Sunday, March 15, 2009

Busy, busy, busy...

Wow, how time flies when you're having fun! The last week has been incredibly busy, what with FFA Ag Issues presentations, which went very well, and working on making Sisley Creek Press a reality, I have hardly had time to take a deep breath...

But now I can stop and review the time since I last posted. Hmm, where does one start? Let's give this a shot...

Monday was Ag Issues practice. Nothing major there, except for personnel shakeups, but we're working past those...

Then Tuesday, we entertained the Irrigation District monthly meeting with our grasshopper presentation. The folks there asked some good questions, and the kids even knew the answers to some of them...

Wednesday, we gave our skit for the local spray outfit. They had some good comments for us, and straightened out some of our information...

Thursday was great. I had signed up ahead of time for a writing workshop run by a lady from Portland named Molly Gloss. Great workshop. Her premise is that setting should be essentially an equal partner with plot in developing your characters. Setting has always been one of the weak points in my writing. I tend to race my characters through the landscape, instead of slowing down and using description of the place where the action is happening to help with plot and characterization...

I also found that she writes pretty much in the same fashion that I do: until the story, or the movie, or whatever you want to call it, starts up in my head, nothing much gets written. My editor went to the workshop with me, and we had a some pretty good one on one time with Molly Gloss afterward, and learned some things that nobody else there did, because they all left immediately...

Some part of every day, I've been feverishly building my new website. I keep remodeling, trying to make the best I can make it. Down the road, I'm supposed to help my editor set up her own site. That'll be fun, too. The bookstore part of my site now has separate pages for each of the authors that I have a connection with, as well as myself, with still more pages under each of their names for their books. There's an "About the author" section there for each of us, as well as book excerpts...

And the icing on the cake: my publisher account with Lightning Source is on the verge of coming to life! Shortly after that happens, I'll be starting to come up with all the paraphernalia necessary to publish one's own, and possibly someone else's, books. I've already been talking to a couple of people about possibly doing their books. This is turning out to be quite an adventure...

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