Broad Appeal

We of the Sarcastic Broads Club have not been busy lately in our online presence (gracious! over two years since the last post!?) - nor, sadly, in our actual meetings (though nowhere near that long).  Perhaps it's because we're a busy lot; certainly, it is not because we don't love each other and get an enormous inspiration from our meetings.  Plus, Leila bakes the BEST cookies and brownies!

Leila published Hot Flashes several months ago, and Kristi Tuck Austin is burgeoning into several areas of work, with media escorting and authorial assisting ... and Kristy Feltenberger Gillespie just put out her new anthology, Even in Death, which is getting great reviews.  Kristi with an I details the release here, very nicely.  I can't wait to read it!  Leila and Kristy with a Y have made me so glad I got a Kindle (though I do have Leila's novel in pulp-and-printing form as well: for I am greedy).  Now, I'll get to have KFG in deluxe, hard copy pulp-and-printing as well.  Many happies ensue.

As for me - though I haven't taken much time to blog about it of late (I may have overdone it in the past as it is!) - querying and, oh so blissfully, dipping into the WIP.  It feels like the WIP (still untitled, and still not a sequel to The Ax and the Vase, as such) has been with me nearly as long as Ax has, and yet its writing has been definitively backburnered until I could commit to it.

Joyously:  at last, I can.  And it is exciting.  Research will take a bit of vacation time I think, and I look forward to taking that and doing that as we approach (YEEP) the holidays.  I've done some bits of writing, but this early in the going that is more a matter of luxuriant indulgence and exercise than creating any sort of text destined to end up in the manuscript.  In its way, that ephemerality makes the writing even more pleasurable, because I don't have to sweat it.  And it's exercise in a very different, new main character and setting.  It's exercise in just writing at all, which I've done not just on the WIP, but on a certain short story actually born at an SBC meeting, with the Broads.  It's something I've toyed with tiny bit by tiny bit for a long time now, but now seems to be its time - its power is growing, and its hold on me is stronger.

Writing is exciting - and it feels like it's been ages since I "really" wrote, creatively, not to further the place of Ax in the world or for my blog or for my work or just to communicate with friends.  Reeeeeaall writing.  The kind that makes you feel something other than, "Got that said.  Good."

Seems like, with the Broads, there's a bit of that going around.  I'll enjoy sinking into a story of two of Kristy-with-a-Y's, and talking with Leila and Kristi-with-an-I about editing and giving birth to new works.  All of us will get to see each other - and SO many others - at the JRW Conference so soon I can't believe it.

Until then ... great things are afoot.