SilverPen Publishing is a website dedicated to writing for the sake of the art, rather than for profit. Moreover, it is also an experiment in a number of different ways. First, my dream was to do what so many webcomic artists have and give away my content, inspired largely by a simple curiosity whether the same can be done with writing that others do with art. Second, it is a vast departure from how I have done things in the past.
I’ve had a website for my writing for many years, but previously everything was on static pages and I felt like the site was rather stagnant. I utilized Mambo almost exclusively, which I didn’t really like, and I was rarely satisfied with SilverPen. After reading an article by Lorelle, however, I asked myself the question, “Why not use blog entries?” What do I need static pages for?
And so version 3 of SilverPen Publishing was born. All of my content goes into blog entries now, search works a lot better, and I’m quite pleased with the results. In addition to this, it means that I can bring additional authors into the project much more easily.
SilverPen Publishing is hosted using WordPress-MU, which gives me a centralized interface for creating and managing multiple blogs. This allows me to keep the site fresh, update easily, and create additional blogs for new writers or projects. When I finally compile an anthology of poetry, that will have a separate blog. As I write a book, that will have its own blog too.
My hope is to someday establish and/or join a community of online writers, people with the same goals or desires as myself, and that we can enrich and encourage each other through open sharing and collaboration on our work. I am sure that such a community exists in this wide, diverse World Wide Web of ours, I simply haven’t found it yet.
The Authors
Currently, the primary authors publishing on this site are myself and my wife, April. My name is Matthew Stublefield, and I live in Springfield, Missouri, USA. My days are spent at Missouri State University where I work in Computer Services, and by evening I can often be found wandering around Azeroth as a Draenei Paladin.
I am (still) an undergraduate in the programs of religious studies and creative writing, and I have been involved in college ministry in some capacity since 2003. As of the spring of 2008, I finished a two year internship at First & Calvary Presbyterian Church, the completion of which freed up enough time for me to really invest in this blog.
I write poetry, fantasy fiction and scifi, and a lot of non-fiction, usually in the form of blogging. Fantasy fiction fills at least half of our bookshelves, and I was practically raised by the DragonLance Saga. I don’t read as much theology as I used to, but who knows what the future will hold.
We hope to add at least one or two more authors to the site soon, but SilverPen Publishing is not an open site with self-registration. If you’d like to begin publishing with us through this website, feel free to contact me and we can talk about it.
The Blogs
SilverPen Publishing
This whole thing is an experiment for me, first begun in 2005 but only gaining personal momentum recently. I wanted to see if I could put my writing online, give it away for free, eventually have entire books on here, and somehow make a living off of that so I could write full time. However, I’ve never really invested in it beyond throwing my old writing on a website and maybe putting some Google ads up; my site was stagnant for a long time and little new work was generated. That is changing.
The front page of this blog is an amalgam of many different things, from theology to technical articles, personal updates, and the occasional book review. It’s pretty much whatever I’m working on or reading at the moment, usually updated Monday through Friday.
Christian Newlyweds
I haven’t really come up with a good title for this project yet. April and I are writing a book together that is ostensibly about marriage, but with information that is helpful for people who are single, just dating, considering engagement or recently engaged, or newly married. So right now, everything’s just working titles, and I’ll come up with something permanent later.
Articles are posted at the rate of one to two a week and the blog will be going for probably around two years, at which time we’ll be editing the ideas and work into a book that will be available from SilverPen Publishing.
Poetry
I previously had about 180 poems in Mambo, and I always told myself that someday I’d go through and revise them all. When I created revision 3 of SilverPen Publishing, I decided to put all of the poems into a blog rather than creating static pages for them, and that I’d put them in slowly, as I had the chance to revise them. This means that you only see the best of the best, or at least the best I have to offer.
The Stormsworn Saga
I am building the site so that each project gets its own blog, so as I begin to write from other character’s points of view, or I begin a completely different story, that will have its own blog. This will hopefully make reading a lot easier for people, and my hope is that it will also make it more simple to give feedback.
Rather than pulling these stories out of the blog once a sufficient amount have been written and dumping those into a single file called a “book,” the finished project will be a new piece written using the ideas developed through the blog. Books will be self-published and available either for purchase or for free download.
