Live By the Pen, Die By the Pen

SHU January Residency: Day 5

Posted by Daphne on February 26th, 2007 — Posted in Writing Popular Fiction

(If you haven’t read day 0, day 1, day 2, day 3, or day 4, you might want to check them out first.)

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SHU January Residency: Day 4

Posted by Daphne on February 23rd, 2007 — Posted in Writing Popular Fiction

(If you haven’t read day 0, day 1, day 2, or day 3, you might want to check them out first.)

Tuesday morning my story was critiqued. I thought I’d feel a lot more nervous, but the good experiences I’d had in the other critique sessions and the couple of comments I’d heard from people who had critiqued my work had me feeling fairly confident.

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SHU January Residency: Day 3

Posted by Daphne on February 20th, 2007 — Posted in Writing Popular Fiction

(If you haven’t read day 0, day 1 and day 2, you might want to check them out first.)

Day 3 dawned bright and early. We started off the day with another round of critiques, and by the end of the session, I felt almost comfortable with the whole process. Everyone was so respectful and kind with their criticism - not holding back, but not attacking people, either.

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Pandemics, Pathogens, and Avian Flu

Posted by Daphne on February 12th, 2007 — Posted in Legacy of Blood, Pandemics

I recently did a little research into pandemics and pathogens for a story I’m writing. I discovered some very interesting stuff, like - there were more pandemics in the 1900’s than I knew about. I knew there was one in 1918, but apparently there were two smaller flu pandemics as well, in 1957-8 and 1968-9. They were bad enough that 70,000 died in America in the first one and 34,000 in the second. That’s not as many as the 1918 flu (675,000 dead in the U.S., including at least one of my great-grandparents), but it’s still a lot of people. I’m yet again amazed by what we *don’t* learn in school. This other site talks about even more epidemics in the 1960’s that were apparently not as bad, but significant enough to be mentioned.

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SHU January Residency: Day 2

Posted by Daphne on February 7th, 2007 — Posted in Legacy of Blood, Writing Popular Fiction

(If you haven’t read day 0 and day 1, you might want to check them out first.)

I woke the next morning with butterflies. First up that morning: my first critique group. The last time I was in a face-to-face critique group was 1989, and I don’t remember the experience fondly.

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SHU January Residency: Day 1

Posted by Daphne on February 4th, 2007 — Posted in Writing Popular Fiction

I knew the day was going to start at what for me was a very early hour. I often get up around 9 or 10 or even later (and stay up correspondingly late at night), but classes started at 9am. Ugh. So - to be kind to myself - a couple weeks earlier I started changing my sleep schedule so I wouldn’t be exhausted on day 1. Thankfully, it worked.

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SHU January Residency: Reception (Day 0)

Posted by Daphne on February 1st, 2007 — Posted in Writing Popular Fiction

I’m a little late, but it’s about time I talked about the residency I just attended at SHU. Months ago, when I was trying to decide if I wanted to apply to the writing popular fiction program, I looked all over for descriptions of residency experiences, and while I found many posts and pictures, none of them went into the detail I wanted. So with that in mind, I’m going to try to provide the detail I wanted back then. At least for this residency - after this, who knows?

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