Susan Forest

Okay, so last weekend I went skiing — no writing. But today I presented at the Young Writers’ Conference. This is always a highlight of the year. I get to do 2, 75-minute sessions with 30, 10 – 15 year-olds who really want to write (they give up a Saturday AND) pay $35 to be there) and see a lot of authors that I only see once a year. I sold 19 of the 20 books I took down and got a nice little honorarium. The keynote speaker was awesome — all in all, a great day!

Revised my novella and put it up for crit, as well as my last short story. Yay!

AND — congratulations to Rob, nominated for the Hugo for “Wake.” “Watch” comes out next month (I have his May launch on my calendar) and it was a thrill to work side-by-side with him at our semi-annual write-off as he did the finishing touches on “Wonder.” Great weekend! Next week – back to the novel — I can hardly wait!

So, I didn’t write fiction this week, but I DID filk my song for the musical AND download the karaoke version of Herod’s Song from JC Superstar AND transfer it to garage band AND record myself with the new lyrics AND burn a disc including the filked song, the blank karaoke, my lines with cues and the cues without my lines. Now I should be able to learn everything by CD!

Got quite a bit done, but not finished!

That’ a good accomplishment for a weekend!

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!

My crit group will help me with it in a month. This week, I got the Mac version of Dragonspeak (Mac Dictate) and got my system upgraded so I can use it. I will install Mac Dictate next weekend and start training it (and me) how to use it — so when I get my crits back on my novella I can do something with them, and so I can benefit from the writing retreat I’m going to in a couple of weeks.

Despite months of tendonitis, my novella is done! Well, rough draft. But as I promised to submit it to my writers group Tuesday, at least I have something to submit. Yay, me!

Between tendonitis and a strained back, not much done over the last month. Trying to carry on!