Here’s the balance sheet of one year’s cost for the chat room:

COSTS:

Linksky hosting: $59.40

addonChat software (Professional Plus): $125.00

TOTAL: $184.40

DONATIONS:

$50.00 $70.00 (thank you!)

Due to an unexpected and totally welcome (if a bit tiny) windfall, I’ll be working on getting this all set up this week. Donations are still welcome, but I’ll be working this into my business budget next year.

From the feedback I’m getting, I’m sensing a real need out there amongst writers to congregate, visit, and challenge in real time.

I’m going to open a chatroom. I want it to be available to all writers of all genres (and philosophies, faiths, politics, issues, etc etc etc) with the need to interact in real time for whatever (legal) activities they need. They would be able to create different sub-chatrooms on the fly, which would poof as soon as it emptied. We can host writing challenges and goal setting and anything else a writer might find helpful to do in real time with other writers.

The URL is writechat.net. It’s not hosted yet. In fact, it’s barely registered.

Now, to do this, it’ll cost a little over $200 a year for the domain name renewal, hosting, and chatroom software. I’m thinking about taking donations for it. I figure, if 200 writers would find something like this useful, each could donate $1.

But the fact is, I’m going to open it anyway. WHEN it gets opened is up to my budget, so the donations part would only speed up the process and give everyone a sense of investment in the community.

So let me know what you think about donating, either here or on Twitter, with hashtag #writechatnet.

By the way, I barely moderate. Anything. Ever. About the only thing I object to (that I can think of at the moment; there may be more) is sharing kiddie porn and/or links. I cut my internet teeth on the unmoderated newsgroups of UseNet and the chatrooms of IRC way back in the day and I have no stomach for telling adults how to behave. So it’ll probably be wild and woolly for a while until like wills to like.

UPDATE: Well, then, here we go!