FAQs

Welcome to Floodmark. 

Consider this your handy guide to what we're about and how to navigate our site. If you haven't already, check out our About Us page to learn more about the editorial team.

Who are we? 

Aside from what you'll find from our mission statement on the About Us page (hint -- go read that first): We're a bunch of creative writers living lives and working day jobs and writing about writing on the side. No one at Floodmark is paid, unless you count experience, awesome GIFs, kickass meetings, and the chance to talk about stuff you care about with people who care, too. (Obviously, we count all that.) We're an enthusiastic bunch who see the humorous side of things, but don't shy away from hard truths either. Maybe we're biased, but we think this little virtual community we've got going on is pretty awesome. If you're interested in writing for us, drop us a line.

How did Floodmark come about? 

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2014. Emily Glimco and Alexandria Petrassi  started spending every lunch break in November working on launching their own poetry blog, in the hopes that they might forge an online community and thus feel a little less alone in the "real world". Or at the very least, write some cool stuff about poetry and have it out there on the internet. And thus, Floodmark was born. From there, it's been a steady path of hard work, determination, buckets of enthusiasm, and a little luck. In the Summer of 2015, Emily left the project and passed the reins over to Alexandria. The site was redesigned, the logo reimagined, and six fantastic editors were brought onto the team to write (Alyssa Froehling, Rukmini Girish, Vernon Meidlinger-Chin, and Padraic Price), handle social media, (Kelsey Kammerzelt) and work on video content (Gary Miller). At the very beginning of 2017, Floodmark reorganized again, this time to open itself to all different genres with Alyssa as the Poetry Editor, Rukmini as the Non-Fiction Editor, Vernon as the Interviews & Outreach Editor, and Cam Best as the Fiction Editor.

Okay, but what does Floodmark mean? Like...symbolism and stuff. 

Good question. We're here to provide eclectic inspiration to the modern writer, to feed the flood of inspiration. Our hope for you, readers, is that the mark gets a little higher each time you visit -- that your notebook is a little fuller, your mind more open to everyday inspiration, and that the landscape of your writing is in constant bloom. (See what we did there?)

Cool. Now tell me how to navigate your site. 

As you wish. There are four big categories: Writing Prompts, Food for Thought, and Featured Work, all located at the top menu bar on our site. Let's go through each one and what you might find there.

Writing Prompts:

Under this category, you'll find the following sub-categories: Photo Prompts, Word List Prompts, Sound Prompts, Word of the Day, Weekend Whimsy, and Inspiration. Some of those are self-explanatory, some of them not so much.

Photo Prompts provide a themed series of photos as the basis of inspiration, and are followed up by a writing prompt to help you dive in. Word List Prompts provide a themed list of words with  a writing prompt to get your gears turning. Sound Prompts provide Youtube videos or music inspiration paired with a prompt to help you think about the sound more in depth. Word of the Day provides a word that we find interesting and a writing prompt to help you find ways to use it in your work. Weekend Whimsy combines artwork and a quote with writing prompts to create a multimedia inspiration piece. Inspiration posts have everything in between -- stuff that doesn't fall into the other categories that we find inspiring and think you will, too.

Food for Thought

As the title suggests, you'll find posts about what it means to be a writer, things we're thinking about right now, videos, humor content, and our guides on various forms. There are sub-categories here, too: Musings, Guides on Form, and Let's Frolic.  Again, some of these are straightforward, some are Floodmark originals.

Musings is the category where you will find our longest posts -- here we delve into a huge variety of topics that interest us. If we're thinking about it and how it connects to our writing, it winds up here on Floodmark. This is our space to explore topics that inspire us and share them with you. Guides on Form is a category we devote to various forms of creative writing. We've expanded this a bit to discuss screen writing, non fiction, and cross genre work, too. In time our goal is to compile a library of forms to reference and use in your writing practice. Let's Frolic captures our adventures, the funny stuff we find on the internet, and everything in between. These are more light-hearted pieces that allow us to share a laugh and some good stories from our own writerly lives.

Featured Work 

Here you'll find a few different things. Guest Posts will show you all the fantastic folks who have agreed to write us a piece or two. We're proud to have such a diversity of voices on our blog, and this is a category we really enjoy expanding. If you're interested in guest blogging, reach out! Chances are we're interested in you guest blogging, too. Reviews will provide information on books or tools that we're interested in and that you might find useful. Spotlights are either interviews with or features on a particular creative writer that we really dig. There are some really cool people out there doing some really cool things and we want you to know about them.

Odds and Ends

At the very time of the page, you'll find our logo. Isn't it pretty?

Below that, there's a slick-looking slider that looks really cool and flips through some of our most recent posts. And below THAT there are our categories and the two most recent posts in each. Easy way to jump into our content.

There's a search bar on the right-hand side of the site. Make a wish. Maybe we've already granted it.

If we haven't, directly underneath the search bar there are a variety of Contact Buttons -- find us on one of those platforms and tell us about some inspiration you'd like to see. We'll get it up on the blog.

Below that, there's a little subscription form for our Email Newsletter. Subscribe! It'll be grand.

After that, there is our Tag Cloud. Click on any tag to be taken to that topic. You can also find all our editors' names in the cloud if you're looking for work by a specific person on Floodmark.

Below, you can check out our most Popular Posts, ranked. That should be pretty fun.

Then we have the Blog Archive and the spot where you can subscribe to our RSS Feed. Which you should definitely do. There's something new everyday on Floodmark -- we're lean, mean writing machines looking to inspire you, so you should take advantage of our awesomeness.

Our site was designed by Underline Designs, and we highly, highly recommend her work if you're looking for a redesign. She's amazing. More about Underline Designs on our About Us page.