Welcome to The Heights! This is our updated blog title. It is our hope that this refreshed approach to our blog will be beneficial to the writing community.

We would like to begin this post with some general updates about us, your admins! As most of you know, Jo and I (Mick) are both full-time students. Due to COVID-19, both of our schools moved to online learning environments in March. I (Mick) completed my first year of graduate school last week and definitely miss the in-person community that occurs in the classroom. Jo is finishing up her junior year of high school and has several impressive personal writing projects in progress. As we enter our summer vacations, we are both embracing new roles within our personal lives. Jo started her first job this week and I (Mick) am preparing to either attend a summer-long training for my job that I will begin after graduate school or, if the training is cancelled due to COVID-19, will take two online courses for my graduate program.

We are both very excited for our educational and personal opportunities. We will continue to invest our time in the Ambient Heights community but want to make sure that in the event we are not able to post as frequently this summer that our community has a scheduled posting they can look forward to. As some of you know, it can be hard to schedule Instagram posts without paying for a program. However, we are able to schedule posts on our website/blog! We have decided that a fun way to embrace our community this summer would be to schedule two blog posts a week that include tips, activities, and inspiration for writers. These posts will include writing prompts, videos, and discussion prompts. We encourage you all to comment, share, and engage with The Heights this summer and hope that it will be an enjoyable and laid back way to embrace writing during this continued time of uncertainty due to COVID-19.

We have also updated the Co-Authors section of our website. We found that this page was hard to navigate, so we have made the page easier to digest by dividing authors into their respective publications that you can click on to view.

Likewise, you will notice that we have changed the opening statement of our Instagram bio to read ‘collective writing community’ instead of ‘indie publisher’. Because Ambient Heights is not based on our published anthologies alone but rather a collection of features, writing prompts, and other community aspects; we find that ‘collective writing community’ is a better description for Ambient Heights.

Many of you have asked about our third anthology. We appreciate your excitement and want to confirm that we are preparing our third anthology. We are taking our time in the planning stages in order to provide you with the best anthology experience we can. This means that we will be revamping our submissions process, but as always, submissions will be free. We hope to share more with the community soon, but so far we can share with you the title of our pending third anthology: Shattered Glass.

As always, we hope that you are remaining healthy and are staying motivated during this time in our world. We are thankful for all of you and are excited to take on a new approach to the way we connect with the writing community in the coming months.

Many thanks,

Mick (@mickthebrickitybrick) & Jo (@jo.u.writes)

Note: If you are an author who has a feature scheduled that has not been posted on our Instagram, your feature will be posted as a part of our blog posts. You will be notified via direct message on Instagram of the date that your feature will be posted on our blog.