Hello Again!
I know, I know, it’s been more than a little while since I’ve posted, not for a lack of topics but rather a lack of time. Since I posted last here, I cleared the 70k word mark on the first draft of my latest work-in-progress and am now deep in the revision stage of the manuscript. I attended one retreat – the Big Sur Children’s Writing Workshop – and three (yes, three!) SCBWI conferences. I’m hoping to write a post or three on my takeaways from the conferences, and on the amazingness that is the Big Sur workshop, so check back for those in the next few months.
Yes, it may really be a few months, because next month I’m going to be researching my current WIP in a whirlwind trip around Europe. I’ll be starting in Prague and gradually making my way to Dubrovnik, then catching a plane to London for a few days before heading home. I can’t say much about the manuscript yet, but I can tell you I’ll be visiting a lot of churches, especially those with catacombs, and checking out former Cold War spy hangouts in Vienna. I’m hoping to be able to keep up on twitter and post a bit to instagram while overseas, but I’ll likely be fairly quiet otherwise, as I’ll be writing, ideating, and photographing everything I can.
In the meantime, I started a project this summer that will hopefully benefit not just me but a lot of writers. Last winter I realized how many tweets I’d favorited – over 5,000(!) – and most of them were links to articles on writing craft. Twitter doesn’t provide an easy way to go through that many favorites, so I set up an export to the bookmarking site, Diigo. I finally got around to looking through the links last month, and started to re-tag them with meaningful categories. I’ve kept the unreviewed links private, but as I’m reviewing them I’m making them public. I’ve got a little over 200 available right now, so if you’re looking for revision techniques, great tools to get to know your characters, or just about anything else writing-related, you can find links from around the web to help you do just that.
You can find the link database at https://www.diigo.com/user/Katebranden.
How have you spent your summer? Do you have any big plans for the fall?