Living with Writers

First of all, today is 1/11/11! Which means it's the debut of the FABULOUS Across the Universe by Beth Revis! I haven't Book-Crush Wednesday-ed this yet because I've been kind of lazy, but the book is awesome so you should BUY IT.

With that totally important announcement out of the way, I'm going to talk about how awesome it is to live surrounded by writers. Don't get me wrong. I love my husband and my pooches (duh.) and living with them is pretty great.

But being here at VCFA, where I can turn to my roommate and say, "Hey Shayda, what did you think about this phrase in the first chapter of my WIP?" And I can get INSTANT FEEDBACK??? Pretty amazing. It's like having a live-in revision assistant! So if any of my CPs or people in my writing group (you know who you are!) or just general awesome writing bloggers want to move in, we do have two spare bedrooms available.

Tonight at residency, after a day full of lectures and a wonderful afternoon workshop where we broke into our small groups and discussed some work by fellow students (my brand-new shiny WIP is being discussed next week), we got a chance to break into our class years and do a little reading of any work we wanted. I read from the first chapter of my WIP, which I've been working on for about a year now. It was SO FUN to read from it, and I really felt good to be sharing my hard work with fellow students. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, and gasped in the appropriate places, and afterwards I got some comments saying that it was "creepy" (that's a good thing) and that people liked it, so I'm really glad I decided to read.

Part of your graduating residency involves an extended reading, so I want to start practicing now. Plus I like to read. A lot.

I'm still having a great time. And I'm still exhausted. But I love this place. Even if it's cold and snowy (maybe because it's cold and snowy? Who knows!)