40 days...

Thanks to the folks at Inprint I'm back in regular writing workshops again.  I don't know that I learn a lot from workshops anymore... I suspect I have enough writing books and critical essays to have earned an MFA by now, but given the number of "drafts" that have taken up residence on my desk, I clearly need the discipline of deadlines. I don't know what possessed me to think that printing out drafts was a good idea, other than the ability to "not edit" while sitting in positions not conducive to a notebook computer, but these pages now haunt me every time I sit at my desk.

So my commitment to myself is to a) write new things for workshop, and b) FINISH something.  So not only have I signed up for another round of workshopping at Inprint, I've agreed to a less formal group with classmates from the last workshop.  That means I will have new eyes for some of the drafts and I will have deadlines to get them moving. Even if they move to the trash or back to a box in the desk that I'll save for the day I have a publisher begging me for anything...

What's that saying I like?  It costs nothing to dream, and everything not to.

Tomorrow I'm with the Old group, and am taking them a short flash piece I wrote in 2009 and a longer one I wrote way back in 2000.  Both of them inspired by the state of Michigan, one winter, one summer.  Since it has been almost fifteen years since I've lived in Michigan, it interests me that this is the work I feel safest with.  Now I've been in Texas longer than I was in Michigan, so it may be time to take some Texan sized risks.  The last two novels I've worked on have major Texas scenes... all i need to do is edit 300 pages before I can get back to them.

at 7.5 pages a day....that's only 40 days.  And nights.  We all know what can happen to the world in 40 days!