writing rooms

The Bowerbird🦚opens his Writing Rooms every Sunday at 9am on Zoom. We begin with a check-in round at 9.05am, then break into rooms to write for 50 minutes. We'll check in with each other at 9.55am and the space will stay open until 10.30am for those who want to write more. Please contact @loumycroft or @joyfulFE for the link.

Anyone is welcome, to write anything, and you don't have to commit to opening a Bower ☺️

Bowerbird's Bootcamp

If there's demand, we could have some more Bootcamps! Below is what we did back in early lockdown.

This is an experiment, based on great work we did (and which still happens) at The Northern College back in the day. We had great experiences of people coming together in temporary writing constellations, putting the internal critical editor to one side and writing, writing, writing. We've also been inspired longtime now by Dave Cormier's #Rhizo14 experiment, which first introduced us to the rhizome, and subsequently of course to The Bowerbird himself.

So what will the Bootcamp look like virtually?

1. Commit to all or some of the six hour session (make it a chunk of time, rather than dipping in and out). The sessions run 8am-2pm.

2. Accept that whoever's there are the right people.

3. Choose a writing space (you can write here in the Bower, in a Googledoc, Word doc etc, in a notebook...if you want editing help, please make sure it's also something we can comment within).

4. Choose a launch space. That could be here in the Bower, on Twitter #BowerbirdBootcamp or (if you are part of the #APConnect constellations) on Slack.

5. You will be invited to make your commitment for the day: how long are you here for? What are you working on? How many words are you aiming to write?

6. Download a Pomodoro app onto your phone or device. This will prompt you to take regular short breaks. Get up and walk around for 5 minutes (I'll have a dance in my kitchen). It's proven to make you more focused and effective. After every several rotations, the app will give you a longer break. This is a great time to do some yoga or go for a walk.

7. If you know you'll get drawn into social media, try and app like Freedom which blocks it on all devices (you won't be able to access the launch spaces though, unless you carefully customise what's blocked). Once you've blocked, you can't override.

8.If you struggle with focus and want to try something more earthy, try rosemary oil. Got my boy through his A-levels, also see below.

9. There are some lovely revision playlists on Spotify, or make one of your own.

10. The idea is to bang words down, not craft them. You can do that later. If you are stuck for a word, don't waste time looking it up. Choose a word for just this occasion (I choose FISH) and bang it in capitals. You can always search and replace later.

11. Switch off your internal editor, banish impostor syndrome - and WRITE.

12. At the end of your time in Bootcamp, please go back to your chosen launch space and tell us how you've done! We love to hear your Bootcamp stories :-)