Good afternoon, squiders! Sorry for abandoning you all week! I wish I had a good excuse but I don’t.
I did finish the final edit for Deep and Blue today. It has a publication date now (May 1) and is coming along–just needs to be formatted and the book description needs some tweaking.
(I gotta say, working on marketing material is always so frustrating. I showed the book description to some friends to be like, hey, would you pick up this book? And they generally were like, yeah, it sounds cool! Good job! And then I posted it to a writing community, who pulled it apart and hated all of it. Probably the solution is somewhere in the middle, but it is very disconcerting to have such varied reactions, and I do sometimes wonder if writing communities feel the need to fix things that are perhaps okay as is.)
(Or maybe they know what they’re talking about! Who knows!)
(Anyway.)
(I just want all the Deep and Blue stuff done so I can go back to Book 1! Also I changed a character’s name in the middle and no one, including me, noticed and it was published serially like that, so that’s embarrassing.)
I talked a few weeks ago about potentially going to Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference to network and so forth, and ended up talking myself completely out of it through writing said blog post. I poked around a bit more at writers’ conferences before deciding that they really weren’t what I was looking for (and going farther afield didn’t fix the networking issue), and then I spent some time looking at writing residencies.
Writing residencies sound great, in theory! In some cases you pay, and in others they pay you, and you go somewhere for anywhere for a week to a few months, and all you do is write (and in some cases, maybe teach a class or prepare a piece for wherever you’re staying).
But, of course, I have the small, mobile ones (though at least the bigger, mobile one is not so small anymore). I did find a few retreats that do allow you to bring your whole family (including one only a few hours away!) but arguably if you bring your kids you’re not getting the whole immersive experience that a residency advertises. But, yeah, the ability to just go off on my own for a while without the rest of the family is not really a thing, at the moment.
Also, in almost all cases (but especially for ones where you stay for free or they pay you), there is an application process. And I just can’t see most of these places digging through all these applicants and being, “Ah, yes, this fantasy/science fiction/horror writer is providing the right level of prominence and art that we look for in our program.”
(And then I looked around to see if there was anything specifically for speculative fiction, and aside from fancy workshop programs like Clarion or Odyssey, the answer was no, and those are also quite long and very expensive, and there is an application process for those as well, and you have to apply months and months and months in advance. So yeah.)
So I shelved that idea.
And then I moved onto writing retreats. A retreat is not unlike a residency, where there is an amount of time dedicated to writing. But unlike (some) residencies, there are other writers there, and they tend to be shorter, normally a few days to a week.
I think this is the right solution for right now. It has the networking, it has the writing, and hopefully it will be sort of relaxing. (Plus they will feed me, always a plus.)
I found two happening relatively nearby, happening in the next two months. I did some research and picked one, for the end of May.
Of course, now my spouse is saying he might need to take a business trip over those days.
Sigh.
Anyway, how are you, squiders? Done a writing retreat before? (Or a residency, for that matter?)
