IWSG: The Insecurity of waiting

It’s the first Wednesday in March, so time for the Insecure Writers’ Support Group. If you haven’t come across this before, it’s a regular monthly blogfest where writing bloggers share their insecurities or post something to reassure or inspire others. 🙂

At this point, what’s on my mind more than anything else is waiting. There’s a lot of the waiting game in being a writer, waiting to hear back from others what they think about your work. Waiting to hear from agents, from potential publishers, from magazines, from contest judges, from beta readers and other volunteer critiquers. I’ve sent the revised copy of “Won’t somebody think of the Children” to two dedicated readers from the critters.org critique workshop, and I’m waiting to hear back from both of them, waiting to hear from somebody at nanowrimo.org about a possible manuscript swap.

And more than anything else, I’m waiting to find out if I got into any summer workshops. I got my applications sent to four during February: Clarion at UCSD, Clarion West, Odyssey, and CSSF Novels. I’m probably not going to hear from anybody for another two weeks or so, and suspect that I’ll be waiting on one workshop until mid-April. Sigh.

But I’m doing what you have to do when you’re waiting; I’ve made my peace with the work I put in, that what I sent out was the best I could have done with the tools I had at the time, and I’m focusing on other things. 🙂 Since it’s March, there’s plenty of editing to do!

Are you waiting to hear back from anybody about your writing?

Blog the Cat, Chapter Eight – Where do we go from here?

Blog the cat screenwriting index.

Well, I’ve read through the last chapter of Blake Snyder’s great scriptwriting book, ‘Save the Cat’, but I’m not really sure what to blog about it. There’s good stuff in there, but it’s all about promoting your script, finding an agent or closing a deal, and that’s just not really where my head is at in this moment.

Part of my head is still just catching up from the stuff I learned today at the latest Brian Henry Saturday workshop, in downtown Toronto at the World’s Biggest Bookstore. The scriptwriting part of my brain is excited about the fact that the Script Frenzy site is launching, and wanting to go back to the beginning of Save the Cat. So it wants to plot out loglines, come up with compelling characters, pick out a genre, make a beat sheet, and buy a Board somewhere.

And I don’t really want to stop it from doing any of those things for long enough to worry about chapter eight of ‘Save the Cat.’ So I’m just going to page through the E-book really quickly, come up with a few cool things to share, and call this a series.

And all the coolest things in this chapter were the stories about novelty pitches – the ones that worked, and the ones that didn’t:

Blogosphere Monday: Donna Hole

Blogosphere index

I’ve been introduced to so many great writing bloggers over the past week, (or should that be blogging writers?) over the past week, that I’ll have lots of choices for Blogosphere spotlights for months to come. That’s because of the two blogfests that I took part in, of course, ‘Show me Yours‘ and ‘New creations‘.

This week, I’m going to feature Donna Hole, who’s got lots of good fiction serials up at her spot, as well as discussion of query letters and agents, author interviews, some fun blogfest entries, and plenty of eclectic videos. Go take a look!

I’m also pleased to plug Donna’s blog, because she apparently spent several hours browsing through mine yesterday, giving me great feedback on lots of stuff, including every Star Patrol Blogisode so far! Thanks a bundle, Donna!

Which brings me to another topic. I’m happy to announce that I’ve started making a few changes based on reader feedback over the past few days – at Donna’s suggestion, I’ve drawn up an index page for the Blogisodes, and I’ll be adding another to group a lot of my posts together by subject matter – so that you can find my posts for Nanowrimo 2010, fanart, beat sheets, or conventions without having to make your way through the tag cloud, if you’d rather not. It should make it easier for anybody trying to find a particular post in one of those series.

Also, more than one person has asked how they can be a Kelworth follower. It seems that WordPress.com doesn’t allow quite the same followers matrix as blogspot does, (too bad,) but I have a shiny new widget up in the top right called ‘Follow that blog!’ It’s really just a subscription widget dressed up as something that it’s not, but it’ll let you know when I’ve got new bloggage up. I’ve also got a widget for ‘most viewed recently’, I’ve turned on the rating controls so that you can let me know how cool I am on a day to day basis, and I’ll probably be experimenting with some more widgets.

And it’s only 2 days now until I announce the title for my fantasy review project!!

Blogosphere Monday: Quick Brown Fox

I’ve gone to three of Brian Henry’s Saturday workshops in the Hamilton area over the past seven months or so – in fact, it was the first of them which actually prompted me to start a writing blog of my own, and share this crazy creative journey that I’m on with the entire blogosphere.

So, this week, I’m happy to spotlight Brian’s blog: Quick Brown Fox It’s full of excerpts and news from all kinds of writers that have been through his courses and workshops, opportunities to submit your work, places to go to find an agent, local writers groups… and it’s a great place to watch for Brian coming to your town if you’re living in Ontario of course.

Myself, I’m already looking forward to heading out to Saint Catherines in the middle of January to learn about “Writing Dialog.”