Writing Retreats

February 21, 2010

Banff was great –

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!

February 12, 2010

Sorry – website as been down

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!

October 3, 2009

New Science Fiction Story

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.

July 6, 2009

My Own Writers’ Retreat

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.

April 19, 2009

The Write-Off Was Great – As Always

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