Tomorrow I’m starting a week-long Q&A on eHarlequin’s Write Stuff community board, on “Tightening Your First Page”.

Why am I doing this, you ask, when my husband’s on tour (and therefore I’m a single mum), I’m trying to finish a book on deadline, and I’ve got a residential course on writing commercial women’s fiction to prepare for next week?

Because a) I agreed to, and b) eHarlequin’s community is one of the best on the web.

I’ll post a link tomorrow, once the Q&A is up.

I’m back from the course I was teaching with Kate Walker.

What a great weekend!

It was an awesome group of writers–every one of them 100% committed to making their writing the best it could be. We laughed and worked and drank (a little) and ate chocolate and generally had a blast. Kate mentions that one of the highlights was when I was leading a session on how to write a sex scene, and a man came in with the heater we’d requested earlier…of course by that time we didn’t need it! He was a little bashful (I wonder why) and hightailed it out of there, even before I’d put up my overhead about “bodacious ta-tas”.

Some of the main highlights for me were these:

…Seeing and working with the marvellous Kate. We write quite differently and it was great to be able to demonstrate two entirely different ways of approaching writing: I analyse things, and Kate writes from instinct, and yet both approaches work. Team teaching is great fun and it was really useful to always have an expert there to enrich what I was doing.

…Meeting the twelve participants. Everyone was so friendly and so excited to be there. The bar was hopping on Friday and Saturday nights (even though we were asked to be quiet for the lecture going on next door)!

…Getting Jane and Pat to solve the my book’s plot problems in the bar!

…Doing a crit session and going around the table and praising each other’s writing. For some people this was the first time they’d shared their writing and it was wonderful to be able to assure each and every person that she had talent and potential. And then asking each person what she’d change about what she’d done, and seeing that everyone had geniunely taken things in and were able to turn what we were saying into concrete strategies for making their writing stronger.

So thank you, Kate; and thank you, Sue, Gray, Melanie, Karen, Pat, Jane, Jacqui, Jo, Lara, Marie, Sarah, and Liz; and thank you, Arts Training Council for making this happen.