The Short Courses on offer were Fashioning Fiction from Fact, taught by yesterday's speaker Syd Moore, Editing Your manuscript, Starting Your Novel, and Self-Publishing Erotica. While Syd Moore's course sounded fascinating, I opted for Self-Publishing Erotica - not for the naughty bits, but to pick up useful tips and hints on self-publishing. I came away with a list of useful links and information.
In the poetry session we covered acrostics, and an exercise called The Garden of Panic (about halfway down the linked page). We also looked at short forms like haiku and tanka, and the gushi - a Chinese form which is a quatrain rhyming a-b-c-b, with the same syllable count in every line (this can be anything as long as it's consistent) and - here's the hard part - can only contain single syllable words. I haven't tried this yet.
Duing the hour before lunch I went looking for an amusing sign I'd heard was somewhere in the main house. It seemed appropriate.
The evening speaker was Michael O'Byrne, to speak about criminal investigation and policing. I'm not really into crime fiction, so I gave it a miss. I'd have had (yet another) early night, except that the Poetry Open Mic was on at 10pm. I puttered around for a bit in my room and the bar, before heading off to listen to other people's offerings - I forgot to bring any poems of my own. The star of the show had to be Anuradha Gupta, who read from memory from her book. She said she'd never read her poetry to an audience before, but had got some tips from friends, and I have to say she's a natural. The following morning the last of her books sold in the book room before I could even get there! Another one to add to my Amazon wish list.
After the poetry reading was the retro disco, but by that point I was tired from two days of paying attention, and went to bed instead where I lounged with a hot chocolate and a book.