Thursday, November 19, 2015

Twitchy

It's been a while but it's time to blow the dust off the old blog and post to it. I would apologize for my absence, but hey, let's not pretend either one of us are regulars around here, okay?

I've been writing on Twitch for a while now. Early-on, I think I was being naughty, so I tried to hide nonchalantly in the Music channel, and I played music to CMA.  At that time, Twitch's TOS said that all streams should be gaming-related, and sure, while games get written all the time, I'm streaming a fantasy novel. The best argument for which I could hope was that the novel had the potential to be turned into a game, and maybe in 10 or 20 years Twitch streamers would stream games set in a world created on Twitch. Meta-poetically, it works, but it's a pretty shaky argument against a TOS should Twitch want to be by-their-book. However, nobody ever told me to go away, so I kept hiding in the Music channel, poking away at my book.

Twitch's response to me (well, people like me, I'm not deluded enough to think it was really me) was to give me a Creative channel. It's quite a fascinating place.

You can watch people engage in their creative side and broadcast your own. You can join a fanbase or build one! You can't always call it art, but it's assuredly always entertaining.

Best of all, a community of writers has been building there, both who stream and do not stream, and with the addition of the NaNoWriMo streamers this month, there is quite a lot of writing happening right now on Twitch.

Getting you into the business end of streaming is beyond the scope of this, but overall, streaming is pretty easy and well-documented on Twitch. You'll need some software (like OBS or Xsplit). A microphone and web cam are handy but not required. Getting some of the "bells and whistles" like follower announcements or social bots can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, but after a few pokes of trial and error, I was able to get them up and running without too much hassle.

Specifically, check out JudyDawn and SilentWillow, both of whom have writing talent exploding from their word processors. If you follow them, you can set Twitch to notify you by email when they go live.

Come join us.