It’s CCCHHHRRRRIIISSSSTTTMMMAAAASSSSSS

Christmas is so close now, which means everyone is frantically trying to meet that deadline of 25 December! Sounds very much like the editorial team for the Survivors Guide actually trying to meet that deadline of end of January 2013!

Most of the copy is done now and over with Dave at Jam PR who is busily working his magic. Its been a difficult process of pulling together twenty different ideas into one book. We started off with stating that this was a 28 page guide, but with the amount of fantastic writing, poems, drawings and photographs that we have, well it will need to be an encyclopaedia! Nothing is going to be wasted though and when we have finished the book, any text that we couldn’t use in the book or images that we couldn’t fit in there will be uploaded to relevant sections of our site.

We had the pleasure, and honour, of going along to The Men’s Room, an arts and social care agency, that aim to work creatively with men and offer them opportunities to be involved in high quality artistic projects along side providing support for issues that they may have in their lives. They run two creative sessions weekly, WMD which is a creative session open to young men between the ages of 18 and 30 who have experience of the criminal justice system and/or homelessness; and The Blue Room, a creative personal development group for young men involved in sex work, or who have been sexually exploited. Service Director, Duncan, and a few of the editorial team went along to a WMD session, but this was a special session as it was a Men Only session.

We presented to the Men’s Room lads our ideas, some of the text we’d written and one of the editorial team presented some of the illustrations they had done.

The Men’s Room lads were so respectful of what we were doing and gave us some great ideas and feedback. We hope to go back in the new year with an update.

But we will definitely be back to our diary in the new year, so until then…

We wish you a merry christmas,
We wish you a merry christmas,
We wish you a merry christmas,
and a happy new year!

From all the We Are Survivors editorial team