Backwater Stories.
Writing for Backwater Publications.
My background is engineering and IT. I’ve written reports and published articles in professional journals as well my PhD research thesis. They all come down to telling stories about beliefs, experiences and life’s lessons learnt. Seems I was always writing fables.
Backwater Publications focuses on interactions between a community of writers and society. The community has locations: coffee house for debates; forests for communing; Gaia, surfing beaches; lagoons and lakes for kayaking and fishing. I actually live near these locations. Perhaps you may regard Backwater as a writer’s retreat or holiday destination, it’s certainly off the beaten track.
In Backwater Publications I consider opinion, experience and audience engagement as being key writing foci. Well written poetry and prose are admirable vehicles for telling stories. Personally, I love experimenting in what some have called “John’s stark poetry”: minimum words for maximum meaning.
There is a risk that applying rules for story styles and formats can lead to constraining creative and innovative writing. However, Backwater Publications exist in medium.com’s ecosystem, so stories must comply to medium.com’s standards. In particular, copyrighted images will not be accepted. Make sure you caption all images and provide full attribution.
Stories generated totally or partially by AI will not be accepted. Personally I don’t like images generated or enhanced by AI, goodness, this publication is all about human creativity!
The overarching goal of Backwater stories is impact. Achieving an impactful story requires originality and exploring novel subjects. Perhaps, offer new perspectives on familiar themes. Your writing will benefit from being based on your own background.
Impact requires stories be well written with a focus on language, grammar, and narrative development. A reader’s appreciation of your story will be severely impaired by spelling errors.
Human Creativity not Mechanistic AI.
Times change but some things like cherishing human creativity stay true to ideals of Blackwater Publications:
Ai generated or enhanced pictures along with AI generated text are not part of Blackwater Publications.
Sections (Topics).
Definition: “Medium publication sections are a feature that allows editors to organize their publication’s content into different categories. These categories are known as sections, and they help readers navigate the publication and find the content that interests them the most.”
The sections included in Backwater Publications are:
Wellness Creativity Family Community Relationships Enjoyment Earnings Commentary
Add the section name as a tag (topic) to your story under the story’s settings. Clicking a section in the Backwater Publications’ homepage will result in all stories with the topic (tag) to be displayed.
Boosting.
This is something that writers need to consider. Apart from thinking about story distribution, possible earnings and bragging rights, writers should think about achieving the quality required for boosted stories. Boosting applies to all writing styles including poetry. Here are medium.com’s boosting guidelines:
Let’s have a discussion about how to help all our writers work to achieve boosting standard.
Writers Joining Backwater Publications.
While Backwater Publications is a little quirky and some have ventured to suggest the editor is somewhat eccentric and drinks too much coffee there seems to be a breed of hardy writers who want to write in this outback lean-to.
If you are a hardy and well-seasoned writer and just happy to have one story published a day, just place a nice comment to this story.
Work in Progress.
Finally, Backwater Publications is conceived as a place where writers experiment and create together. No doubt, this document will continue to be a work-in-progress.
Blessed be.
