Adventure Time is nigh!

adventures, housekeeping, Lilly grant

FinnJake
As part of my Teacher Creativity Grant, I have signed up for three Adventures: Write on the River with Bob Mayer, the Writing Retreat for Teachers being held at Bard College next week, and the Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie, IN the week after that. (I also gave myself a bonus adventure for my birthday this year: the Indiana Romance Writers–our local branch of the Romance Writers of America–put on the Making Magic conference, which was ten blocks away on my actual birthday… clearly a sign. Plus, At Write on the River, Bob told us that RWA is by far the best-organized and most welcoming group for writers, even if you’re not strictly a romance writer. I am thinking about joining next year.)

Part of my plan was to write about each adventure as I attended it, but thanks to some scheduling craziness I ended up attending Write on the River in March, driving down to Tennessee on a Friday afternoon (turns out five and a half hours is a really tough drive when you’re 7 months pregnant). Then I did the IRWA conference in April. Then I finally got around to this whole blogging thing… last week.

So clearly I need to start writing up my takeaways from each of those experiences!

Unfortunately the notebook where I took all of my notes at both of those is currently AWOL. So it may well be that you get to hear about IWT’s writing retreat before you get to hear about those…

I’m sure the entire world waits with bated breath. đŸ˜‰

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

Lilly grant, writing exercises, writing resources, , ,

Well, despite knowing perfectly well that the #1 task I need to accomplish as a writer is to WRITE, I keep finding ways to distract myself. Sometimes I distract myself “productively” (laundry, dishes, blog entries…) and sometimes I just read all of tumblr or get distracted by a really excellent blog. Or decide that I really need to spend a long time posting pictures of my kid on Facebook. Or tweaking things that are immaterial.


forgive the language, but this is a very accurate depiction of what I’m talking about.

Anyway, lately I’ve been reading through the entire archives at QueryShark. (This is facilitated by how easy it is to read things on a smartphone while you feed a baby.) This counts as goofy procrastination because you absolutely do not ever query an agent about a novel that you haven’t finished yet, and despite having several projects in various stages, I definitely do not yet have any finished novels to be querying.

HOWEVER… Continue reading Putting the Cart Before the Horse →

Testing, Testing…

housekeeping, ,

Wow, it’s been a really long time since I’ve been in the habit of blogging daily (or more often, even). Hopefully I can shake off the dust and get back into the habit!


Pictured: me showing off my awesome dance moves

This webpage is brought to you by Mitchco Industries (webmaster/design guru) and the Teacher Creativity Fellowship sponsored by the Lilly Endowment. If you’re a teacher in Indiana, DEFINITELY check that sucker out!

The goals of my grant are to:
–set up a website (DONE!) with content on it (d’oh…)
–write about writing, in blog form (how meta!)
–actually write, and even complete a YA manuscript by August 2015*
–attend conferences, workshops, and retreats to help me develop a)my own craft and b)exercises for my creative writing students
–develop writing exercises for said students

So that’s the sort of thing I’ll be writing about here on the blog, along with some book reviews (examining other people’s storytelling) and links to resources I find.

*HAHAAHAHAHAHAHA. Yeah, that goal is getting revised. Because I submitted this grant proposal, then had a baby, which turns out to be a bit of a barrier to productivity. Luckily I have until June 2016 to complete my final report on this project for the grant people, and I hope to have the MS finished and be querying it by then.