I spent yesterday at the Bartholomew Country Writer’s Conference (sponsored by Pen It! magazine), which was a great time. I met several writers I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting, and heard a ton of advice–some I agreed with, and some, of course, that I didn’t. But that’s the way it goes, eh? Us folks who write are all so different and weird.
Kudos to Debi Hurt for putting it on. Hope she does it again.
I spent my half hour on stage talking about the rewriting process, which means I blabbered on about story structure and how I use it to think through making the “storiness” of drafts better. After I got home, Lisa asked how it went, and I related (with complete truthfulness!) that it must have been okay because no one threw tomatoes or anything at me. I also sat backstage and was the human Powerpoint clicker for Suzanne Purewal, who gave a nice discussion that mixed passion with craft. (I suppose some might argue being a human clicker was my greatest contribution to the conference, but we’ll just not go there now, will we?)
Whether my part was helpful to anyone or not, I admit I enjoyed it. The act of rewriting is a fascinating topic, and it applies to everyone in every genre. Being the analytical beast that I am, I fully admit though that others may not find it so interesting. [grin]
So I got to pimp my own stuff a little, which is nice…and I pushed everyone to Stephen Leigh’s “The Woods”, and “Cobweb Bride” (Vera Nazarian’s kickstarter project). Hope they get a little bump from it, too.
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Here’s a fun toy to play with for the day. It’s a study in motion sickness that the safety folks at my work site distributed last week to try to heighten awareness of how your brain works while you’re driving. They want us to drive like pilots fly, and keep shifting our viewpoint to avoid motion blindness.
Personally, I want to drive like a pilot and do some barrel rolls and loopty-loops, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen anytime soon, and if it does I suppose I’m in trouble.
Anyway, here’s the little gadget. Definitely fascinating and kinda fun to play with for a bit.