Month: May 2021

Writing together

~ sharon ~ Leave a comment
(Sharon’s photo)

My local writing group hosted a writing day last Saturday. A few who came, once everyone got over seeing each other again after months, had what they described as “breakthrough” days. They’d been stuck and after settling down to work had sudden insights about where to take their stories.

None of us is without competition for our time. We have kids, jobs, illnesses, the gamut of life challenges that keep us from spending time with our words. But Saturday we got to put those behind us for a few hours and get some creative work done.

Personally, I was able to sort through last year’s NaNo novel, which has in the intervening months, become two novels.

Over lunch, a few of us tuned in to Jane Cleland’s We’re All in It Together writing seminar. An award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction who is on the faculty of CUNY, she started doing online monthly talks in April 2020 after her in-person events were cancelled. She’s continued every month since then. Each talk centers around one aspect of writing. The one we listened to focused on “whispering” to build suspense. Next month is titled “Writing Crime Fiction: Even When You’re Not.”. I plan to be there.

A bientôt!

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It’s been a long couple of weeks

~ sharon ~ 2 Comments

Believe it or not, I’ve actually been doing some writing in the last few months. Just not here.

But I’m excited to be devoting a couple of days a week to my own writing projects. And I’ve been working on sharpening my skills when it comes to writing fiction. For the last few years, about the only time I’ve been able to eke out has been in November for NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month. But I haven’t been able to manage the follow-up time to edit my rough first drafts.

Now I’m hiring myself as a part-time novelist, potentially starving artist. I figure the continuing need to make some money will help motivate me to stay on track.. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I’m still (well, more like finally) trying to figure out how to incorporate my book reviews into this blog. And I do like sharing tips from other writers, so I hope to write a few posts on that topic up from time to time.

I also plan to set some weekly goals. This week I’ll be preparing for a local writing day with my writing group and some friends. About a dozen of us will be set up in a lake-side lodge for a binge writing spree. I know which novel I want to work on, so my goal this week is to plan some scenes.

A bientôt!