Only Wednesday? Or should I say: only Wednesday …
The last two days have been hard work, exciting, fun, intense, pressurised – long. But I’m coping, and coping well. No complaints, just an awareness that the 19 hours I did on Monday, the 15 yesterday, and the 16 today, only takes me to the forty three per cent mark in the week – it feels like I should be in the high seventies by now.
I’ve committed to doing the “Saturday Event”. I’d love to explain what it is but I can’t in case I give the game away publicly. The event won’t last the whole day so I’ll have the morning to work on Muse before doing the event in the afternoon. Saturday night has been reserved for a while: curry and beers with friends.
My eyes were heavy this morning and my brain in dire need of caffeine to get it into gear. It feels as though NaNo has already begun.
I was interested to read that Glasgow was named as being in the ‘top 10 world cities’ according to travel site, Lonely Planet. It’s good to see they’ve got it right for once and done their research. Not too long ago this publication relied on the stereotypical image of Glasgow to fill their pages, but now they’ve been to experience it they’ve proclaimed it.
“Forget castles, kilts, bagpipes and tartan,” their latest publication says. “You come for the cocktails, cuisine and designer chic (plus the legendary native wit). Glasgow has shaken off its shroud of industrial soot and shimmied into a sparkling new designer gown.”
Lonely Planet travel editor Tom Hall said: “The time has come for Lonely Planet to let one of its worst-kept secrets out: Glasgow’s got everything. We’re delighted to highlight such a fun, stylish city.”
Go Glasgow! The other cities in the top 10 were: Antwerp, Beirut, Chicago, Lisbon, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Warsaw and Zurich.
And so to today’s checklist: caught up on email, wrote the 4th draft of the 1st batch of TLB articles and the 2nd draft of the 2nd batch. I began the process of catching up with the RR submissions that are outstanding, and worked on my MUSE Conference assignments.
Earlier, I attended a chat for the tutor who had still to show up at the Muse Conference. I checked the forum beforehand and she has posted her first assignment (it’s Wednesday) but done it by asking us to read the handout that’s been available for weeks and picking whatever one we wanted. There’s been no interaction at all. The chat itself was a total waste of time, with the advice being given out generic, uninspiring, and written as though she didn’t have a clue how to go about it. I wasted an hour.
On her website she advertises as “lecturing” at the conference for a week. Why, when she’s a) hardly there, and b) it’s meant to be a hands-on workshop? I suspect there’s an ego being milked somewhere and not much substance to learn from, so I’ve ditched the “course”. I’ve got other workshops and spoken to other tutors who are more interested in working with people than self-congratulating.
I think the only thing I never managed to do was work on my NaNo novel. I think time for that will open up after tomorrow, though.
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Freedom from the Mundane 
We’ll be able to give feedback at the end of the conference, and I know I have a few things I plan to say about the lack of interaction on some courses. Don’t offer it for a week if you won’t be around and don’t expect people to buy your book as a course text if you’re not going to be around.
I’m also going to request a thread for Working Writers, because it would be nice for us to find each other and talk about our issues, which are quite different from aspiring writers.