January 2025 The Great Substack Prompt Celebration
Your Inspiration Invitation
Welcome back to another month — and a brand new year — of The Great Substack Prompt Celebration!
Let’s begin by explaining what this is and why we think you should join us.
What is The Great Substack Prompt Celebration?
Fictionistas was created to support you in the fiction you are already writing and sharing on Substack, but as we grew, we took the opportunity to encourage you to embrace this growing writing community, stretch your writing muscles, and stop writing alone. Each month, Nicole Rivera of the Stop Writing Alone substack community and Jackie Dana, writer of Unseen St. Louis (nonfiction/local history) and Story Cauldron (fiction), will host a month-long Writing Prompt Celebration.
Our monthly writing prompt celebration begins with a live writing prompt party where we share a writing prompt, set a timer and write, and finally read aloud a first draft of a short fiction piece with fellow Fictionistas members. (This post includes this month’s invitation and link to that writing prompt party.) To continue the celebration – and to ensure no one misses out on what Nicole playfully calls “writing fitness with friends” – the prompt is then shared here on Fictionistas, along with an invite to share your polished fiction based on the prompt on the Fictionistas Substack page. In between we like to engage the community in conversations about their writing and writing process, within our posts so we can continue to learn about each other and share tips, tricks, experiences and lessons learned.
In the end we hope that our ever-growing community will get a chance to find your Substack page, read your fiction, and share it with their own followers in their social media spaces. Active participants will get a chance to write in and outside their comfort zones, meet fellow fiction writers in the trenches with them and, perhaps best of all, read lots of new-to-them writers.
Let’s begin for our chat topic of the week:
Let’s Talk About Favorite Reads of the Year
To be writers, we must read. It is often recommended that we read widely, ensuring that we expose our writer-mind to all types of writing, especially outside our own preferred catergories and genres of writing. However, we all have our favorites, and they are worth celebrating.
What was your favorite read from 2024?
For this week’s chat, let’s discuss our favorite reads from 2024, whether they are novels, nonfiction books, poems, stories, Substacks, or something else entirely! Your choice does not have to been newly published in 2024, just new to you in 2024. As we celebrate our own faves, we can use the comment section to fill up our 2025 TBR list of reading widely!
Mark Your Calendar & Grab Your Link
You officially have one week to warm up before this month’s fun begins. Remember, Fictionistas who join the Writing Prompt Party will be the first to get this month’s prompt and the first to get some real-time reactions to their first drafts!
Your Official Invitation to Party
The January Writing Prompt Party will be on Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 6PM Eastern. We would love to see you there (but keep in mind, if you can’t make it, we will be posting the prompt to Fictionistas after the meeting)!
Topic: FICTIONISTAS Writing Prompt Party DECEMBER 2024
Time: Jan 16, 2025 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89636663598?pwd=5QvLnYQCcHangpftkaqjEOs2VdjpQf.1
Meeting ID: 896 3666 3598
Passcode: JanFICTION
I’m Jackie, a fiction author, freelance writer, and historian, I enjoy rooting for the underdog and stirring up trouble. Unsurprisingly, my alignment is Chaotic Good. My Substacks are Unseen St. Louis and Story Cauldron,
I’m Nicole creator of all things Stop Writing Alone including a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a Substack community hosting multiple monthly Live Zoom Events for writers seeking community. If you are ready to truly stop writing alone, join here.
Thanks for reading Fictionistas! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
I shared a list of great reads on my Substack last month, so I’m going to be lazy and share it here. https://open.substack.com/pub/projectstarfish/p/12-days-of-the-best-free-serial-fiction?r=1mk6at&utm_medium=ios
In 2024 I finally returned to reading books. Granted, I only read one book - Emily Katy's "Girl Unmasked" - but I realize that books are good for learning new things and expanding one's imagination. One of my goals for this year is to read more books.
In terms of stuff hosted online I've been really enjoying the poetry written by Emma-Jane Barlow and Caiti Quatmann. Both of these post often on Instagram and Threads.