Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	The Whip - Divebomb
Entry tags:	clarion west, graham joyce, novels, writing

A Cabful of Bash Indeed
Yesterday I got the chance to sit in on the Clarion West classroom with Graham Joyce teaching it. As always, the stories were interesting and the discussion lively and entertaining. Plus any instuructor with a great accent like that = BONUS. (imo)

Towards the end, he talked about getting from the point where you start a novel to the completed point and said with the first draft he tries to circumvent the editoral side of his brain and just spit it all out onto the page. Then revisions follow -- first a big structural one where he figures out what scenes he's missing and writes them, rearranges and delete stuff, etc., then ones focusing on characterization, etc, and then finally the last pass where he works at the sentence level. This encouraged me since it's the process I'm using right now - tomorrow, in fact, I'm printing out that first grand draft and looking to start filling in all the gaps, of which there are an abundance. But booyah for first drafts! I dance with jubilation.

There's a couple of yellow swallowtails that keep flittering past the window -- maybe the same one each time, I'm not sure.  Time to refill the hummingbird feeder and then keep plugging away since for once there seems to be no roofers walking around above my head.