It seems a little silly to be launching this blog with a post about how we wrote a book. We originally intended to post on this blog a few times before the end of 2023, but it turns out that writing a book takes a lot of time and attention. So here we are.

We three met at the National Theater Institute in 2013. Elena suggested this group at the beginning of Covid as a way to cope/stay engaged/be creative/etc. We generated prompts from conversations, books of writing prompts, writing prompt generator websites, and some from Suleika Jauad’s The Isolation Journals. Like a lot of folks, we all started many projects in 2020, but this is one of the few we all actually kept up with. This book is not the culmination of all our work; it comes out of wanting to celebrate what we’ve done so far.

We are constantly changing and evolving the format: some days we invite guests, some days we play DnD, sometimes we have a plan, and other times we spend most of our time chatting. In year one, we mostly wrote from prompts and conversations, using what was happening around us and what was going on in our internal worlds. In year two, we did a lot of accountability writing – we all had other things we were working on, and used our weekly hour for that. In year three, we expanded our structure and sources of inspiration, using more nontraditional sources to help us generate work.

We decided to make a book because at the start of year three we looked back and realized we had generated a large amount of work. We thought it would be nice to collect some of it in one place. We’ve been friends for ten years, have been writing for three, and this feels like a commemoration of both those things.

In looking ahead to 2024, we want to continue using non-traditional things to generate our work. Things like RPGs, songs, games, visitors, etc. And we hope to start posting some of our work – things we’ve written in the past, and things we write this year – on this blog. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy of our book, it can be ordered from your local independent bookstore. You can also buy it from Barnes & Noble, but we’d prefer you go the indie rout first! Here is a link to the bookstore that Ivy works at: https://www.buffalostreetbooks.com/book/9798218314699