Lawyer and Writer

Greetings. It's been a rough two years, but I'm back.

For the past two years, my work schedule has gone from very busy, to very very insanely busy, and basically stayed there. I've dealt with a coworker who flamed out and dumped their entire caseload on me, and also a three month period of absolutely no income while the government body who writes my paycheque "upgraded" their system. During that entire time, I carried a caseload of over 100 clients and worked every one of them as hard as I could.

It didn't leave much time or brainpower left over for writing, and even less time for blogging about writing.

However, I now see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as my work load at the day job. In addition to that, I've had some important boosts to my writing brain, and I believe I'm firmly back in the saddle now, with enough brainpower left over on the side to attend to my social media as well.

In September, I attended the Out of Excuses Retreat. When I got back from that utterly life-changing experience, I went to the Surrey International Writer's Conference, and pitched OtherWhere to an agent, who asked for a full manuscript.

I've decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year, so that I can concentrate on getting my manuscript up to par and getting it out to the agent.

In the meantime, I am committing to updating this blog regularly again. I intend to update on a rotating schedule, every Friday, and it'll probably be more writing and life updates, and writing exercises, rather than reviews. Though I will probably do the odd review, as well.

So thanks for being patient! I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say.

This weekend I'm attending the Surrey International Writer's Conference for the second time. I went once before, 6 or 7 years ago, and it was a life-altering experience. Unfortunately, at the time I was working on a book that I have since trunked, so even though it got very good responses from both agents and readers, I never did anything with it. Then I went to law school.

It's nice to be back.

Yesterday I attended two master classes, one on subtext, which was basically about how to use word choice and things like that to set tone and convey character. The other was about editing. Though there wasn't really much in the second one that was completely new to me, I learned a lot at both classes.

Then there was a really terrible accident on the freeway and it took me over 4 hours to make a one hour trip home....

Today I attended a workshop on cliches in YA fiction and another one on diversity in fiction. The latter was by Jim C. Hines, who appears to be a thoroughly awesome individual. He'll be reading the first three pages of my novel on Saturday, so I hope he likes it XD!

As a side note, not totally unrelated: For various reasons, I feel like a number of forces in the universe are pushing me towards submitting OtherWhere for publication instead of self-publishing it, so that's what I'm going to do after this weekend. Wish me luck!

I think I'm going to be extremely tired, but very enlightened, by Sunday night.