gabriela pereira – Griffin's Nest

This was a two day event held this weekend. I did Day One after noon because I had errands to run in the morning. Today, I just finished. I wanted to get an early start because I have house cleaning to do, and I did’t want to be too tired to write. It’s happened before.

I used this sprint as a way to get back to working on Golden Knave. Vice’s story is still in the first draft stage, and I need to get a move on with it. I already missed my personal deadline of having the entire piece published by my birthday. My new goal is Christmas so I need to pull out the stops.

Encouragingly enough, the first three handwritten pages of the first draft have become eight handwritten pages in the second draft. 🙂 I feel really good about this, and I plan to do mini sprints every day to keep my momentum going.

During this event, I spent only an hour at a time at each session, and there were two sessions a day. I plan to do a one hour session every day of the week and at least two sessions of the same length on the weekends for the first two weeks. I’ll up my game from there once I see how well, or not, I’m doing. I don’t want to stress myself out and stop writing again.

Wish me luck, and I’ll see you on the flipside. Don’t forget your towel and sonic screwdriver!!

I just got done with Day One of a two-day Writing Sprint being hosted by DIY MFA, and I had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, because of the event, I’m back to working on my novel, Golden Knave. I haven’t written in months, but this event inspired me to get back to it.

DIY MFA is a site hosted and run by Gabriela Pereira. It’s core is Write with Focus, Read With Purpose and Build Your Community. Its purpose is to give writers the education and community a traditional MFA would give them without having to go to school. They have courses you can pay to take, but they also have lots of free resources that are very helpful.

Podcasts – I’ve never been big on podcasts simply because I haven’t gotten much use out of them in the past. MFA Radio is a podcast hosted by Mrs. Pereira, and there are over 130 of them so far. I didn’t see anything in the current list that grabbed me so, I decided to go to the very beginning to see what nuggets I might find there. I have listened to the first 6 podcasts so far, including one very interesting interview. I plan to listen to more as I get the time.

Writer Igniter – this is the best feature, imho, of this site. It’s a writing prompter that goes one step further than regular prompts. You actually press a “shuffle” button, and it randomly chooses four elements for you to write about. These elements are : character, situation, prop and setting. The first one I ever got was: Olympic Bronze Medalist Gets Fired Briefcase Full of Money New Orleans Restaurant. I wrote a short story using this prompt. You can use the prompt for any length of writing and any form of writing. There a thousands of combinations so each prompt is different and shouldn’t repeat.

Articles – there are lots of articles on writing and on reading. Reading as in what is useful to you for your writing. There are also interviews and guest writers so, there’s lots to read and learn from without taking a class.

I have just begun to discover things on the site, and I plan to keep going back to it every day if I can.

I strongly suggest you sign up for the email so you can get the Starter Kit and find out what it’s all about. If you’re a writer, you won’t regret finding this place!!

http://www.diymfa.com

See you on the flipside and don’t forget your towel and sonic screwdriver!!