Explanation of absence

Due to sinus headaches I have not been doing a great deal of reading or writing this past week.

Thankfully headaches subsided enough yesterday and today to allow for participation in my first social events among other writers. As I have no doubt mentioned before I am still learning about the community, for lack of better phrasing, of writers. These events were educational to say the least. It was good to get out among other writers and just talk and learn from them. 

The first event was Saturday morning at the Springwood Coffee Club. It was a catch up of the members of the Logan City Writers group. The catch up itself was great. Getting to speak with a range of writers. I found listening to others experiences with writing and getting published very inspiring. 

The second of the two events was my first vision writers meeting. Here was a massive step for me. This is because one of the aspects of the vision writers meeting was critiquing each others work. During an overconfident moment (thanks to the strong painkillers for my headaches) I put forward a small piece of a work I have been dabbling with. It was only two pages but still. For me this was incredibly scary because no one has read any of my original pieces. The only pieces of my writing that anyone has read is that of my fan fiction pieces (which are published on fanfiction.net). But despite my fears the critique I received was not all bad news. It was actually rather enlightening. 

I learned that a level of suspense I was aiming didn't work as I had intended it to.The helpful thing was that others had picked up on points that I have overlooked. For example I had made reference to a distinctive mark on someones neck and noted that this mark defined that person as being a wizard, yet I never described what the mark was in anyway. I also learned that on a whole people liked it and that the idea would generally work. It just needed some rewriting.

So for this week my goal is to rewrite the scene and hopefully add more to it. I am actually going to see if another point of view would work better for the piece. 

My other goal this week is to finally finish the book Angel Evolution by David Estes. I started reading this book two weeks ago and have yet to finish despite enjoying what I've read so far. So far I am enjoying the book. It is well written. 

So until next time

Jen