The choice of Short Courses on Sunday was between Screenwriting (taught by yesterday's speaker James Moran), Stories for Women's Magazines, Business Skills, and Writing Autobiography. I opted for the Women's Magazine course, where we studied the kind of stories accepted, and requirements of, magazines like Woman's Weekly. I have to admit to buying a couple of issues of the fiction special earlier in the year for research, and now I'm hooked. This might have something with not being able to take a Kindle in the bath.
After the first session is a coffee break, and I made a quick visit to the Book Room and picked up a couple of books: some poems by Alison Chisholm, and Public Speaking for Writers by Alison and Malcolm Chisholm. I also replaced last year's Swanwick pen. There were several other books I was interested in, including Anuraha Gupta's beautiful poetry collection New Moon Rising, and Elizabeth Hopkinson's historical novel Silver Hands. Having a limited amount of both cash and space in my luggage, I added the novel to my Amazon wish list for my Kindle, and decided to think about Anuradha's book. Being art as well as poetry, it's not the sort of thing an electronic version would do justice to.
The Specialist Courses, which run all week, were on Poetry, Writing Young Fiction, Literary Fiction, and Making Money for Magazines. I was going to take the latter, but decided in the end it would be to dry to sustain my interest for an entire week and took the safe option doing poetry as the other two would take me well out of my comfort zone. It was taught by Debjani Chatterjee, and we discussed using the senses and memory to make poems real. We drafted poems about breakfast (a lot of people wrote about the porridge), and I also drafted a poem about a rocking horse, so it was time well spent.
After lunch we had the second part of the short course sessions, which I skipped because we'd be looking at The People's Friend, which is not a market I intend to submit to. Then it was time for a tea break and I popped back to the Book Room, to see if any new books had arrived with the latecomers. Debjani had brought books with her when she arrived, and I picked up a gorgeous hand-crafted Indian edition of her book I Was That Woman. I also noticed that Linda Lewis' Writer's Treasury of Ideas was there, so picked up a copy as it's been on my Amazon wish list since last year's school.
The hour-long workshop choices were Comedy Writing, Folk Tales, Promoting Your Work, and Begin Family History. I picked Promotion, and it turned into a lively discussion: the tutor favoured traditional methods over social media and blogging, and asked those of us who are online for our input. I'm not sure she was convinced by the end to join us!
The evening speaker was ghost story writer Syd Moore, who shared the background of her novels The Drowning Pool and Witch Hunt. I'm a sucker for history and all things paranormal so it was fascinating. After the talk I had to resist buying one of her books to get it signed. I'd spent all my book money, so they went on the wish list too. Once again I went to bed early, and left others to sing the hours away at the Buskers' Night.