Lately I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out at Holly Lisle‘s online Talyn party, and while there, I thought of a way to bring back from the dead an old idea that could still be interesting and fun. A couple of years ago, back when I had recently discovered Holly Lisle’s website and writing courses, she had launched a fun little tradition called “Friday Snippets“, where writers would share snippets of their WIPs every friday through a linking list service. I never took part in it back then, since I didn’t feel comfortable translating my writing and sharing it with strangers, and in time sadly the meme died out of use.
In time, anyway, a lot of things have changed. First of all, my attitude towards writing: sure, it’s unlikely to come up as a casual conversation subject, but I’m no longer going to behave like I should be ashamed of it or something. Also, new social media like Twitter make sharing links and spreading the word for something like this much easier. So I thought… why not start this again? 
I’ve mentioned the idea to Holly during the party, and not only she appreciated it, but she might join the fun when she goes back to writing fiction, which just makes this more awesome given that she’s the one who inspired it.
So the #FridaySnippets hashtag was born. I’m already spreading the word on my twitter, and anybody who wants to take part in the fun is welcome to do so.
A couple of hopefully unnecessary bits of common sense:
- The #FridaySnippets twitter hashtag must be included when tweeting the link to the snippet, so all tweets can be grouped easily. Yes, I know it’s horribly obvious, but this is important and kind of the point of the whole thing, so I prefer to stress it just in case.
- Any writer can link to snippets of anything they feel comfortable sharing, hosted on any convenient blogging or text uploading service (I’ll be using my tumblr blog for this): finished works or first draft WIPs, original or fan fiction, even old and embarrassingly bad stuff if they like to make fun of it (in that case though, best add a disclaimer or some comments in the text). They can be complete scenes if they’re short, and also things like excerpts of description, dialogues or even worldbuilding can be posted. I can’t think of a good rule of thumb for “short”, so that’s left to individual judgement, but please keep in mind that the risk of “tl;dr” is stronger on the Internet than on printed media.
- A disclaimer in case of mature content will be appreciated (and I know I’ll definitely have to use one if I’m going to post snippets from PoB).
- The material should be as spoiler-free as possible, or at least have a disclaimer if spoilers are unavoidable. You want to engage and tantalize, but not ruin the fun for your readers when eventually the book will be published!
