Back from TNEO
I'm home, and somewhat rested and recovered from TNEO. Wow, what a week!
I found not only the critique sessions and master classes on dialogue valuable, but also the informal shop talk among a group of really talented and interesting writers. I got to meet lots of fun new folks like my roomies kannibal_kat and babarnett and be in an extended novel critique group with araken, and hang out with other cool people like rogue_psion and lots of folks not on lj or whose user names I don't know.
I got to catch up with old friends like maggiedr, my Odyssey roomie edenvelocityzro and many others. The Odyssey class of '06 represented well with six of us in attendance.
Naturally, I learned a lot about my novel to go into the next rewrite, which will include more frontloading of plot elements that happen later in the novel, better setup of my antagonist, as well as many other fixes. The extended novel group was a great experience.
I realized during discussions that my novel is in some ways cross-genre and I need to make this clear to the readers by the way I foreshadow or frontload the conflict to come. Some elements have a traditional fantasy plot, and others are more character-driven more like a mainstream non-genre novel (some would say a "literary" novel but to me this sounds pretentious). This could be a good or a bad thing, but now that I'm aware of it, I need to better integrate the various elements.
While at TNEO, I finished a draft of a flash piece called "The Mouths" which still needs work, and did a little bit of work on a short story I started a while back called "The Fair Emilia."
Next, I'd like to pull out my novelette "For the Love of Trees" from last year's TNEO and edit it for the Writers of the Future Contest, as well as polishing up a couple of short things for submission. Then, it will be back to the novel for me.
I can't say enough how wonderful the community of Odfellows is and how much I get out of these alumni workshops.
I found not only the critique sessions and master classes on dialogue valuable, but also the informal shop talk among a group of really talented and interesting writers. I got to meet lots of fun new folks like my roomies kannibal_kat and babarnett and be in an extended novel critique group with araken, and hang out with other cool people like rogue_psion and lots of folks not on lj or whose user names I don't know.
I got to catch up with old friends like maggiedr, my Odyssey roomie edenvelocityzro and many others. The Odyssey class of '06 represented well with six of us in attendance.
Naturally, I learned a lot about my novel to go into the next rewrite, which will include more frontloading of plot elements that happen later in the novel, better setup of my antagonist, as well as many other fixes. The extended novel group was a great experience.
I realized during discussions that my novel is in some ways cross-genre and I need to make this clear to the readers by the way I foreshadow or frontload the conflict to come. Some elements have a traditional fantasy plot, and others are more character-driven more like a mainstream non-genre novel (some would say a "literary" novel but to me this sounds pretentious). This could be a good or a bad thing, but now that I'm aware of it, I need to better integrate the various elements.
While at TNEO, I finished a draft of a flash piece called "The Mouths" which still needs work, and did a little bit of work on a short story I started a while back called "The Fair Emilia."
Next, I'd like to pull out my novelette "For the Love of Trees" from last year's TNEO and edit it for the Writers of the Future Contest, as well as polishing up a couple of short things for submission. Then, it will be back to the novel for me.
I can't say enough how wonderful the community of Odfellows is and how much I get out of these alumni workshops.