That’s how I feel after spending a week at Donald Maass’s Break Out Novel Intensive Workshop, maass-tified. For the first time since kids (ten years), I spent a week on my own in a hotel. I didn’t cook a meal, wash a dish, load laundry, supervise homework or taxi anyone, anywhere. I wrote. I went to class. I wrote. I read. I wrote. You get the idea. Special thanks to Cookie and BBC2, who came to pitch in. Bacon really had it tough. He had to eat all of Aunt Cookie’s fabulous desserts.
What did I learn?
- Tons of stuff to make my writing better.
- I should be writing in a different genre. I made the leap from romance to satire. It took a professional to point that out to me. Something about the contract with the reader. Click the link to see an explanation from Orson Scott Card’s book, Characters and Viewpoint. My satire will have a little romance going on too, though.
- When I said, “This is a story about intellectual piracy.” Every agent/editor’s first words were, “Realllllly?” I guess that wasn’t quite clear enough.
- Those same people thought my writing was funny–as in humorous–not pathetic. They all encouraged me to keep writing.
It was a week well spent.
CRISPLY SPOKEN 