I am beyond excited to be going to Surrey International Writers’ Conference next fall (in 133 days!). I attended SIWC in 2009 after I’d written Grace Awakening, and successfully pitched it there. I was a walk in registration on the Saturday that year. This year, I registered and paid on the first day I could for the full conference. As a result, I have appointments with agent Victoria Marini and with Diana Gabaldon! I’m so excited I can hardly stand it.
In the midst of my excitement, I’m feeling the pressure to be finishing up book 3, Grace Awakening Myth, and getting back to work on Grace Beguiling. Beguiling is the book I was in France to research in 2011, and it has already had some help from Diana Gabaldon, as she responded to some historical questions about Roman Catholic practice that I’d posted on the Compuserve Writers’ Forum. I was poking around the Forum today, looking for some interesting conversations and tips, and I came across links to this blog post that is the notes that L. S. Taylor took at SIWC in a masters’ class by agent Donald Maass in 2011. Maass handles some serious talent, and I’ve heard him speak before. This workshop is so full of fantastic stuff that I thought I’d direct you to the link. I’m going to be chewing on this for a while. Taylor records, “Fiction that keeps us enthralled works on three different levels at once: the macroplot, the scene structure, and the line-by-line tension. A throbbing beat that keeps us dancing/reading, enthralled.”
Click here to read Taylor’s notes from Maass’s Master Class: Impossible to Put Down: Mastering the Three Levels of Story. Thanks Laura for taking these great notes and posting them on your blog for us all!
Shawn L. Bird 