The Killer Dappled by Sun

The Loyalist campus remains unchanged from last year – small ripples but nothing major – getting decent lunch food still remains a challenge unless one really loves bread – Tim Ho’s is fine in the morning but Subway for lunch 5 days in a row could lead to me skipping lunches & losing nano-grams of weight.

This year, for the first time, I’m in residence “D” – the one residence building with no name. It’s very cold – I like a bit of a/c but its too cool here for kicking around, indoors, in shorts & a tee-shirt – sweat pants & hoodie are musts.

First day of workshop was meeting others. Of the 12 in the class 8 of us have taken workshops with Rosemary a few times before. 2 men, 10 women . In the mornings we’ll be looking a the “whys” of being a novelist & also at marketing. To warm us up to each other we did a couple of writing exercises in the afternoon – one of which was to write a great opening line. Here’s mine:

My sister, Misty, who hasn’t spoken to me in years, leaned over my father’s coffin to whisper in my good ear, “Which of us kills mother?”

Real workshopping began Tuesday. I signed on to be one of the first in the hot seat with the section of Lazarus Kiss I posted here last week http://wp.me/p1RtxU-68.

Day two sort of over – I’m out of out the classroom but still have pieces to read over for workshopping tomorrow. Even by this second day it is very clear that ePub is changing the nature of the industry so that what we are learning about marketing & paper publishing is altering as it gets said –

Mine was the first piece workshopped – a good kick off – because it moves so fast some were a bit confused, some were lost because the excerpt comes from the 3/4 point in the manuscript – but overall they were impressed, challenged & in some cases laughed out loud when they first read it.

I tried to set the example of listening till everyone had commented before responding to a few things – I assured them that the violence of the scene wasn’t typical of the story but that the humor was. I’ll look at the written comments in couple of months when I do the next round of revisions.