Sue Bahr
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Guest Post: The One Million Project!

12/7/2015

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       ​              The One Million Project:
              What We’re All About.

 
Hi everyone,
 
Sue asked me to write something about the soon to launch One Million Project, specially for her website. I think I’ll start with something about Susan Bahr herself (which she definitely didn‘t ask me to write. I hope I‘m not embarrassing you Sue!).
 
In my opinion Sue is extremely talented as both a writer and artist, and as I’m sure regular visitors to this site know already, she is a warm and friendly person as well, one whom it’s a delight to work with on a collaborative, creative project.
 
Sue is doing promotional artwork for Sarah Wilson’s mythological fable THE PERFECT TREE, which incidentally is a great story for adults and children - I think it would work wonderfully as a Pixar style movie. Sue can tell you more specifically but what she is basically doing is taking characters and scenes from the story and following her own artistic inspiration - the first piece of art is rendered in the form of a cover - not an actual cover because TPT is just one of 24 amazing stories in the collection, but stylistically each story will have their own ‘cover’ as separate promotional art.
 
As I’m sure you’re aware, Sue is a brilliant artist but she also writes. I very much hope that if we are successful enough to do a follow up collection, HODGE PODGE LANE by Susan Bahr will be a big part of it. A wonderful story by a great lady and I’ve seen the accompanying art which is to Sue’s usual high standards of creativity. In my eyes this is an illustrated story for children that can match anything on the market and one day it will. J
 
Now to the actual OMP itself - well it originated from two separate ideas.
 
The first was that, after writing several novels from 2010 to 2013 I wanted to write a collection of short stories. I settled on the number of 20 but felt it would take me ages to do them all. Therefore, I decided I would invite ten other writers to write a story apiece and I would do ten. It occurred to me that we could promote each other as a collective.
 
Around the same time in 2012, 2013, I was reading numerous articles about the homeless, watching television documentaries and wishing I could do something to help. I was also working in Pupil Referral Units as a supply teacher and interacting with children who had emotional and behavioural issues. Some of these children ended up being excluded from mainstream schools because of traumatic family backgrounds, neglectful parents and other things that they weren’t emotionally prepared to deal with. Although my role meant I was in and out of various PRU’s, I tried to encourage, help and make a difference, even if it meant just listening to children with sympathy.
 
My experiences and what I read and watched really made me want to give something back and help in a deeper way, but I was at a loss as to how I could achieve this. Then it clicked - I could meld my collection idea with my desire to give something back, and the OMP was born.
 
Between 2013 and today, I recruited writers and then artists like Sue for promotional art and gave thought to strategies of how to make this a global brand so we could continue to raise money even after the initial collection.
 
I added Cancer Research to make up a third charity to raise money for. My reasons for wanting to help children and the homeless, I stated above. For Cancer Research it was more personal as my mother was a cancer survivor, now thankfully many years in remission.
 
So that’s the story of the ONE MILLION PROJECT. We are all ordinary people - writers, artists, promoters - almost 30 in the network that’s been built.  We’re not a slick publishing or corporate entity and not perfect, but I’m very proud of what we’ve put together and the kind, caring people who have given their skills and time for free to build the project. The OMP relies on help and word of mouth from others to spread our recognizable logo and message.
 
The collection is over 620 pages of print and is available in paperback and ebook version.
 
You can buy it or if you’re an Amazon Prime member, borrow for free - we still receive money from Amazon per page read so if you borrow, please read every page and tell all your friends so we can achieve our targets.
 
Thank you very much. 
Jason Greenfield

And thank you, Jason, for the wonderful shout out! If you'd like to purchase this wonderful book, please visit: http://tinyurl.com/neluwa3

Cheers to all of you!
Sue

 


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