Workshopping, finally

I haven't workshopped my writing since 2001. That was the year I did two classes at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York. (In fact, while killing a few minutes before one such workshop, I ran into an old music biz/college friend, and yadda yadda yadda, within a month I was working at S&S Children's; thanks, Detroit*.) I found that experience to be at times horrible and useless, but very often invaluable. In fact, it's safe to say that my first instructor at GWW, one Alex Steele, was one of the three most important--how shall I put this?--cattle prods in my writing career. He was a big fan of some of the earliest scenes in |-1|, and without his confidence in the piece, I don't know I ever would have written even the novella it was this time last year.

I digress. The point is, been a long time since I was active in a workshop, but now it's on: I've just begun the Advanced Fiction Workshop at the Loft, and, no offense to Brian Farrey, I'm glad I ended up "stuck" in this class, rather than BF's "Better Writing through Buffy." That class sounded hell of fun, but probably would not have been quite the swift kick YA MS the Third really needs.

Already the workshop has been helpful. In selecting the 6500-word section I want to submit (I volunteered to submit next week, essentially right away), I determined that the wrong 25 pages are right now the first 25 pages, and the 25 pages I chose for the workshop should be the first 25 pages. Already a win. Oh, plus the first story we read was Kelly Link's "Stone Animals," which, swoon.

*My old friend's name is not actually Detroit. Detroit is simply what a particular mispronunciation of her name sort of sounds like, but not really.