Little girl reading a book in a burned-out forest by simpleinsomnia on Flickr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

To be utterly straightforward, I want more readers. I want more readers for my stories – as well as the articles I usually post on here. So I shall lay out a small piece once a week and see what you make of it. There are three sorts of reasons for asking this:

Creative

• your imagination will make my little worlds exist
• your effort in reading them will breathe life into the people there
• my tales will then exist in the space between us

The Seed of Imagination
by Qinni on DeviantArt

Critical

• you will see what I need to develop
• you can hear where my storytelling is working
• you can point out my errors so that I can improve

Communal

• Why would you embark on my longer work if you don’t know what my style is like?
• Why would you recommend my work to anyone else (other than kindness) ?
• How could you trust my help unless you knew I had something to offer?

So thank you if you responded to my Twitter poll or commented on Facebook – you’ve helped me feel brave enough to try this experiment.

The Distrest Poet by William Hogarth – http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22500/22500-h/22500-h.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7244821

Come into #TheGarret – there’s plenty of room for all.