So I took the plunge and signed up for the LDStorymakers writing conference. It was last week and it was phenomenal!
I decided if I was going to go, I might as well get the whole experience. I signed up for the boot camp.
*Cue the scary music*
Boot camp consisted of taking your first 15 pages of your work in progress (WIP) and work-shopping it with a small group.
My group had four of us attendees, and one “Sergeant”. Our Sergeant was Becca Whilite. She has two awesome books (contemporary young adult) out with a regional publisher.
I was the only one that hadn’t attended the conference before. True confession time. . .
The night before I was so anxious about the whole thing I was a nervous wreck. I will, of course, blame some of it on exhaustion and some of it on pregnancy hormones, but the rest was all me. I was really asking myself ‘what am I doing?’
I didn’t have anything to worry about. Everyone was fabulous. We took turns reading, or having our story read out loud. Then we all had comments and suggestions. I learned so much from the process of discussing everyone’s work. I will really be watching for Gail’s, Ashley’s, and Kenneth’s books to come out – they were that good.
When I read mine, they were really good at helping me figure out the rough parts. There was a large paragraph that made me cringe every time I saw it because it mostly seemed like info-dump (yuck). They helped me talk through suggestions to fix and integrate the information elsewhere. Yay! I am thinking I should look in to a writing group of some kind so that I can get more feedback, more often.
It was fun to see other peoples’ responses to my story. I know what I can do now with pacing and increasing the tension in a couple of spots. The whole process made me excited to dig back in and work on the story.
I would highly recommend the experience to anyone.
The rest of the weekend was also fabulous. I will post about the classes I was able to attend next time!
There's Magic in Story, 