Joseph Nassise

Well, as you can see, Storytellersunplugged has a new look and feel. This is our fourth calendar year in existence (hard to imagine we started back in June of 2005, isn’t it?) and we’re still going strong with a marvelous cast of contributors and terrific content. We’ve grown exponentially each year and I hope we continue to do the same in 2009.

You may have noticed we have some advertising space available now. If you have a website or product that you think our readership would be interested in, check out the new Advertising page to see what we’ve made available. Our readers comes from more than 80 countries across the globe and are a widely-read and highly intelligent crowd.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post, actually.

We want to hear from you, our readers.

We want to know what you’d like us to talk about in 2009. What topics would you like to see covered? What questions do you have to ask? What other types of posts would you like to see? Maybe book reviews? Author interviews? Product write-ups? Publishing house reviews? Guest bloggers? Come on, don’t be shy! Use the comment section and let us know what you’d like to read about this year and we’ll do our level best to bring it to you.

Finally, we want to say thank you. Thank you to each and every one of you who come back here day after day, week after week. You’ve helped make this place what it is and I know every single one of our contributors appreciates your patronage.

Here’s to another great year at SU!

– Joe Nassise and Dave Wilson

For the past couple of years, Michael Stelzner has done a “Top 10 Blogs For Writers” post, and it has been amazingly successful.

To participate, all you need to do is leave a comment at his post explaining why you think a given blog is worthy of making the Top 10.

In the past, great blogs like Men With Pens, Freelance Writing Jobs, and Copyblogger have all made the cut.

This year I’d love to see Storytellersunplugged make the list in the top ten. To show your appreciation for all the fine writers who create content here, do me a favor and go visit Michael’s blog, and let him know how much you appreciate Storytellersunplugged.com.

Thanks,
Your friendly neighborhood admin – Joe Nassise

We’re quite happy to announce that the RSS Feeds for our site have been fixed and should now be operational.  Thank you all for your patience, suggestions, and assistance in resolving the issue.

If anyone experiences any problems, please let us know in the Comments to this post.

Best,

Your friendly neighborhood administrators

Welcome to the new look and feel for Storytellersunplugged!

After 2 and 1/4 years of that old plain vanilla, we decided it was time to bring a new face to your favorite writing blog. Some of the changes we’ve made include:

• New style and layout
• Improved search functions
• Better tagging and indexing
• Bookshelves with the latest works by our contributors, linked to Amazon.com and other virtual bookstores, all accessed through their Contributor pages (please note these are rolling out all week – only a few are presently active, so keep checking back)
• Alphabetized contributor pages
• A new blogroll (which we be greatly expanded over the next day or two

Still to come are an improved RSS process, which will not only allow you to create feeds for the site overall (both posts and comments) but also allow the creation of feeds for individual authors or post subjects. (This should be live by the end of the week – the framework is in place, as you can see from the icons, but the mechanics still need some work)

Please let us know of any difficulties you might be having and what you think of our new look!

Best,

The Admins – Joe Nassise and Dave Wilson

I’m currently suffering from a rather bad case of lateral epicondylitis. Typing has become a major difficulty for me over the last several weeks, which means this month’s essay is going to be limited in size and scope as a result. Rather than try to come up with something halfway coherent while muddling through my pain meds, I decided the time might be more wisely spent asking questions of our readership as to what you might like to see here on Storytellersunplugged in the near future.

If you read this blog, please do us a favor and comment after this post. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’d appreciate hearing us talk about in the future.

So, some questions….

What do you like most about the site?

What do you like least?

What topics would you like us to cover in the next ninety days?

Do you like the straight essay style or would you like to see some variety – book reviews, author interviews, short fiction, round-robin stories?

What do you think of the podcasts? Would you like to hear more of them?

Would links on the bio pages to the contributors’ latest works be beneficial?

What specific questions about writing/publishing would you like someone to answer?

What do you want to tell us that I didn’t think of here?

The ball’s in your court, folks.

Every now and then I use my scheduled slot to give our readers a quick update on what’s happening here at Storytellersunplugged and this week is one of those weeks.

As you can see from the list of columnists on the right, we’ve had a few personnel changes around here. The writing life can by cyclical and sometimes the amount of work that falls into a short segment of time can overwhelm other activities. Such is the case with some of our columnists who have had to step down due to impending deadlines and the want of 28 hour days.

Not to fear, we’ve arranged for an equally intriguing and interesting group to take over right on their heels.

My thanks to Doug Clegg, Kealan Patrick Burke, Brian Keene, Mike Laimo, Jay Caselberg, and Laura Anne Gilman for taking the time to join us over the last several months. It’s the holiday season – go buy one of their books and give it away to a new reader to show your thanks for their participation here!

Starting tomorrow, new columnists will include:

Thomas Sullivan – author of SECOND SOUL and DUST OF EDEN, among others

Justine Musk – author of Bloodangel, now available in your favorite bookstore

Weston Ochse – author of the recently released Scarecrow Gods and the forthcoming Recalled to Life.

And at the end of January, master storyteller Lucius Shepard will also be joining our ranks, something I’m personally looking forward to as Lucius has long been a favorite of mine.

So there you have it, some new faces and new voices to go with the New Year. Thanks again for joining us and be sure to spread the word far and wide that Storytellersunplugged.com is THE place for an inside look at writing, horror, and everything in between.