Over the past few weeks I have wrote, edited, and promoted, The Stanger Across the Restaurant. This is a short story that required multiply things from things from me. Such as writing the drafts, having a conference with my professor, creating promotional material, creating a production calendar, making a Wix page, and making three additional social media accounts to promote the narrative.  I did all of this over the last three weeks and it was one of the best learning processes I’ve had in a while.

          When writing this narrative, I kept in mind who my intended audience would be. In the end I was reaching out to young adults, other writers, fans of the television show Big Little Lies, and advocates who aim to end domestic violence. While making my social media accounts I made sure to include that my inspiration was from Big Little Lies, and when revising my narrative, I took out parts that were unnecessary to grab the attention of my intended audience.

            My short story was based off a main character named Annie who is a victim of intimate partner violence. I utilized the genre conventions of romance, suspense, and action to piece my short story together.

            One image from my story I used to promote my short story was the color blue. This image is repeated multiply times throughout my story. For one my promotional images I used the color blue to make this image stand out. That promotional image was very simple as it only had the title, my name, and the background color of blue on it. For the other I made it with the background being a wineglass with a drop of blood in it. It also included a quote about the blue dress in my short story, the title, and my name. To make these promotional images I used the website Canva. This website was a lifesaver for the promotional material. It was user friendly and had everything I needed.

            When I first started this project, I was worrisome about how it would turn out. The concepts in my head seemed were all over the place. But when I started to organize my thoughts an actually started working on my project, it all fell into place. Although there were many revisions for my narrative, I am proud of how it turned out.

           I managed my time with the use of my production calendar. I found this to be very helpful during the process. I also had a regular set time to log onto my social media accounts to check on the activity and post new updates. Although I did find this to be the most challenging part of project three comparatively to project two. Keeping up with three social media accounts was a lot harder than I predicted. If I could go back in time I would of told myself to set up my social media accounts earlier than I did.

            I used three different social media accounts to promote my material- Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. I kept my accounts uniform for the most part. Meaning that I would post the same information of all three accounts. My plan to draw in my audience was to post lots art that correlated with short narrative and Big Little Lies. I also planned to post facts, resources, and videos about domestic abuse and how we can move closer to ending it. I followed accounts that had to do with raising awareness about domestic abuse, fan accounts of Big Little Lies, and short story writers. With this said the most popular hashtags I used were #stopabuse, #TSATR, #shortstory and #biglittlelies.

            Out of all three accounts the most successful was my Twitter account. I think it was a close tie with my Instagram account though. I followed about 100 people on Twitter, and about 50 for both Tumblr and Instagram. I posted 101 times on Twitter, 50 times on Instagram, and 51 times on Tumblr. In all honesty getting attention from my audience was very hard, but when they didn’t respond, I would go through and like/comment on their post. This usually helped me get a response from them, at least to follow me back.

            Composing project two and composing project three were two different processes completely. Project two was based off of what I know, what interest me, and what I wanted to research about. When I first started writing project two, I listed different narratives that interested me and social issues that I found were important. I also looked to see how much research support I could have for each topic, which paper would be more reasonable to write.

           While writing project three was completely different. I knew what my topic was I was writing about, but how could I write a whole story that portrayed my subject in a proper manner. To start writing project three, I planned a beginning, middle, and end. After that I just started to write and based off of the research I did from project two, I was able to write a story that I was fully informed on.

          For my narrative I had consider how what kind of story I would create. While for project two I didn’t have to focus on that, I knew what I was writing about and what had already happened. I also really had to consider who was going to read my story more than I usually do for an essay. What did my audience want to read? What kind of story would portray my subject in a positive light? Who did my audience want to read about? These were all questions I had to continuously ask myself while writing this narrative.

         The most challenging aspect of project three was trying to figure out how to start and end my story. For project two I didn’t have to worry about this as much because it’s more so a text-book paper. Project three really made me think about what’s a good way to start my paper because this will set up how the rest of the story went. Also the ending was crucial because I didn’t want to reader to be left with questions or a feeling of confusion. Between just those two parts made my paper very difficult to write in the beginning.

         If I could go back in time before I started project two, I would tell myself to really consider about what I was going to write my narrative about for project three. Although I am proud of how my paper came out, writing about sensitive topics are very challenging. It really makes you think about how these situations happen every day, and you never want to be insensitive about the subject. It’s important to consider how the audience would feel when they read your story. In the end I did receive positive feedback about my narrative, but it was a long process to get there. This project made me realize how hard it is to get your audience’s attention, which gave me new respect for published authors.