I’ve been accepted to an advanced fiction studio at The Muse Writing Center down in Norfolk! While I’ve attended many one-off writing classes and workshops, this will be the first time I will be a part of an ongoing fiction studio, where fellow writers submit work to be critiqued regularly and study the writing techniques of various authors under the guidance of a professional instructor.

My goals are twofold:

1. Level up my fiction writing chops, particular in the areas of character depth and weaving together multiple subplots within an overarching structure.
2. Use the requirement to regularly submit new work to supplement my motivation for finishing the sequel to Red Soil Through Our Fingers. I’ve tentatively titled Book 2 When the Ground Beneath Us Shifted, and there is a loose plan for a third book as well.

Objective 2 is one that I’ve been struggling with for two years, as a glance back through my previous writing updates over this time will show. It’s been a tumultuous couple of years, professionally and personally. I’ve been keeping up momentum though, and project a completion of Draft Alpha (first complete draft + self-editing pass) by mid-May.

Normally, at that point, I would send Draft Alpha to my Writing Group, but alas the one that I had in Boston is, for various reasons, disbanded at the moment, with only vague possibilities of re-forming. So, perhaps a tertiary goal of the fiction studio (and getting involved with The Muse in general) will be to make connections with new writers in this area who may be interested in forming a new group.

Super ambitious, probably impossible goal, but one that I want to aim for anyway: a book launch party at RavenCon 15 in April 2020!

For now, I’ve got three writing submissions from my new classmates to read and critique by Monday… gotta get to it! Probably another update next week after the first class.