing new people into your community as well?

Dianna Gunn: [00:10:44] I'll answer the second part first, since it's easier — yes, these events are absolutely magnets for the community. They do bring people in. First Draft Fall especially always brings us [00:11:00] a good chunk of new members.

Dianna Gunn: We've run First Draft Fall twice now. The first time, I believe it brought in about ten new members — fairly modest, but it was also brand new. Last year, during the second run, we brought in about twenty new members. So it's definitely significant for bringing people into the community, since people get genuinely excited about these shared events, and it gives them a taste of what they can find inside the community.

Dianna Gunn: The Story Crafting Sessions are our virtual conferences, and those matter a lot to me, because that's something you'd never have had access to before without leaving your house and spending a lot of money on travel. Those are [00:12:00] fully free events. We do offer a supporter ticket option if people want to help cover hosting costs, but they're free, because I really want that option available to as many people as possible.

Dianna Gunn: That's really our core social-good initiative. We're a social enterprise, dedicated to providing this wider support, and Story Crafting Sessions are one of the main ways we do that, by making it accessible to literally anyone with an internet connection. We have great conversations in the community leading up to the events, during them, and after.

Dianna Gunn: They absolutely help people stay engaged and give them a chance to learn new things. Weeknight Writers members actually get to vote on panel topics, which is really fun — we get input from this whole group of writers on [00:13:00] what we'll cover, both the general topics and advance questions they'd like addressed.

Dianna Gunn: That really helps me with programming, since I know exactly what people want, and it helps them too, because we're delivering the knowledge they feel they most need to complete their projects. With First Draft Fall, there's some educational material attached as well — we send out a batch of worksheets in October to help people plan their projects. But really, First Draft Fall is where the accountability piece shines, which was, like I said, the big draw of NaNoWriMo. People loved NaNoWriMo because there was a big shared goal — everyone working toward the same thing.

Dianna Gunn: We were holding each other accountable, celebrating the wins, commiserating over the struggles, and it was genuinely powerful. We do all of that to a lesser [00:14:00] extent throughout the year in Weeknight Writers, but during First Draft Fall there's this really big energy, because everyone's writing a first draft. Not necessarily the exact same word-count goal, since the actual goal is just finishing a first draft, but everyone's still working toward something shared, and there's so much energy in that.

Dianna Gunn: During First Draft Fall, we also run themed Blue Sky chats to bring that energy to the wider public, and we post our nightly accountability check-ins on Blue Sky during weekdays too — partly to give the broader community some level of involvement, and partly to show people what they'd get year-round if they joined Weeknight Writers, if they came into the Discord.

Laura Williams: [00:14:58] Wow, that just sounds like so [00:15:00] much work. You clearly have to love doing this. I've watched communities get built from the ground up before, and I know what it takes.

Dianna Gunn: [00:15:10] Do you want to hear the really wild part? I conceived of First Draft Fall in 2024, right when there was a scandal around NaNoWriMo and AI at the end of August, and I built the first round of it in ADHD hyper-focus mode, in three weeks.

Laura Williams: [00:15:33] That's terrific — that's incredibly fast. You built the whole thing from the ground up in three weeks.

Dianna Gunn: [00:15:38] First Draft Fall runs from October through the first half of December — there's a whole month devoted to planning, plus a couple extra weeks at the end to wrap up. I decided we'd do nightly check-ins, I built out all the worksheets — well, most of them, Jade helped with a couple [00:16:00] — and a whole bunch of prompts.

Dianna Gunn: It was all built on top of the existing Discord and Blue Sky, but I look back and honestly still wonder how I pulled it off. I did do NaNoWriMo for twelve years, so I was drawing on a lot of that experience, the best parts of that community — but I still can't quite believe I managed all of it in three weeks.

Laura Williams: [00:16:30] It's really cool that you did NaNoWriMo for twelve years. I'm glad you're picking up the torch, because the way that whole situation ended was quite a mess. What was the biggest hurdle you faced getting off the ground early on, and how did you get past it?

Dianna Gunn: [00:16:48] The biggest hurdle then is honestly still the biggest hurdle now — just finding time between a day job and wanting to [00:17:00] write my own books. Time is always the thing.

Laura Williams: [00:17:03] Right, you have to be good at time management.

Dianna Gunn: [00:17:05] My day job is freelance too, so my whole sense of time and scheduling tends to be pretty chaotic.

Dianna Gunn: I spend a set number of hours at my computer every day, but what I do during those hours varies a lot. One thing that's genuinely helped is having the Blue Sky chat every single Thursday, without fail, at the same time — I actually orient my whole week around it at this point, since it's been such a consistent fixture for so many years.

Laura Williams: [00:17:40] That makes a lot of sense. I bet you find this too — jumping from one project to the next and back again, which is one of our superpowers. A lot of people couldn't keep up with that.

Dianna Gunn: Oh, absolutely.

Laura Williams: [00:18:00] And do you find that having your whole approach structured around accountability also helps your ADHD — same with having deadlines in your business, knowing exactly when something needs to be done?

Laura Williams: It helps me tremendously. I know I have to serve my clients within the timeframe they need, and one thing they always tell me is how much they appreciate that I'm always on top of everything and communicating well. Do you find that helps you too?

Dianna Gunn: [00:18:19] Deadlines help a lot. In my freelance work, external deadlines are genuinely useful. And with Weeknight Writers, I've essentially created my own external deadlines, since I have to have everything updated for First Draft Fall before it happens.

Dianna Gunn: Having those big events helps me orient my months, really my whole year at this point, because First Draft Fall has become such a big deal, and I expect it to keep growing quickly. NaNoWriMo shut down very abruptly last fall.

Laura Williams: [00:18:59] Right, [00:19:00] people didn't know where to go.

Dianna Gunn: [00:19:01] Yeah. So this year, with more time having passed since NaNoWriMo shut down, and this being our third year running First Draft Fall, I think it's going to be a big deal this year.

Dianna Gunn: We're recording this in July, and I've already been working on plans for it for a few weeks now. I'll spend most of the summer on it, and I'm really excited — it's huge.

Laura Williams: [00:19:33] Let me ask you — almost every episode I record, these two little letters come up: AI. Do you deal with any issues around AI in the community? How do you handle it? What's your stance on AI within Weeknight Writers?

Dianna Gunn: [00:19:50] We haven't had issues with AI yet. I assume eventually we will, but so far, nothing.

Dianna Gunn: [00:20:00] We've attracted a very anti-AI community. We've actually run panels on how to protect yourself and your work from AI, and part of why First Draft Fall launched in the first place was that, before it shut down, NaNoWriMo embraced AI — that's what actually made me angry enough to start my own thing, and it's what brought in that first wave of people for First Draft Fall.

Dianna Gunn: So we don't currently have anyone using AI in the community. We're actually in the process of launching an ezine, which is exciting, and I just realized I haven't even bothered adding a guideline saying we won't accept AI-generated work — because I'm that confident in the community we've built. We're all real humans creating real human art, and we're deeply committed to that; we don't want to work with the plagiarism machine.

Dianna Gunn: It's [00:21:00] not formally listed as one of our core values on the website, but it really is a core value of this community — human writing, human artists. We believe creativity should always be by and for humans.

Laura Williams: [00:21:20] Right, that's terrific.

Laura Williams: I'm glad to hear that. Since you focus a lot on fantasy, sci-fi, and horror writers, and that probably came naturally into the community, do you find that genre-specific communities foster a different kind of connection and collaboration than a general writing group would?

Dianna Gunn: [00:21:44] As you said, yeah, it really did just happen naturally.

Dianna Gunn: I only refined our branding to explicitly say fantasy, science fiction, and horror writers earlier this year. But since I write fantasy and horror myself, [00:22:00] that's just how it always skewed. And I do think there's a real difference — there's a more cohesive focus when everyone's writing similar genres.

Dianna Gunn: Whether you're all working within that speculative umbrella, or you're all writing romance, or thrillers — I think it creates more cohesive focus, and it lets you build deeper relationships within the community, because you genuinely understand what the other person is doing.

Dianna Gunn: It also means that when you reach out to those people for feedback, you're likely to get much better story feedback. I've heard so many horror stories about fantasy or sci-fi writers bringing their work to a group that turned out to be [00:23:00] mostly literary fiction writers, or mystery writers, and getting terrible feedback that basically amounted to, ‘your genre sucks.'

Dianna Gunn: So you'll definitely find better feedback on your work, and you'll form deeper connections, because while every novelist can understand every other novelist in a way non-writers can't, there's still such a big difference between genres.

Laura Williams: [00:23:37] I'm a fantasy author myself, so I completely understand what you're saying there. Do you have a critique group? How do you handle that?

Dianna Gunn: [00:23:48] We currently have one smaller critique group, and I'm working on how to expand that structure, [00:24:00] because I find critique groups past a certain size start to lose their usefulness.

Dianna Gunn: Right now we have one closed critique group with six people in it, with a set structure.

Dianna Gunn: I'm looking at how to build out more of those, since it's something I'd really like to do. Outside of that, we have a seeking-feedback channel in the Discord where anyone can post something they'd like feedback on. If it's something really short, like a poem or flash fiction, you can post it directly. Otherwise you post your title, word count, genre, and the kind of feedback you're looking for, and people will let you know if they're able to help.

Dianna Gunn: There's almost always someone with time to read your work if you post there. [00:25:00] For a full novel, it might be harder to find someone with time for the whole thing, but you'll almost always find someone willing to read the first few chapters, or a chunk of it, to give you a sense of where things stand and how you're doing.

Dianna Gunn: Even if you only get the first few chapters or fifty pages read, you can often extrapolate that feedback across the rest of the book and still get something genuinely useful out of it.

Laura Williams: [00:25:28] I belonged to one when I lived in Florida that I absolutely loved — we'd meet at the library.

Laura Williams: It was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it. But I've also belonged to groups that weren't like that. Recently I had an issue with a critique group, actually the same kind of thing with fantasy fiction.

Laura Williams: Someone said, ‘I don't even know how you write about magic, it's not real.' Okay, sure, whatever. Another issue I've run into is critiquing someone's work when [00:26:00] there was someone in the group who wrote in these massive blocks of text that just told everything — ‘He opened the door and got in the car and put it into drive and drove down the road.'

Laura Williams: I genuinely didn't know how to critique that — but I did, nicely. I told him he needed to work on building out his descriptive ability. I was kind about it, but that's hard, isn't it?

Dianna Gunn: [00:26:33] Oh goodness, yes. Critiquing is a real skill, and I think a lot of people underestimate how important it is to develop it as its own separate skill.

Dianna Gunn: We actually do have guidelines for our critique group. For the ezine, we've had a few members step up to offer beta reads specifically for the stories going into it, and because we're doing that in a more structured way, I've also created beta-reader feedback guidelines to help people critique productively.

Dianna Gunn: Things like always focusing on the work and not the author — it's not a personal attack — and always favoring suggestions and questions, since those are really powerful. I think every critique group should have a document like that, and it should be a living document.

Dianna Gunn: We should all be willing to keep learning from each other, and from our own experiences, both giving and receiving critique.

Laura Williams: [00:27:45] The advice really has to be actionable — something you can actually apply to your writing. I felt bad with this one gentleman, because just saying ‘show, don't tell' is absolutely useless [00:28:00] if someone hasn't taken the time to learn what that actually means. I realized that afterward. It's something I'd genuinely like to work on myself, because I love doing it — I love reading other people's work and helping them, since I appreciate it so much when people do the same for me.

Dianna Gunn: [00:28:16] It's a really powerful skill to have, and it also teaches you to see your own work in a new way, right?

Laura Williams: [00:28:22] Exactly. We all see our own work differently, which is why self-editing can be such an issue — we don't catch the nuanced things as easily. I think it's terrific that you've had authors come through the community and get their work published.

Laura Williams: What's your favorite success story? It doesn't have to be someone who got published, maybe just someone who came in really raw and grew into something else.

Dianna Gunn: [00:28:47] It's actually one of the authors I mentioned earlier, who published her first book last year. My friend S.M. Ryher, who's been with Weeknight Writers since it was just a [00:29:00] Twitter chat, and who honestly wasn't writing much at the very beginning, then came up with this idea for a big, wild, weird sort of space fantasy with horror elements.

Dianna Gunn: It's this huge, ambitious project — even though at first Saffron thought it was just going to be one book. I encouraged it, and I was enthusiastic about it right from the start, telling her I wanted to be a beta reader once it was ready. I watched Saffron write the first draft, go through edits.

Dianna Gunn: I also offer editing services on a pretty limited basis, so I got to edit the book myself, and had to tell her, this is actually two books.

Dianna Gunn: Saffron took it completely in stride, and now it's actually grown into [00:30:00] a several-book-long series.

Laura Williams: [00:30:02] Oh, that's great.

Dianna Gunn: [00:30:03] The first book came out last December, to a lot of excitement from me.

Dianna Gunn: It was really cool finally holding my friend's book in my hands, after editing it multiple times and watching it grow from this seed of an ambitious idea into this big, sprawling book.

Laura Williams: [00:30:26] Wonderful.

Dianna Gunn: [00:30:27] And the second one is almost ready for me to start editing, and I'm really looking forward to watching this series grow, and hopefully finding it a real audience.

Dianna Gunn: Saffron decided to go the indie route, and finding an audience can be really tough that way. But it's an absolutely incredible book, an incredible series, and I'm just so proud I've been able to [00:31:00] nurture it from that very first seed of an idea into these being real books out in the world.

Dianna Gunn: The first one, for anyone curious, is called The Mycelium Palace.

Laura Williams: [00:31:10] For any listeners thinking about starting their own author community, or a Patreon-style group, what's the number one piece of advice you'd give them for building a space that's genuinely nurturing, supportive, interactive, and keeps people around?

Dianna Gunn: [00:31:30] I think a lot of it just comes down to treating people how you want to be treated — being kind, being encouraging. I made a decision a long time ago that I wasn't going to leave negative reviews on books, because I'm building my entire presence and career around being a positive force for authors. That doesn't mean I never dislike a book.

Dianna Gunn: I just don't bother saying anything about it [00:32:00] if I do, because my role here is to support authors, and that's exactly what I do through Weeknight Writers. The other big thing is consistency — give people something to look forward to, whether that's weekly or monthly or however often you can manage.

Dianna Gunn: Make it really consistent. Don't skip dates unless you're genuinely ill, or there's a holiday or something like that. Just make sure you're always there when people expect you to be, and give them something to actually do. With the Blue Sky chat, over those two hours I ask a handful of questions, giving everyone prompts to respond to, and I also actively encourage people to talk with each other — there's a whole dedicated post reminding folks to interact with one another, not just with me.

Dianna Gunn: [00:33:00] Really, it comes down to those two pillars — consistency and encouragement. Think carefully about what you can offer in terms of engagement, what topics you'd want to cover, whether you want something simple, like a Blue Sky chat to just hang out with other writers, or something more involved, like a Discord server with structured programming.

Dianna Gunn: Also be aware it can quickly spiral into a lot of work. I spend between eight and ten hours a week on Weeknight Writers most weeks, sometimes more, occasionally less. I'm able to do that because I don't have children, and my freelance work is very flexible in terms of hours.

Dianna Gunn: So I have a limited number of other responsibilities. [00:34:00] But if I were working full-time, I wouldn't be able to run Weeknight Writers and still have any time left to write my own work. So really think carefully about how much time you can actually commit, and consider whether there's someone else who might want to run it with you — building it as a two-person effort rather than doing everything solo, so you can keep a lighter workload and still have time for the rest of your life.

Dianna Gunn: I mentioned my friend Jade earlier — I run basically all the day-to-day of Weeknight Writers, but Jade helps a lot with the bigger events. She helps with content planning for the Story Crafting Sessions and First Draft Fall, and some of the worksheets and other material.

Dianna Gunn: Sometimes it's even just sanity-checking whether [00:35:00] an idea is good, bad, or just not doable right now.

Dianna Gunn: Having that other person to bounce things off of — even though most of the time she's really just someone I bounce ideas off of, not deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the community — helps a lot.

Laura Williams: [00:35:17] You just said something really important — that it's not something you have to do right now. When you're building a community, or anything like this, you don't have to do everything at the start. Do what you can, do what's actually needed right now, and add to it as you grow.

Laura Williams: It's easy to look at well-developed groups and think, oh, I need all of that too, but you really don't. You're a beginner — start at the beginning.

Dianna Gunn: [00:35:47] Yeah, exactly. I ran the Twitter chat for about a year, maybe a little over, before starting the first version of the Discord, which I ran for a year before hosting our first virtual [00:36:00] conference.

Dianna Gunn: We ran the virtual conferences for three years before starting First Draft Fall. And the ezine we're building now — by the time this episode airs, we'll have closed the submission round for the first issue, but we're still building up to it right now.

Dianna Gunn: It's something Jade and I talked about many times over the years, something we'd always wanted to do, but we needed the right moment, and it came along recently when a couple of community members — people we'd discussed the idea with vaguely before — reached out and said, hey, we should really do this, and here's how we're willing and able to help.

Dianna Gunn: It was funny, because the day before that, I'd actually been discussing it with — [00:37:00] right now I'm working with a mentor, Carol Tice, on building out the Weeknight Writers community even further, since I'd like it to eventually become my primary income, my main business. She'd suggested doing an anthology or some kind of electronic publication, and I told her I wasn't sure I had the workload capacity for that.

Dianna Gunn: Then, literally the next day, those members reached out, and I thought, okay, if I can delegate this piece and that piece, we can actually do this. We can launch the first issue at the start of next year, and I'm genuinely excited about it. But none of that would've been possible without their help — if I'd tried to do it alone, with just a little support from Jade, I would've burned out worse than the concrete outside my house in this forty-five [00:38:00] degree Celsius weather.

Laura Williams: [00:38:04] That's just awful, I really feel for you. That sounds so uncomfortable.

Dianna Gunn: [00:38:11] Yeah, it's brutal.

Laura Williams: [00:38:12] I bet, I bet.

Laura Williams: Tell me where you see it all going. Obviously the ezine — how many times a year will you publish it?

Dianna Gunn: [00:38:21] We're planning two issues a year — one in February, one in July, since those tend to be the months where we don't have much else going on.

Dianna Gunn: And our hope — I say hope, since it doesn't quite feel real until you're actually doing it — is that starting in 2028, we'll also compile a yearly best-of anthology as an actual print publication.

Laura Williams: [00:38:53] Wow, that's exciting.

Dianna Gunn: [00:38:54] I'm still pretty nervous about it, because we'll have to crowdfund in order to pay our writers, [00:39:00] and —

Laura Williams: [00:39:01] I've got a show coming up with Oriana Leckhardt — she's the head of content for Kickstarter. I'll let you know when that airs. A friend of mine, a publisher up in New England, has run some really successful Kickstarter campaigns and learned a lot from it, and I'm having her on for another episode to look at things from that angle.

Laura Williams: I think that would be a really good project — it would get a lot of eyes on it, and people would be excited to back it.

Dianna Gunn: [00:39:37] Yeah, I'm not so much nervous about the funding side. I actually ran a Kickstarter for one of my own books before, and I don't mind writing the marketing materials, doing the promotion, any of that — but what I learned the hard way is that I really hate shipping physical rewards.

Dianna Gunn: Dealing with the post office and all of that.

Dianna Gunn: But now I have people on board to help with at least [00:40:00] some of that, which makes me feel like I can actually pull it off, as long as I've got others willing to help coordinate the logistics.

Laura Williams: [00:40:08] Could you tell the audience how they can find your group, and everything you have going on? Before you even start — I want to say, if you're not on Blue Sky yet, get on Blue Sky, because it's a wonderful space for authors.

Laura Williams: I've gotten so much out of it myself — you really do build genuine relationships there, and it's so cool to see what other people are working on. So go ahead and share that information with us.

Dianna Gunn: [00:40:43] You're absolutely right — writers should be on Blue Sky, especially fiction writers.

Dianna Gunn: It's such a great place — I've met so many amazing people there, found so many great opportunities, and sold a fair number of books through it. You can [00:41:00] find Weeknight Writers on Blue Sky at weeknightwriters — that's our username, very simple. The chat runs Thursdays from 7:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern under the hashtag weeknightwriters, and we have great conversations there.

Dianna Gunn: That part's totally free. If you're interested in joining the Discord, you can find all the details at weeknightwriters.com/sustaining-membership-program. We briefly considered becoming a nonprofit at one point, which is why it's called that, and I didn't want to break all the links once we decided to stay for-profit, since nonprofits come with a lot of organizational overhead that's really too much for two people to manage.

Dianna Gunn: So yes, it's a bit of a mouthful for a URL, but that's where you'll find the direct membership page. If you just want to go straight to buying a membership, you can find that on Ko-fi, [00:42:00] ko-fi.com/weeknightwriters/tiers. We use Ko-fi as our payment processor — it's similar to Patreon, a really good option for anyone setting up something like this, and it integrates directly with Discord, which made it perfect for our purposes.

Dianna Gunn: Those are the places to check things out. Once we start running First Draft Fall, which I'm pretty sure will be right around when this episode comes out, you can find it on Blue Sky under the hashtag firstdraftfall. We'll have a bunch of activities, and you can also check weeknightwriters.com for updates on that.

Laura Williams: [00:42:56] Thank you so much for taking the time to spend with [00:43:00] me today — I learned a lot about what you're doing, and I'm sure my listeners will too. I just think it's terrific that you've put this much time and energy into building a group like this, and into genuinely supporting people.

Laura Williams: We don't always approach our lives with that kind of kindness and generosity of spirit, so I really appreciate it whenever I see it in someone.

Dianna Gunn: [00:43:27] And thank you for having me. I'll never get tired of talking about Weeknight Writers and writing in general — it's really my whole life.

Laura Williams: [00:43:37] Yeah, it shows — you're so motivated, and you clearly get so much joy out of it. I think that's beautiful. Again, thank you so much, Dianna. I'll put all your information in the show notes, along with every link you mentioned, so people can find you and learn more about Weeknight Writers.

Laura Williams: To learn more about this [00:44:00] podcast, you can sign up to be the first to know when new episodes are up at thewritingbiz.com. And don't forget to like, share, and subscribe — it helps me tremendously, I'd really appreciate it. Until next time, take what you've learned and put it to work in your own writing biz.

Laura Williams: Thank you, Dianna.