Dream Foundry's Free-Fall Challenge

Fall has arrived for those of us in the northern hemisphere and the second month of the global phenomena of using October and November as creative "make a thing" months. Here at the Dream Foundry, we brainstormed ideas on how to pull together an event to encompass creatives of all kinds, forming a community space to encourage attaining goals, fostering skills, and honing craft.

Starting November 1, the Dream Foundry presents The Free-Fall November Challenge: prepare to stretch your creative muscles, set goals, leap into new feats, and cheer each other on!

The goal of the challenge is to foster skills that will help you translate your current workflow into something sustainable as you learn your limits, expand your boundaries, build endurance, and how to work without burning yourself out. Build a plan! Set goals! Make a schedule! And cheer each other on! And if you don't succeed, that's okay too! In fact, failing is also a valuable learning experience and we're here to help guide you through it.

You're writing a novel this November? Or maybe a series of short stories? Awesome. This is for you. You're thinking of making a new interactive fiction game? Good! This is for you, too. Want to stretch your drawing practice or try a new medium for a month? This challenge is all yours. Want to translate a poem a day, or write the scripts for your next SFF podcast? Jump right in! Whatever your project is, if you’re dedicating the month to doing something bigger than you ever have before, the Free-Fall November challenge is for you.

We're running the challenge through our Discord server, complete with a whole new channel for co-working, tips, and encouragement.

How it works!

  • The Dream Foundry is providing space for co-working, accountability, and scheduling help. 
  • Come over to our Discord server and find the #free-fall-challenge channel. 
  • Let us know what your plans and goals are - and if you’re not sure how to set goals that are the right level of challenging, we’ll help you out! 
  • When you have your plan ready, you can sign-up here. If you want to join the official co-working sessions, you’ll need to sign up.  
  • You can also share your progress and join in on twitter with the hashtag #freefallchallenge.  
  • And if you stumble along the way? We’ll help you recover, with some cheerleading from the other folks working on their own challenges. 

Sign up here!

Preparations for your jump can start now! Drop in, get hyped, and prepare to make November a challenge that gives you life!

The official launch of our Free-Fall Challenge will take place here in our virtual co-working space November 1st. Details and invites will be sent to those who have signed up using our form. We look forward to seeing everyone there!

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Make a Thing Month(s)!

There's a chill in the air tinted by the ever-increasing energy of spooky season starting. Which means for those of us in the northern hemisphere, sweater season, warm drinks, and falling leaves. It also means that rolling around the corner are the months of creating things, of making and sharing (or not sharing!) art and writing and whatever else you might have in mind. Whether you're an artist, a writer, or just a creative looking for inspiration from prompts, October and November are excellent times to come together, find a spot in the community among other creatives, and encourage each other to make things.

The goal of these challenges isn't to gain popularity, or to compete with each other. You could go the entire next few months quietly creating away, supported by the community, and never share a thing. The important part is the process! Let the creative juices flow!

Under the cut is a collection of art challenges/prompts. Most of these are intended for use for art, but the creators are quite flexible - tag them so they can see (if that's your sort of thing) or keep them to yourselves, they can even make great prompts for poetry or short fiction.

And, as NaNoWriMo peeks around the corner, be sure to pop by the Dream Foundry Discord server (discord.gg/dreamfoundry) and join the community of writers there for support, sprints, helpful advice, and more! Not a writer? Come by anyway - the Dream Foundry server is a space for all creatives, artists, game devs, comics makers, and more!

Read more

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An Interview with the Dream Foundry's Writing Contest Coordinator Vajra Chandrasekera

In light of the Dream Foundry’s Writing Contest opening submissions, we asked writing contest coordinator Vajra Chandrasekera a few questions about the contest and what these sorts of opportunities mean for emerging writers.

 

Can you tell us a bit about the process of reading and evaluating submissions? How does it differ – if at all – from reading slush for a magazine?

It’s really quite similar! All submissions are read and responded to; a shortlisted selection will be discussed further, and final selections will be made out of that.

How do contests and open submissions drive the creation of encouraging environments for emerging writers?

Effectively, or so I hope. Writers need opportunities to be paid and recognized for their work; writers at the beginning of their career, especially, need more opportunities that aren’t predatory or exploitative like the Church of Scientology's Writers of the Future contest; or foreclosed by restrictive eligibility criteria or entry fees like many prestigious literary fiction magazines and contests; or walled off into invitation-only prestigious genre publications.

Professional development spaces for emerging writers are not necessarily easily accessible to those who need it most. How do you see opportunities like the Dream Foundry’s writing contest fitting into the professional development of new and upcoming writers?

I think nine-tenths of “professional development” for a short story writer at the beginning of their career is learning how to make their own practice effective. This means figuring out what they want to write about and what they’re good at writing, and writing more stories where they do those things, ideally at the same time. Sometimes it's just that a contest gives you a clearly defined set of constraints to work within, which can be very productive. Sometimes it's good to hang out in a discord with a bunch of other people who are trying to solve the same problems you are—so you can commiserate and share experiences and animal pictures, if you're into that sort of thing, and even if not, these are good spaces to eventually share knowledge about the industry, too.

Do you have any advice on how emerging writers can get the most out of participating in the writing contest?

One of the most difficult hurdles in a writer's entire career, in a rather cruel irony, is the very first one: submitting your work for consideration in a contest or for publication. I think most of us struggle with it in the early going. It takes practice for it to stop feeling like a huge leap of faith every time—it never stops being a leap of faith, but you do get used to the jump. So if you're a writer eligible for the contest who wants to participate but is already stressing about whether you can even write something for it, you're exactly the person this thing is for.

What kind of experience do you believe transfers from the writing contest to publishing at large? What can emerging writers learn from this process?

If you want to write and publish, then you have to write and submit work as much as you can. This may sound like a mere tautology, or maybe too simple to require saying out loud, but it's neither of those things in real life. Properly connecting the back half of that sentence to the front half can be the work of years, but what matters is that you get started—and when it falls apart, that you get started again.

 

Interested in joining a community of other writers participating in the contest? Come join our Discord server (discord.gg/dreamfoundry) where you can discuss writing and ask for help in #writer-chat, ask for and receive feedback in #find-crit-beta, discuss industry goings-on in #industry-chat, or just come update us on your story progress in #am-working!

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SFF Craft and Industry Resources for and by Black Creators

Here at Dream Foundry, we encourage and support new creatives in the field of SFF. As the internet has provided a wealth of resources for new and emerging creators, we've compiled a list specifically geared toward Black creators and helping get more Black voices out into the world.

The list currently skews quite heavily toward writing but we continue to search for and add to this page as new opportunities arise. Please feel free to check back and/or to drop us a line if you see something we haven't added.

Representation

Manuscript contest with the award being rep by DongWon Song. Genre: Commercial fiction, also MG and YA speculative and contemporary and graphic novels. Black writers only.

https://publishingishard.substack.com/p/the-only-lasting-truth-is-change

Scholarship/Resources:

Jobs

Residency:

Events:

Art/Design

Directories:

Lit Mags

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