And we're home

It went something like this:

Sunday, 4 May 2008

Beach today! Walked with Brenda, whom I hadn’t met in a previous workshop. There’s huge chunks of driftwood everywhere—giant trees, some imbedded in the sand. It looks like an alien landscape. I imagine it was what a shipwreck looked like. It gave me so much energy, and Brenda and I had a fabulous conversation.

Monday, 5 May 2008

Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Okay, it’s 2 p.m. I have two assignments to finish—both are close to completion, although one I’ll review again a bit later—before dinner at 5 p.m. with Karen and Brenda, and our next meeting at 7 p.m. So I’m going to work on a short story, too. I also have a story to submit now that the magazine’s reading period has opened back up. Not sure if a walk on the beach or some floor/band work is in my future; I really want to get the story done.

Oh, and note to self: Bring a hat next time. The wind and greater moisture in the air is giving me an unattractive explosion of frizz.

Rejection from Abyss & Apex for “Seeds of Hope,” which they said “was very well-received here, but…”

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

My friend Chris York just made a three-book deal with Berkley Prime Crime! WaHOO! Go Chris!

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Meltdown.

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Better.

Friday, 9 May 2008

Mistakes happen. You learn from them, then get over them and move forward.

Went for a glorious beach walk today with Leslie; we also ran into Matt who walked the rest of the way with us. We saw baby seals and a bald eagle! It was just sitting out there on a log near the seals on a spit of land, and then it flew low over the water looking for fish, and then it perched again. And I didn’t have my camera. ::pounds head on desk::

Anyway, it was a beautiful day, cool and sunny, and I wish I’d had more time to spend down there.

Saturday, 10 May 2008

So Dean’s talking about his process and his blocks, which are much like mine, and he tells us his crazy plan for overcoming the problem, and I think “Holy crap, that’s exactly what I need to do,” and then there was this big sneaker wave of fear crashing over me as I then thought stupid things like “But I can’t” and “What if I fail?”

A better question is, “What if I succeed?”

A better response is, “When I succeed…”

Sunday, 11 May 2008

On the plane home. Um. Wow. After the Master Class (March 2002), this is by far the most valuable, most amazing, and most life- and career-changing workshops I’ve taken with Kris & Dean. (And I counted: including novel workshops, I’ve now taken 9.) I…I… Yeah, it’s going to take me a little while to process all this.

On Saturday, I think, Kris asked how we slept the night before and we all said “Awful.” She laughed and explained: They’d had us in critical brain up ‘til Friday, and Friday night our brains frantically downloaded all the new information into our subconscious before we lost anything. Devious. Effective, but devious.

So now I have to find a balance of recovery (tonight’s plan: wine, TV, and Ken. Not necessarily in that order) and getting back to work with new ideas, fresh energy, and an astonishing amount of new information to put into practice. Although this was a business workshop (about marketing, editors, the publishing industry and how it’s changed, and, um, a gazillion other things), I’ve come away with three new novel ideas in proposal form. One of which caused Kris to swear and say, twice, that she wished she’d come up with the idea. Bwahaha.

Plane descending. Must turn off laptop before it adversely affects that.

Oh, wait, one more thing. New sticky on Afalwen desktop:

It's okay to be afraid.

It's not okay to let the fear stop me.