Sharp Words

I seem to have breezed through the mid-month miseries that I was suffering yesterday, by dint of meeting a couple of other WriMos up in Derry, drinking a big bucket of cinnamon-flavoured latte, and hand-writing over 1000 words in about an hour. V successful.
Typing them up was a bugger, of course. But I also did a mini character-workshop and defined some of my secondary characters a bit better. And I’m damned glad I did, too, as it opened up some new ideas for side-plots…

I managed to make it to the lunchtime session at Queen’s today, and am glad I did. Today’s speaker was Carlo Gebler, who’s had something published in just about every possible form (adult fiction, children’s fiction, plays, non-fiction, and so on) except poetry (and graphic novels, as far as I can tell). He was talking mainly about different writing styles and I found it all pretty interesting.

So much so in fact that sometimes I wish I was a student again, and studying English or history or something other than sciences - something in which there’s debate and different viewpoints and you have to learn to pick your way between them to form your own, rather than something to which there’s a definitive(-ish) answer. That’s my romantic and rational sides in conflict again; there’s the reason why I have a craving to write creatively as well as technically. (I /do/ like my job, but sometimes…)