A Good Crime Was Had by All

Okay, the silence is probably getting ominous, so it's time to squeeze a blog into the already crammed schedule.

This last weekend I attended our local mystery conference, Murder in the Grove. I took a master class on Friday from Margie Lawson. She had some interesting techniques for diagnosing and evaluating a manuscript, mostly focused on how you've handled the various story elements with regard to character emotion and highly charged emotional moments. It was a good class and certainly gave me a few new tools with which to tweak the rewrite. I also met Sharan Newman and took a class from her on Saturday--her information on research and accuracy in historical fiction was right in line with what I've always believed, and Sharan is as gracious a lady as anyone who has read her books could hope to meet.

The kids and I are about a heartbeat away from being able to mail the last of the homeschool packets for the year, and then I'll be hitting this novel revision with a sledgehammer. Next year I'll be ruthlessly dividing the schedule up into very focused blocks, which should result in my getting lots more writing time and the kids keeping pace or getting ahead with their schoolwork. Oak Meadow's such a great school program, we'd really like to be able to continue with it.

Meanwhile, onward....