No, I’m not talking about Santa, I’m talking about the originator of The Snowflake Method of novel design, Randy Ingermanson!

Randy is doing a workshop in Couer d’Alene this weekend. One of his other blog readers from my area contacted me, and now three of us will drive down this weekend to ’sit at the master’s feet’ as it were.

For a very modest fee Randy agreed to give a 5-page manuscript a 20-minute critique to all takers. This will be the first time my ‘real’ work has been professionally critiqued. I am shaking in my pretty boots! I know Randy well enough to know that he will be encouraging. I know myself well enough to know that I’m only 1 year into a four year learning process, and it’s okay that I don’t know, or even apply all the things I do know, all the time to my work. But I want to be told I am brilliant, dammit! (Was that my outside voice?)

Mature me can handle whatever comes, and immature me will just have to deal. Hopefully this will be a springboard for faster improvement, so that one day I will be described as brilliant!

I’m getting a lot more out of Techniques of the Selling Writer this time. I’m a good way in, and I’m grasping the MRU thing a lot better. Applying it may a different story entirely, but it’s a start.

I’m having a lot of fun putting in an extra chapter or two to my Nanowrimo novel as I re-write it. I seem to do well on the whole big picture thing and can snowflake that, but all the interesting layers and details and little subplots that reinforce the big ones seem to come to me organically as I’m tying the bigger things together. I guess I work better creatively withing the boundaries of an established framework. I’m not putting the time into it that I’d like as there’s a lot of upheaval as our family is considering a major move, after a move just 11 months ago. Randy Ingermanson says that real writers write 3 hours a day anyway, even with life going on. With kids still home I consider myself part-time, and feel good if I write three times a week. It’s enough for now.