writing workshops

[ritaxis]

For some reason this is the time of years when everybody and his mother's brother has a writing workshop they want to let you know about for next year.  maybe this is the time of year they hire the instructors for next year, I don't know.

Anyway, not a single one of them: not Odyssey, not Clarion West, not Clarion, not Viable Paradise, not a single one of them is ever going to be possible for me ever, because I will never ever have that much money at my disposal and also that much time I do not have to be working.   And also.  . . .

It would be nice to be a part of a community of writers again sometime, but the last time I was in a writing group it totally broke me.  I don't understand how that worked.  Everybody in the group was nice and friendly, and the things they were writing were really interesting, but there was not a bit of commentary I received that didn't depress me completely.  And the two novels I brought to that group died, though I am pretty sure they were both had great potential.

I really don't know why that happened.  And so naturally I am wary of writing groups after that, because if that could happen with people I respected so much and who were so kind, and I don't know why, then how can I expect any other writing group situation not to do the same thing to me?

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping to get people together for an online writing/crit circle - not whole books (because I don't have the patience to put something through chapter by chapter), but the kind of problem crits we did on rasfc - 500 words, 'this is what I'm trying to do, is it working, and how can I make it better'.

I would like to have more feedback - and at the same time, I want very specific feedback, on the areas I want to improve. I do not want to be told that I ought to write a different kind of book, because my kind of book is the only one I know how to write.

And I've just read a book that's a) doing a hell of a lot of the things I love in a book and that is b) commercially successful, so there's hope yet.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I'd be willing to try another writing circle online!