13 October 2006

Word Nerd's Deadline is When?!?

Word Nerd remembered this morning that she signed up for an upcoming Author Spotlight section with the Oshkosh Area Writers Club and thought she'd better just double-check the date on that.

Yeah. Good thing. It's two-weeks earlier than she was remembering.

A bit of explanation.

The Oshkosh Area Writers Club is a local writers critique group that meets the first and third Saturdays of the month at 10 a.m.- noon in the Oshkosh Public Library. Because many in the group are working on what they hope will be novels, the second hour of the meeting has been dubbed "Author Spotlight." For this session, at the previous meeting, the author to be spotlighted passes out a 40-50 page chunk of their work. The rest of those in the group take it and read it and write comments all over it in the ensuing two weeks and then talk about it at the next meeting.

So. Word Nerd's on the hot-seat on Nov. 4, but that means she's got to pass out her section at the Oct. 21 meeting. As, next weekend.

And that means she's got to get working to get the first three chapters or so of her novel ready for other people to read. Granted, going to Author Spotlight is supposed to be a time for critique, meaning the section doesn't have to be perfect, but Word Nerd doesn't want top just bring a section that she hasn't revised at least once already.

Why not? Because it's scary. Make no mistake. Critiquing in writing is hard, particularly when it's your piece that everybody else is reading. After slaving away to write it, you as a writer are turning over something that you created for other people to have a red-pen-heydey with.

In Word Nerd's case, this is all coming a little sooner than she thought.

1 comment:

Stacie Penney said...

But blue, green, or purple are fun too.