I've been ignoring my blog in preference for Facebook. It seems to be an excellent way to stay in touch with many of the people I care about, all in one place.
So, I haven't written here for a while, but I learned huge amounts from the course I was in this fall -- Writing the Novel: An Introduction.
The prologue for my historical novel (set in 1582) has been cut from seven pages down to one and a bit. The first chapter has been tightened up considerably, as well. Altogether the two sections dropped from 31 pages to 20 -- and it's much better now.
The last assignment was actually the hardest. We had to do a five minute report on one of the books on a list -- and the only ones on it that I'd heard of, I'd had to read in high school. Apparently, several other people in the class weren't too thrilled with the list, either.
The teacher finally gave us the opportunity to select any book we wanted. I chose Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. I went through it and studied how he handled some of the problems I was facing in my work, like vocabulary that would be known in the period (or, in his case, place) but might be unfamiliar to the average reader.
Learned a lot from Pratchett ... now the hard part: to implement what I've learned.
