Yesterday the new courses started so that everyone could move on to their second choice - Writing Poetry, Writing the Historical Novel, Writing Publishable Long Fiction, Writing Non-Fiction Artilces and Books, adding Power to Your Writing - and of course my own Writing Contemporary Romance.
The Main Talks sessions have been great too - Brad Ashton was as funny as his reputation and illustrated perfectly how we make our own luck - being prepared to write and committing ourselves fully to the job, not waiting for the contract to come along. He is running a course on Writing Comedy next year. Yesterday evenninbg was the traditional Poetry Reading - with some very silly 'Roman Poets' who looked like the Babe Nagnet and a couple of friends.
And last night, when everyone was back from their day out to the coal mine, Cardiff or the book town of Hay on Wye, crime novelists Susan Moody and Janet Laurence gave us a sparkling hour of 'Women of Letters' with a selection of letters written by women, some sad,some happy, some poignant, some indignant and some truly hysterically funny. I was particularly moved by the letter of the wife of a slave whose husband had escaped and fled to earn his freedon and save up enough money to buy her freedom, only to find that here cruel owner wouldn't let her husband buy her. It was a real relief to learn that eventually she too escaped to freedom.
Today classes continued, with a lot of work on Building Characters and how to 'dig deep' into them. Tomorrow it's Conflict and Sex!
Now I'm off to the afternoon Main Talk by children's writer John Townsend - I've met him already several times this week and it promises to be a lot of fun.
Then tonight we will have the traditional concert by the Cwmbach Male Voice Choir.
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