Susan Forest

I got about 4000 words written, which wasn’t bad considering the new technology I was using. It worked fairly well, too. Mostly, it understood the text I dictated, though I had more trouble with the navigation commands. Still, getting text down was what I really needed, and I was able to do some edits left-handed, afterward, so it all worked out. Still have to learn more!

BTW, congratulations to everyone who was nominated for an Aurora this year. I personally know every nominee for Best Work, Long Form – Leslie, Barb, Ed, Rob and Hayden. Will make voting VERY tough! Also, congratulations to Ivan, who was nominated for short story. Not sure who else was nominated, as the official list isn’t out yet, but already I’m thinking I better book my membership to Keycon!

But the good news is, I sold another story! “The Director’s Cut” will appear in Tesseracts Fourteen this fall! Yay!

The other good news is, I am off to Banff today for a writers’ retreat for 2 days – will be fun, and I hope to teach my computer (and myself) to use Dragonspeak (MacDictate) so I can stop typing with my left hand. Yay!

I’ve been recording ideas for a couple of weeks on my voice recorder that Don gave me for my birthday last year, and today I start. Next week is the IFWA writers retreat, and I hope to get most if not all of it done by then. Oh, and I’ll be reading at the Calgary Public Library (W.R. Castell Central Branch, downtown) on October 29. Should be fun! Halloween theme, and all.

My family has about 120 acres a couple of hours out of the city, and I managed to get up there for 5 days once school was out, and I got a ton of writing done. Yes, my daughter was there, but she had her friends and so there were almost no interruptions. While eating, I critiqued submissions for the summer workshop, and the rest of the time I wrote, taking a couple of hours to stretch my legs by trimming the hedge and mowing the lawn. Got all the revisions for one novel done, and began reviewing one I finished six months ago. The six month break was good: found some places to cut, so the other novel is tighter now.

So I am going to Rob Sawyer’s writing workshop this summer and we are studying long-form works. For that, I need to have chapter 1 and an outline. I wasn’t able to attend the whole write-off (from 8:00 AM to 3:30 PM on Saturday I was at the Young Writers’ Conference, which was a lot of fun) but I went Friday night, Saturday after the conference and all day Sunday, and I pretty much have the first draft of the package. As it’s not due for a month, I should have time to revise it by then. Felt very productive.

And — Rob’s book launch for “Wake” is in Calgary on Tuesday, so a bunch of us will be there to listen to him read. Will be great!

Susan

It was a lovely weekend, and I got to re-read the entire novel, capturing little wording and plot snags and correcting them. Tomorrow it is off to my Kensington Writers’ Group for critique and I plan to take a Saturday or two off to get caught up on all the things I have been ducking as the novel came close to completion. I’ve already plotted the next book, and will start writing, probably during the Write-Off.

Ta-ta!

So, the Rainforest Retreat was absolutely fabulous — finished the rough draft of my novel. Also, thanks to Patrick Swensen who put the retreat together so well — each day there was an optional session run by a top-notch writer at 11 AM and again at 3 PM, so we got great tips on plot, setting, character, openings, and so forth, while most of our time was spent on our own writing. This, of course, meant that we could begin to apply what was shared immediately. Earlybird writing in the common room started at 6 AM, and I was usually there between 7 and 8; and Nightowl writing seems to have gone until about 2 AM — although I generally quit by about 10 PM. Other than the workshops, I only stopped writing for dinner (with friends, old and new), grazing lunch and breakfast, and physical breaks for yoga and short hikes to clear my head and think through my next scene. I hoped to finish about 6 of my 12 remaining scenes, and as I said, I got the whole thing done. This weekend, I’m spending time with my family skiing, snowboarding and playing pool to get a little distance from the novel (okay, that’s not much, but it’s a LITTLE). Next weekend I begin a week of Spring Break, and that’s when the real work on the novel begins: revision!

I belong to 3 writers’ groups and one of them, Kensington, meets on an as-needed basis. Last Monday we got together to crit a novel just completed by one of our members. Francis wrote a historical YA that is excellent. We had a few suggestions for her, but it’s pretty much ready to be sent out. Then we had a discussion about the business, again, trading information that can be helpful to all. Got a couple of websites to check out and more inspiration! Only 2 days now to the Rainforest Writers’ Retreat west of Seattle, run by Patrick Swensen of Fairwood Press. Can hardly wait!

IFWA, my writers’ group, has a bi-yearly tradition of setting aside a weekend JUST for writing. It’s a poor-man’s writers’ retreat. As members, it’s free to us (and the group even buys us pizza for the Saturday night when we all read a little of what we have written so far). From 6 PM Friday to 5 PM Sunday, you can hear nothing but the clacking of keys — especially my daughter, Heather’s. I forget how many thousand words she wrote over the weekend, but the excerpt she read aloud on Saturday night was to die for. I am so proud of her!

I got no actual words written, but I went through all the notes I have been accumulating over the past few weeks and wrote plot outlines for 2 novels. Lots of thinking / problem solving involved, so even though I had most of it worked out ahead of time, I was pretty cooked by the end of the weekend. However, I’m ready to go!

THIS weekend, I work on chapter one of my new novel, and I get almost 2 full days to work on it because the ski season hasn’t (quite) started yet — have to keep the instrument tuned, you know: healthy and active — and because last Christmas, Heather gave me the best gift a writer can get: a weekend to write. She is doing all my chores for me this weekend, so I have nothing between me and my story.

I’m away this weekend, going to the Canadian Mountain Guides’ Ball (my sister is one of five female mountain guides in Canada) and taking a train trip through the Rocky Mountains with my husband – what a treat! Focusing back on short fiction, now. I have a story to be critqued by my writers’ group (IFWA) in early November and I just popped 3 stories in the mail last Sunday. I have 2 very cool short story ideas – hope to get to one of them (between social activities) this weekend. Vampires . . .