The weekend of Friday 8 May I went on a writing retreat at Dunford House in W Sussex, which was organised by SCBWI. It was the third or fourth time I've been there. I enjoy it there because it 's so peaceful that I get lots of writing done. Here is what I got up to over that weekend.
It started for me on the Friday evening when I had a one-to-one with author Sally Nicholls. She had read the first two chapters of Charlie and gave me her feedback. The main point she said was to make Charlie more interesting so the readers would want to read more about him and not think, so what about him. Within half an hour of this feedback, I got ideas. One of which relates to what happens to him throughout the book. It so happened that in one of Sally's workshops she said to think about what you already have for your character if you get stuck.
Saturday morning I started my fifth and final YA fantasy (my Guardian Angels series), which I am calling at the moment 'The Fire Angels'. That time I wrote 960 words. In the afternoon I began revisions on Charlie. I was planning to start a third book in my Asperkids series, but after the feedback from Sally I changed my mind. Also that afternoon, I wrote out an outline for my author service to do personally and an on-line, and sketched some angels. Sketched is the loose term for them. I put speech bubbles with them to make them resonate with my website HopewithJulie.
There were workshops by Sally and an agent, but I shall put what I learnt in another post. I didn't go to the talks by the agent and the editor.
Sunday - I wrote more of my Angel ebook, this time it was 1085 words. I also wrote more revisions to Charlie, and I wrote a short story (773 words), which I shall start expanding later this week. It is aimed at Yours.
Monday - there was time in the morning before we all said goodbye to do more writing if we wished. I did wish as I was caught up in what I was writing for my Angel ebook. So I wrote more of that. It came out to be over 600 words.
Next post will be all that I learnt from Sally.
2 comments:
Sounds busy, Julie. I wish I was there!
I was busy, and so were a lot of the others. You would have got a lot of writing done.
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