Latest news: April 2025

Hey there friends! We've had a couple of big changes at Red Pens and Playwriting over the last wee while, so I thought it was about time to send you all an update about what's new and what's coming up.

A new federated presence

A very exciting piece of news is actually something that's been developed by the platform I use, Ghost. Recently, Ghost opened up a beta for something called Activity Pub, which in short is a way of connecting different collaborative sites and servers so that they can all interact with each other.

In practice, what this means is that if you're on Mastodon or any other federated site (you'll know if you use one, and if you don't know what this means you probably aren't on a federated site), you can follow Red Pens and Playwriting directly on the handle @index@red-pens-and-playwriting.ghost.io. I'm also set up on BlueSky in a slightly more roundabout way, so if you have an account there you can follow @index.red-pens-and-playwriting.ghost.io.ap.brid.gy.

The Red Pens and Playwriting account regularly publishes links to my weekly posts (except for the ones that are completely paywalled), making it easier than ever for you to share your favourite articles on these particular social media sites. It will also be a place for me to share behind-the-scenes commentary and strike up a bit of casual chat—I will try and work on doing some more chatting about what I'm up to so that you get some quality behind-the-scenes content.

Red Pens and Playwriting on Ko-fi

The other shiny new thing to report is that I've set up a Ko-fi account for Red Pens and Playwriting! There are a few purposes for the change:

• Giving members more flexible options for providing financial support at different levels and as one-off payments
• Fundraising towards future growth and development of the blog
• Showcasing my (very slowly growing) collection of PDF publications for sale

I know that in this economy ongoing subscriptions can be a lot to ask of people (and fair enough too), but a tip every once in a while may be much more achievable for anyone who still wants to contribute towards keeping Red Pens and Playwriting going. I also have some big plans for future additions to the blog, but in order to enact those plans I'll need to be on a higher tier of service on the Ghost platform, which will cost more than I'm currently bringing in. This won't be happening for a while yet, because I also need more time/energy to write this stuff, but having a vehicle to fundraise for those improvements will be handy when the time comes, and this will keep me prepared. (There's even an option for commissions, so maybe I'll raise some funds by writing sonnets for people or something?)

To keep everything a bit more centralised, you'll note that I have also moved Dissecting the Frog to Ko-fi from its previous location on Gumroad, which has the added benefit of the Ko-fi management system being an awful lot easier to use than Gumroad's (which I only realised after setting myself up there, naturally). It might be easier for you all to navigate through as well, so go have a snoop and let me know how you get on!

Upcoming: The Great Multimedia Showdown

Speaking of PDF publications, I've got a new one planned for later in the year! I've just wrapped up the Great Multimedia Showdown series of reflection posts, where we examined different forms of media and compared the various strengths of long vs short texts, fiction vs non-fiction, prose vs verse, and performative vs non-performative texts. Over the next few months, time and health allowing, I'm going to work on polishing up the content of these posts, adding new thoughts and examples, and moulding them into a single cohesive whole. Then, once I've finished my whole text that will be greater than the sum of its pre-existing parts, it will join Dissecting the Frog on Ko-fi and I will have many excited updates about it. I'm not ready to commit to a release date just yet, but it'll certainly be available before Christmas.

That's the haps, friends! Stay tuned for more news as it comes up later in the year (like when that new PDF is going to be ready). I hope to see some of you online for some good chats.

Until next time, stay funky and happy writing!