Saturday, 17 July 2004

This entry is being written a couple days late, after I got the pictures onto my desktop machine.

Here are the Writing Jam paritipants, David Barr Kirtley, Philip Brewer, and Tobias Buckell. Photo by Emily Buckell.

I've written some already about some of the neat stuff we did, and I'll write some more later about what I learned, but let me just summarize by saying that it was all great.

Toby and his wife threw a BBQ for us, and invited writers from all over Ohio and parts nearby.

Before the guests showed up, we watched "Grosse Pointe Blank." Over the course of the week we had talked about a lot of movies that one or another of us liked, but "Grosse Pointe Blank" stood out. We had all seen it, we all thought it was enormously underrated, and we all remembered scenes from it. I'm not quite sure what it was about it that struck such a chord in each of us, but there was definitely something.

Among the people there were Mary A. Turzillo (who kindly gave me a signed copy of the new Analog with the first quarter of her new novel!), Katrina Kidder, and Pam McNew.

There's Pam again sitting with Jaime Voss and Katrina's husband, whose name I missed.

We played frisbee some and talked about a lot of stuff--agents and globalization are the things that stick in my mind.

We also talked about the structure of novels and what makes a novel-sized idea. Dave had some really interest stuff to say about that, which I'll talk about in the next entry, but it'll take more time to get down than I have tonight.

I want to leave you with one more picture from the Writing Jam. We all took Toby's dog Ginger for a walk around the park, and I thought this picture turned out well: