Illness and Seminar
Oh buddy! I missed last week’s accountability post and for that I’m sorry. I’ve been ill and the medications I’ve been trying are taking their toll. It’s hard to write when it’s a monumental effort to get out of bed without the room swaying. I’m finally back to functioning status which means back to work. Woo!
To kick off my recovery, yesterday I attended an online seminar about writing short fiction hosted by the wonderful Mary Robinette Kowal. It was fantastic and if you get a chance to take the seminar: Do it! A thousand times: Do it! Throw your money at this lady because I came away with some wonderful tools to use for my own fiction writing both novel length and short fiction.
I primarily took the seminar because I generally suck at short fiction. i.e. I have no idea how to write short fiction. My brain can’t do succinct when it comes to writing a story. But publishing a short story seems very doable and getting that publishing credit would go a long way towards the end goal of getting one of my books published.
Mary did this wonderful thing where she had both full and partial participants for the seminar. I was a partial participant meaning my work wasn’t critiqued or shared with anyone (I’m totally fine with that at this point) but I got to sit in on the entire lecture and do the homework and examples done in class. Partial participants are even allowed to ask questions which is wonderful. It was a great experience and I hope to find other online seminars similar to this one since I much prefer to be a lurker than have any sort of spotlight put on me in situations like that.
Now that it’s Monday and I have a short work week (The boy child’s birthday is this weekend and we have family coming early on Friday and staying all the long weekend), I’ve decided that I want to get my brain back on track and into writing mode since it’s effectively been offline for the last two and a half weeks. I’ve decided to use what I learned in the seminar and start a short story this week to get back in the swing of things. It seems like a very doable goal and something light given that we are coming up on Nanowrimo in less than 30 days and I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to be writing about in November, not that I ever know until the last minute. (You’ll hear more about nano the closer we get to November.)
It’s time for me to put the internet aside now and get to work. So go check out Mary’s wonderful site full of awesome information (Seriously, how did I not know about her podcast?) and have a great day!