I felt better prepared for group C. I hadn’t worked on the beginning and instead chose a scene where I introduce my fave side character. I may have fudged it a little to fit the 500 Word Limit. 😅

That helped. It also helped that the workshop leader was an agent who already rejected book one. The possibility to impress her into remembering (with regret) the ms she rejected some time ago was non-existent. I had nothing to prove and only my peers to entertain. I was positive that this would go well enough. They already admitted to being entertained by my writing.

One of us had actually brought a reworked beginning.

I had to think super hard on what everybody else brought, which should tell you something about the stress-levels I was still having.

Two others also brought something we had wanted as a group, snippets from a little later in the ms introducing people or showcasing them. One brought a prologue. Ngl, I felt strange seeing all this prologue thingie when I had just nixed mine.

Reading went okay. I am more used to it than I was on grounds of trying to keep Sunday Sound Snippets alive on twitter. (It is not working.) So I had read a few of my things before and knew the most important thing was to slow down. More. Even more. No, go SLOWER! Almost there.

I don’t think anybody laughed but I was very concentrated on slowing down the words coming out of my mouth. Which, on top of liking those words, helped a lot staying afloat.

The feedback was pointing out several (expected) things. The voice was still working. It was still unclear what the Agency does and why. At least nobody harped on Sava for being unprofessional for thinking about banging first and foremost. (Maybe because this time she looked at a guy? Hm.)

The dialogue was moving too fast, it was not grounded, it didn’t give the reader time to think. And while I appreciate the notion, why should the reader get the time to think during talking when I do not? Also, the free-floating dialogue hit home hard because it was a comment I made on a fellow workshopoer’s words. I was like, if everybody does it, and nobody really has a problem with it, why do we have to stop? It doesn’t compute. There will be a blog post about that.

Suffice it here to say that in general I am aware of the phenomenon and have to actively look for it if I want to remove it. (Which, let’s be honest, I have to for marketability reasons.) On the other hand not having much around the dialogue to move forward faster and make people skip over things – yes, yes I am doing that.

It is something I should look at, though, to make sure it fires precisely. I love having my readers overlook crucial details because the banter is too funny or the pun so bad. 😅

I am not sure what to do about the feedback on the agency and its motives. There is literally nothing there but a frame for the stories. I don’t think about it any more than I would about putting kingdoms into fantasy because that will give me kings and borders and conflict and an environment. Maybe it’s something about taking things at face value. Another subject I think about a lot.

After the trail the second workshop was, this went pretty well. I can’t remember if I said a single thing outside of my segment though.