The February workshop is done and dusted and we had some great participation and some people who bowed out due to work and life complications leaving them with less time to devote to their creative pursuits than they’d have liked. And no one ended up coming out to our in-person meetups.
One of our academics did meet his goal of getting a few articles ready for submission! Yay!
I didn’t meet my goal of 20k words, but I’ve started a couple of new chapters and am getting close on putting the finishing touches on others and incorporating them into the overall narrative. Slow progress is still progress is what I keep telling myself!
IRL Meetups
I did check out a new group meeting near me called “Shut Up and Write” and it was amazing. It was just four of us, all females. There wasn’t a whole lot of socialization, no critique, no discussion. It’s just sitting down and getting to it. One woman handwrote in a crammed notebook. The rest of us typed on laptops. Pretty much no one spoke, but there was a lot of the clatter of keys or scratching of a pen against paper. I only checked Twitter like three times to check in on ongoing conversations! Mostly, I wrote. For a solid hour. It was super refreshing to just sit and silently commune with others who were lost in their own fictional worlds.
I will definitely be going back and spending that silent hour with other writers again!
At the end of the hour, I chatted briefly with a couple of the others. We didn’t get too deep into what we’re working on, but they were pleasant people who get how hard it can be to carve out dedicated writing time and keep yourself on task.
During that one hour session, I wrote a bit over 500 words. That day overall was a 1,700 word day, which is one of the best writing days I’ve had in months. I made really great progress on a chapter I conceptualized a few months ago and I’m getting so close to finishing it. Since I try not to spend too much mental energy on tracking word counts, I have begun picking out my favorite line from that day’s writing session instead.
She’d just about decided she should burn the lingerie before anyone ever saw her in it again when Charlotte broke the delicate strands of her shame spiral with a question.
I was proud of this line because it was originally a plain language throwaway line, but I needed it to also serve as a transition so I spent some time going through iterations to punch it up. When I landed on “breaking the delicate strands of her shame spiral” that felt like it had a universal quality to it.