John Brown – the author’s official site » Blog Archive » Writing update: Curse Draft 3 FINISHED, The Book Academy.
I am mentioned as a reader! John asked me to read it because I had not yet read the first book in the series and he wanted to make sure things still made sense to me. I made it through a couple chapters (if I recall correctly) before things got a bit confusing, but I applaud John’s idea to make each book stand a bit on its own.
I hope he gets done with it soon because I am really looking forward to reading the first book (I’ve had it in my To Read pile for almost a year, I believe).
Well, last night I sent off my first short story submission to Intergalactic Medicine Show. It is a bit frightening.
I originally created the story at Liberty Hall Writers as part of a flash fiction contest. I liked the story but haven’t done much with it for a couple years.
Then, I needed something for my Writing Group (The Point Writing Group, to be specific) and pulled it out, dusted it off, and totally revamped it. My writing group gave it a pretty good reception, with some much needed advice on how to improve the “surprise” for the end, and I rewrote it again. That was a couple months ago.
Then, yesterday, I pulled it out again and added in more world building-type detail to bring it even more to life.
I felt like I’d done all I could for this story and so I sent it out into the big bad world.
It will probably be rejected (it is my first submission after all), but the experience has been good for me.
I recently started a writing group in my area. We critiqued each other’s stuff for the first time earlier this month, and I have to say that it was a great experience. It got me moving on my writing and should make it so that I write more regularly (creatively, not necessarily on my blogs 
).
In February, a couple of us (the Founders) got together to come up with guidelines for our group.
Dave Farland had sent out several emails last year about writing groups, so I went through those again and pulled out the good nuggets of information.
In any case, we set up some rules about how we’re going to run the thing and our expectations. Basically, we expect people to write something new every month instead of just rehashing the same old thing again and again. We also don’t want critiques to get out of hand and so will use something similar to Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp method (which I believe is also used at Odyssey and/or Clarion). Everyone will get a turn and there will not be any cross-talking or commenting by the author.
We also decided to include a short writing exercise at the beginning of each one so that we can improve our craft and get our brains working.
Finally, we decided (for various reasons that I will not enumerate at the present time) to call our group The Point Writing Group.
We are open to anyone who is serious about writing and improving themselves.
So, if you live in northern Utah county or southern Salt Lake county (in Utah, of course), then we’d be happy to have you.
