Hello and happy Friday! I hope your April is off to a sunny start.
Announcements
There are still spots in the free storytelling offering for underrepresented voices (you can also read more it about here), which starts April 18 in Carrboro, N.C.
If you’re interested but not sure if this is for you, get in touch (spoiler: it is!). And if you want to support this effort, please share—forward this email to a friend, or share this Instagram post.
If you are considering blasting off to Jupiter with me, applications close April 12th!
Save the date! The next meetup of a scratch of writers will be Saturday, April 27th, 3-5pm. Stay tuned for a location! You can read all about the first one here. I can assure this one will also include many free books.
I’ll be giving a craft talk on May 7th entitled How to Build Complex Characters to Drive Plot/Story. Registration doesn’t open till April 12th, but mark your calendar—it’ll be full of insight and exercises to kick your characters and plot up several notches.
Retreat
Last week I spent five days at the Porches Writing Retreat in Virginia, which was pretty heavenly. I set out with a few options for how to spend my time there—I brought printed pages to read and mark, a lot of notes about unwritten/underdeveloped scenes in Act II, and of course everything in Scriviener I’d written so far.
I spent a lot of my time revising Act I. I still feel ambivalent about revising parts that feel more solid when I know there are shakier places that need by attention, but I’ve come to accept this is part of my process—that I need to solidify as much as I can, which is how I know what comes next. The danger is always getting too sucked into line level edits, which is like deciding where to put your dishes and spices and mugs in your newly renovated kitchen while the house still doesn’t have a roof. If I catch myself fiddling with word choice or commas, I make myself move on.
It felt good to lock in a lot of the first act, which allowed me to go full steam ahead on some Act II pieces that have been elusive. I do want to tell you this though: as I said in my earlier piece about going on retreat, I did have an on-schedule total freakout the day before I left Porches. I had finished my work on Act I and knew I need to barrel into Act II. And as I was making tea for the afternoon Act II session, I became convinced that the whole book was a disaster and a failure and it was time to give up and become an accountant.
I took my tea to the porch with a notebook and I wrote it all down: how this whole book thing was a disaster, how I was a failure, etc etc etc. I put all the dark gremlin thoughts in my head down on the page. And wouldn’t you know (you would, this has happened to me nine zillion times), eventually something shifted. Eventually I felt a little lighter and the relentless negative self-talk my inner critic was feeding me began to be replaced with ideas about Act II, sentences even. So I turned the page in my notebook and began writing those. And I made a shit ton of progress on Act II before I departed the next day.
Retreats are the best. Go on one if you can, even for an afternoon!
Prompt
And now, a writing prompt!
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