The trip started off a little rocky. I woke up yesterday morning to a blizzard warning and seeing as I was taking Moby to Banff I thought I'd better wait for the weather to clear. Once that happened I decided to wait until I would get there by 4:00, when check in is. Then I decided to clean the house.
Anyway... come 3:00 and I hadn't left yet. When I finally did leave I realized about ten minutes from home that I may have forgotten my power supply for my laptop. Yeap, I sure did. I went back to the van and had a brain wave, do I have Moby's insurance card? Guess what I didn't, not only did I not have it, I had never recieved it prompting me to panically call our insurance company to find out whether we actually had insurance on him. We did and they e-mailed me a copy of it which I printed out (from our printer that's almost out of ink). So 4:00 and I was off.
The road were great, I had my old computer speakers plugged into my mp3 player and was rocking out to Captain Tractor all the way to Banff.
So I arrogantly thought I knew where this place was, right by the tourist information center... WRONG! I finally had to break out the map. "Oh it's off Tunnel Mountain Road," I said to myself, "So it must be on the way to the campground," or past it, or on the other side of the road closed barricade impeading my way.
I finally saw a sign that read "Banff Center Commercial Traffic" I had seen the sign before but I had assumed (read assume) that Banff Center = Banff City Center. Anyway long story short. Here I am, and luckily I arrived just in time for supper.
The food here is superb, I heard a rumour that aspiring chefs come here to train with great chefs who are here for residency. Despite the fact it is a buffet you'd think you were eating in a fine restaurant. The tables are set up with signs indicating which group sits where so I was able to sit with my fellow writers.
After dinner we had a meet and greet for all of the new comers like myself. I realized quite quickly that there were very few males here, three actually; myself, Dave Margoshes who is our resident writer and Timothy, who actually won his way here in a speed writing competition or something like that. He's actually very interesting, besides being a fairly well established writer he is also an opera singer.
So a couple glasses of wine last night, some introductions and I was off to write. After all that is why I'm here.
My fingers and mind have been completely uninhibited. I'm on fire. I must have written for at least 12 hours since I've been here and don't want to stop (although I did need to step away for a bit which is why I'm here).
Last night I reworked my main character in 'Framed' and today I am pulling together snippets I have typed over the last few months and editing them as well as typing up all of my murder scenes. I'm really beggining to see the story really clearly now.
Today I also had the pleasure of meeting with Dave Margoshes (He's written a few books, the one I have heard of is 'The Drowning Man'). I had sent him fifteen pages of my manuscript to look through. He had some really great technical advise for me, asked me a lot of questions about where my story was going. I think his biggest critism was my grammer. Nothing I didn't already know. Another thing he mentioned was my intro. It's a murder scene and I don't formally introduce my main character, actually he mentioned that I kept the reader at a distance which might turn them off. I need to work on that and see if I can pull them in closer, but then on the other hand he did agree that what I lacked in character introduction I more than made up for in action and that might be what pulls people in instead. I guess time will tell.
Anyway. I should get off the computer (I'm on one of two that have internet access) and think about having supper. I've still got about 3 hours of typing left in me but I need fuel to acheive it.
No comments:
Post a Comment