Yesterday I attended (or attempted to attend) the Stay In Place Virtual Writing Conference. Here are my impressions: First the good. The speakers were excellent! I especially enjoyed Jodi Lynn Nye’s talk on humor. In fact, she is one of those teachers that once I get a taste of, I want to follow her everywhere…
Month: April 2020
Productivity Check-In
I think one of the reasons I’ve been so much more productive lately is that my internet has been really unreliable since everyone else started working and schooling from home. For example, yesterday it was out for almost the full day. I used my hotspot via my phone to connect, but because I have a…
Countdown: Two Stories Left
I am so very, very close to the end of the Great Challenge. I have written fifty stories in fifty weeks. Let that roll around in your mind for a moment. Fifty! Just two more weeks and two more stories left. I’m tempted to try to make them the best stories I’ve ever written, but…
Flying! Lots of Productivity
It’s been an impressively productive week. I’ve written three short stories from scratch, rewritten a fourth and submitted it to an anthology, proofread a book, updated my webpage to include the Writers of the Future Honorable Mentions logo, and completed Kris Rusch’s Short Story Intensive. I also turned in story number 50 to Dean for…
Crazy as a Cuckoo Clock
My sleep schedule since I left FedEx has devolved into crazy cuckoo clock territory and I love it! I basically write for 2-4 hours after my husband goes to sleep and wake up with him in the morning to do the day’s activities. Then I nap for about an hour in the afternoon to catch…
WMG Short Story Craft Workshop Sum Up
Summing up the Short Story Craft workshop is tough because the most important parts of the workshop can’t be summed. It wrought a transformation in how I look at my own work and how I look at short stories in general. I have a tremulous butterfly of knowledge beating in my chest now that I…
Short Story Craft Workshop – Day 5
Today is listed as the last day of the Short Story Craft Workshop and all the lectures are now done (more on those below) but the workshop continues through tomorrow. I turned in my third short story today, a contemporary romance titled “Hot Turtle Sex,” which is loosely based on a friend of mine who…
Short Story Craft Workshop – Day 4
Yesterday Kris Rusch reviewed my Zoom seder story and said it was quite good and that I should send it out. She had a few recommendations for very small things to change. My heart is singing and doing acrobatics. We received our next short story assignment. It is contemporary and needs to be upbeat. That’s…
Short Story Craft Workshop – Day 3
Yesterday was intense and as a result I’m somewhat low on sleep. Along with videos and story analysis, we had an assignment to write a science fiction or fantasy story based on the prompt she gave us. I immediately had an idea for a science fiction story and worked on that. But SF is not…
Short Story Craft Workshop – Day 2
I think I should provide a caveat here, on my second day of this workshop. Because of the pandemic, we are not doing the in-person version of Kris Rusch’s Short Story Craft workshop. Instead they are conducting something sort of halfway between the online Study Along workshop and the in-person seminar. It is different. It…