Closing The Red Door

redroom-logo

One less widget in the sidebar.  

Hundreds of us got word recently that Red Room, a hospitable and collegial site for writers of all stripes, is calling it quits after many years of providing an invaluable and irreplaceable writing/blogging/social platform.

 Bummer. Major Bummer.

The email came from founder, CEO, and Editor-In-Chief Ivory Madison.  It recommended we check out another site, Wattpad, and said that all of our work would be transportable soon but, frankly, after doing so, I’ve decided against it.  Red Room, like all other really good things, is one of a kind.

Right now, all the other writers I’ve encountered there are busy trying to find ways to make sure they can stay in touch & not lose what they’ve worked so hard to cultivate.

It’s like the last day of summer camp: everyone’s running around with their address books, promising to stay in touch.

I’m doing the same.

No_Longer_Bus_Stop

8 responses

  1. Ron, I never went to summer camp, but you summed it up perfectly. Hope you can join the The Red Room Writers group on Facebook. The gangs migrating over there so we can stay in touch.

  2. Please join the Facebook page for RR writers, Ron. We need your wit and words there.

  3. always sad when a good site disappears. sorry sorry

  4. I felt similar when dVerse Poets Pub site stopped doing weekly open link night for poets. It gave me incentive to write new poems and I had developed a sense of community with other poets. I still check them out sometimes but it’s kind of like saying ‘let’s get together soon’ with old friends and you never do.

  5. Once you lose that sense of continuity everything sort of fizzles. I miss the old Speakeasy, WildPoetry, even Melic and Utne Cafe. in 19 years of online stuff, I can count maybe ten people who are still “with me” and even some of those are of the ‘let’s do lunch’ variety.

  6. Even though I had no connection, I’m sorry to see it go. I’ve seen a lot of online places that I like disappear over the years. It’s painful.

  7. It seems those awful Wattpad people were keen to give themselves some street cred with literary critics, and that was the reason the acquired Red Room – this seems to have backfired, because so far from what I’ve seen every writer who was a valued guest in the Red Room is now fleeing the Wattpadian padded cell of bad writing as fast as they can. The site keeps claiming their “phenomenal success story” for getting writers publishing contracts and turning them into bestsellers, but if that were the case…why bother gobbling up Red Room?

    Sure, there are 16-year-old kids on there who have had 2.5 million downloads for their “work” about some pop star and their teenage sexual fantasies, but as far as I know there have been no critically acclaimed writers who’ve made it out of the Wattpad quick sand.

  8. A lovely tribute to what was. So glad I ran into you here!

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