Last Thursday the fabulous and very talented Jayne from over at a Novice Novelist came by train (the 4.50 from Paddington no less) and we hotfooted it down to Oxford Blackwells where author extraordinaire/the crabbit old bat Nicola Morgan was giving a talk on how to get published/write your pitch for your novel (there is a lot more of that kind of advice on her blog here). Jayne writes up the whole thing fabulously here and all I can add is that the workshop was incredibly informative, Nicola was lovely and we managed to drag her out for a drink afterwards (photographic proof of us muchly enjoying the Grande cafe, when in Oxford etc).
I had the Friday off as I wanted to take Jayne to the station & the plan after that was to write but I mostly just sat down to enjoy my friend Ali's second book The Man who Rained, its really good, so good in fact that I'm trying to ration the chapters else I'll speed read it which is glorified skimming and I'm enjoying this book too much to miss any detail (plus look how pretty that and his first novel look on the speculative fiction part of my new bookshelf, indeed!).
Tuesday evening saw me head back to Blackwells (if I'm there enough maybe they will let me move into poets corner?) for the launch of group 2012 the new writing group. The aim is to help with your writing. Having got two novels in first draft (written in the undergraduate years, obviously, when I had time and was doing my creative writing minor) I'm finding it really hard to find the motivation/time to re-write/improve them so the plan was to find some support and some other writers to share my thoughts/time with. I managed to meet some lovely people (quote of the evening: "It's really exciting, like we are the new Inklings. You can be Tolkien" me "Why do I have to be the weird one with elves...", and there was more wine, most excellent) and the next meeting is in a month (by which time I have pledged I will have revisited at least one chapter, gulp). I also managed to find out the dates for this years Oxford Literary Festival at which the author of my favourite novel of all time (An Equal Music - Vikram Seth) will be speaking alongside the literary greats and um Alex James (who is talking about cheese). I'm so excited I may have to take an afternoon off to go and sit in the same room (although they say you should never meet your idols).
Last night was spent at Wood school, trying to finish something I've been working on for a while (I can't really post it on here as I know the person its for is a reader of this blog, ahh the problems) but here is a sneaky peak.
This morning was freezing and my bus didn't turn up (booo) so I was in a pretty cold and bad mood by the time I got to work (after being rescued by one of our lovely neighbours), that was until I found out one of my close work friends James (indeed we used to be desk spouses, until I cruelly moved upstairs) keeps a blog on Dr Who (I'm a massive Who fan & the site is brilliant) and indeed had taken the time to create a pretty epic Sherlock/Dr Who script which you can find here, I also got sent this piece of genius, music students take note!
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