Woo Hoo! It's Finally Here!

Well, it’s that magical time of year again and I can hardly wait! This morning the Muse Online Writers conference officially begins. This past week has been a flurry of introductory emails and networking, and handouts for galore for each of the classes, but tomorrow the forum workshops and chat workshops officially begin and it promises to be a whole lot of fun.

This is my second time attending the conference. This year is no different than last – I signed up for waaaaay too many workshops…but they all sounded simply to good to pass up.

A lot of the writers at the conference are doing their preliminary work for NaNoWriMo. What’s NaNoWriMo? It stands for National Novel Writing Month. Yes, November is officially the month to challenge yourself to flesh out a novel of 50,000 words or more. That is quite a challenge. I tried it last year. I was successful in hitting my 50,000 word target, but the novel still in my “work in progress” drawer. You see, I decided not only to challenge myself to write a novel in a month…but to change genres and challenge myself to try something totally new – out of my comfort zone. It was great! Invigorating! The only downfall was with the change there was a need for a lot of research. I had not realized how much research was going to be necessary to get a believable mystery written. You have to know law – well, not chapter and verse, but the basics. You have to know jurisdiction – there are some lines that cross in the particular storyline I have going. You have to know people and behaviors. Well, for any good book to have believable characters you need to know the human element fairly well and show well defined and developed characters to keep today’s readers interested. By the way – there are a couple great workshops on writing mysteries at the Muse Conference!

My favorite genre is fantasy. Again, there are lots of great workshops at the Muse conference on Fantasy, World Building, Magic, Celtic magic. Of course I signed up for all of them. Yes, it is like regular school and they all have homework. Sleep? Nah, not this week, they’ll be plenty of time to sleep…hmmmmm…well, sooner or later there’ll be time to sleep, I’m sure. I’m an insomniac by nature anyway, lol.

Well, I’m still working on preliminary work for the conference soooooo…to everyone who is attending the conference – have fun and I’ll see you there!