What is there to say about day seven? I got up too early, packed the last of my things in a hurry, and was just in time for breakfast. On the Friday it's not the leisurely affair it is the rest of the week - those of us on the coach have to finish in time to get ourselves and our luggage on board. There isn't quite enough time to eat and say goodbye to everyone.

It seems like, once we get to the station, everyone becomes strangers again. We all end up on different platforms. Those lucky enough to have a cafe and a wait sit and chat, but I ended up perched on the platform trying to decide if I'd rather be too hot with my jumper on or too cold without it.

On the train I discovered my mp3 player, loaded with several hours of music, had decided not to hold its charge over the week. I was too tired to read and ended up dozing, since if I missed my station I could easily get a train from where this one terminated. I slept through the arrival of the trolley with coffee, which didn't improve my mood.

On the second train I made the effort to stay awake, since if I missed my stop I could end up somewhere very awkward to get back from. I read some of David Crystal's By Hook or By Crook, which I'd meant to start at Derby but couldn't keep my eyes open for, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

At home there was unpacking and laundry to do. Although there's a weekend between the end of Swanwick and returning to work for most of us, it's not enough. I wasn't the only one posting on Facebook about 11+ hours of sleep on Friday night!

Now the trick is to keep the momentum going, through the commitment of day job, family, housework, and the need to eat food that doesn't come out of a microwave. I heard the same advice three times at Swanwick so it must be true: persistence is key; write for yourself; trust your instincts. Let's hope that's enough to keep me going until next year.

Day six always starts off slightly subdued for me. By then I'm tired, and facing the prospect of going home the following day. A week of no cooking, washing up, or laundry only reminds me very strongly how much I dislike them!

The short courses for the day were Simon Hall's crime writing course, children's/YA fiction with Steve Hartley, marketing e-books, or the astro-characterisation course of my train-buddy Judy Hall. I'd decided early on that I was taking the marketing course, although by Thursday breakfast I was starting to lean in favour of crime writing. In the end common sense won out - after all, I don't write crime fiction - and I went to the potentially more useful course.

It turned out to be the only course all week that I regretted taking. We started out by discussing finding a niche, which is all very well and good but sometimes there just isn't a new one worth digging into - or if there is it might not be something you want to write in. I felt it was getting into write for the market and not for yourself territory, which was completely at odds with what I'd been learning on the Ways of Seeing course. It also happens to be at odds with what I believe in. The next thing we learned was that you should offer free stuff on your website to harvest email addresses and send a newsletter even if the topic ("I have a novel out!") is nothing to do with the reason they signed up in the first place. Since I hate spam emails and being advertised at, I decided this was very much not for me and not to bother with the second part of the course.

In the final part of Ways of Seeing, I realised I'd forgotten to do my homework. We discussed blocks to creative, and how to work through them. Fear seemed to be a large part of this, which made me wonder what it is that I'm afraid of that's got me blocked currently. Certainly I'm finding it difficult to sit down and work on anything. Maybe I need to add having another chat with my inspiration and inner critic to my timeline!

Instead of the marketing course, I went to part two of the crime writing course. As expected, it was fantastic. I figured out a short version of what I'd missed in part one (the importance of first impressions, place, and characters with motivations and backstory), and learned about plot and the importance of persistence.

I wandered away despondent, as it was the last course on offer. After a quick tea break it was back to the hall for the AGM, where I failed to win a free place in the raffle. The following slot on the programme is labelled Time For You, and is my traditional time to pack - since I don't want to do it after the disco or early the following morning.

There was no speaker on the final evening, instead we had a version of "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" which revealed that no one at Swanwick had a clue how to play the kazoo. After that was the traditional last night disco, which kept a number of us up until just after midnight. When the music stopped that was the signal that Swanwick was truly over for another year, with nothing between me and the trip home but not enough sleep and a hurried breakfast.

Back on the courses again for day five, and I was starting to feel a bit glum, partly because of tiredness and partly because there were only two days remaining. The real world had encroached a bit with unfortunate news from home, which brought returning all that much closer.

For the short course I considered both the public speaking and Wild Words courses, comedy sketch writing and working with the media being very much not for me. Wild Words seemed designed to complement the Ways of Seeing course, only using an outdoor setting. However it looked like it was going to rain, and I decided to look at a new skill rather than building on what I was already doing in the novel course.

Public speaking was in two parts: the first on the technical side; the second on getting over the fear of doing it in the first place. It took some of the mystery out of it, certainly, but I'm not sure if it will be enough as I get nervous just speaking to my department at work as a group!

Back in Ways of Seeing, we looked at trusting our instincts and listening to hunches. We did another guided visualisation, this time to speak to our inner critic, and as a group seemed to find it easier. A number of people found it looked like a parent, some had monsters, and one even found it looked like himself. At the end, we were given another homework to do, which involved speaking to a character from our work.

The evening speakers were David and Hilary Crystal. They came to my first Swanwick in 2011, where David was a speaker and his enthusiasm was catching. This time they both gave a presentation on their new book, Wordsmiths and Warriors, which is a linguistic tour of the UK. I had a setting idea for a story during the talk, although I'm not sure what to do with it. I also discovered how creepy it is when someone says "Y Y U R" to an audience of around 200 people, who respond in unison "Too wise you are, too wise you be. I see you are too wise for me." I felt like I was witnessing the triggering of a cell of sleeper assassins!

A friend and I were out of the hall fast enough to be first in the queue for a signed book, although as Wordsmiths and Warriors is in hardback I settled for a more portable paperback. Afterwards we went to the Ceilidh, which is Scottish dancing, but a technical hitch pushed the start so late I gave up and went for a more reasonable 11.30pm bedtime!

Day four at Swanwick is traditionally the "day off", although all that really means is that there are no classes. In the morning we had speakers on "Bookselling in the Digital Age" and a fantastic presentation from a member of the Derbyshire Police Forensics Team on how forensics are used to solve cases. After this is the "Page to Stage" workshop, where the plays selected prior to the school are workshopped ready for performance the following day. Alongside all this runs the Procrastination Free Day, during which willing participants are locked in a room to write and only let out for meals and tea breaks.

I went to the speakers, and then spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in a mostly empty bar and reading.

After dinner we had BBC journalist and crime writer Simon Hall, who was one of the best speakers I've seen at Swanwick. He told lots of anecdotes, which are likely to become Swanwick in-jokes as you really had to be there. Afterwards was the poetry open mike, which I'd been considering skipping due to tiredness. In the end I was glad I went since there were some excellent performances, including one from Topwriter (young writers who are given a subsidised place) Rufus Lunn, which showed why he deserved his place on the Topwrite scheme. He certainly gave some of the older and more established poets a run for their money!

After the poetry I ended up in the bar, having neon-pen lightsaber fights and talking until - you guessed it - far too late!

I somehow managed to drag myself to breakfast after the previous late night, although not everyone I was up with managed it. It's on days like that the Swanwick breakfast - cereal, pastries, followed by cooked - is particularly appreciated.

The short courses on offer were writing for The Peoples' Friend, solving plot problems using business skills, e-books, and Manifesting Your Goals (neuro linguistic programming). Since I don't intend to write for the People's Friend and I already know the basics of e-books, it was a choice between the other two - both of which looked useful. In the end I went for the NLP course since it seemed to offer more on the getting-butt-in-chair front. All the advice on plotting in the world won't help if I can't make myself sit down to write!

In the course we discussed how the brain filters what is important to what you're doing at the time - if you're focused on something, that's what it will see. It will delete things that aren't important, which is why you can respond to someone while you're reading or writing and have no idea a moment later what they said. It will also distort things, and give them meaning where there is none. In order to make this work for you, you need to move past your goal (finish a book) to the outcome of your goal (sell a million copies, get a big house and car) - the unconscious needs to know exactly where it's going, because otherwise it chooses the quickest route to gratification (eg Candy Crush!).  This will also allow it to see other methods of getting there, rather than being too fixated on the goal.

We also looked at how to deal with limiting beliefs, and  setting out a timeline for achieving goals. Both of these are something I need to work on, although I suspect I need to set up a timeline for setting up my timeline!

This course had a little bit of a crossover with the Ways of Seeing course, since this was also about harnessing the subconscious and unconscious minds (these are not the same thing). Xanthe told us about the different parts of the brain and how the "fight or flight" instinct shuts down conscious thought. This is why it can be so difficult to think when confronted with something (even something actually non-threatening like public-speaking) that frightens us. The way to reverse this is do do something that requires conscious thought - puzzles, talking, reciting a poem.  Xanthe then led us on a guided visualisation to talk to our inspiration, with varying results. Our homework: have another conversation later, writing with our dominant hand for ourselves and our non-dominant hand for our inspiration. I tried not to read anything into it when twenty minutes later I shut my dominant hand in a door...

Due to the late night, I skipped the workshop again to catch up on sleep. I then followed it up with another late night playing card games. You'd think I'd learn!

I'm having a brief hiatus from my POD posts, because I spent the last week at Swanwick Writers' Summer School. As always I'm a week late blogging about it, as I don't take a laptop with me. I know some who do, but they tend to travel by car which makes it slightly easier. Every year I swear I'll have a netbook by the following year, so I can take it with me, and every year I don't because I don't really need one.

This year, as always, began with a lengthy train journey. In an odd coincidence I ended up sitting next to first-time Swanwicker Judy Hall, who was teaching our Thursday course on Astro-Characterisation (using astrology to create characters). We alternated between chatting, reading, and drinking coffee, before arriving at Derby station and grabbing yet more coffee and hanging out with other early-arrivals while we waited for the coach.

My Swanwick routine begins with locating my room and unpacking my case. I like to think it signals to my brain that I'm settling in for the week. I managed to time it extremely badly this year, as I emerged to find I was supposed to have been at the Chairman's Welcome fifteen minutes previously. Instead I waited in the bar area until it had finished and I could catch up with old friends.

The evening speaker was the historian Christopher Lee, who gave the advice that poetry should be told not recited. This applies to stories as well. There were various events on afterwards, but after a day of travel I was tired and called it a night.

Sunday is the first full day of Swanwick. There was a choice of short courses in writing for competitions, playwriting, novel editing, and creating fantasy worlds. I went to the latter, where there was lively debate on examples of worldbuilding, from J.R.R. Tolkien to G.R.R. Martin, and we were given a handy list of things we might want to consider when creating our own worlds.

I'd chosen to do the novel-writing course Ways of Seeing as my specialist course option, since I'm not into writing scripts or memoirs, and I took the poetry course the last two years. The other option was a short story course run by Della Galton, which was a definite contender for my time. In the end I went for the novel course as it promised a deeper look at what makes writers writers - a similar short course has been run by tutor Xanthe Wells most of the other years I've been, but it's always clashed with something else. This year I decided to take the hint and get on with it.

During the first session we covered the iceberg of publishing/professional skills/practical skills, which is the bit you can see, and the "personal wealth" of creativity, confidence, intuition, and the subconscious, which are the parts of the writer that lie below the waterline. The course overall was about getting those parts to work for you, and not always fighting against them, which is something I need to figure out.

After the second part of the short course (and a much needed tea break) there were workshops, new on the programme for this year. I had meant to go to the one of Scrivener, but I was still tired from travel so I used the gap until dinner to nap instead.

Got talking at dinner and missed the start of the evening speaker, but I'd arranged to play a roleplaying game called Fiasco with some friends after so we ended up setting that up instead. We played until 1am, when the game was resolved with only one of our characters coming out of it well. I went to bed dreading how I was going to feel in the morning after only 6 hours' sleep...

It's not really a seventh day, since we have to be off site by 10am - and those of us getting the coach leave at 8.30am, which is when we normally have breakfast. As usual breakfast had a deflated feeling, with a lot of people having left already or simply not got out of bed, and everyone seemed to be tired. Friday is the morning when it all starts to catch up....

After being ferried by a particularly grumpy coach driver, we made our way. I napped part of the way home, crammed into my seat between my luggage and another passenger. At least I had a window. The latter part of the journey took in the scenic route, which was very soothing until the carriage filled with chattering scouts, fresh from a camping trip. Even less restful was the announcement that the train was going to sit in a particular station for fifteen minutes, and that there was another train leaving shortly going to where I was headed. This left me dashing across the station like a mad thing, getting to the platform just as the second train pulled in. It cut about half an hour off my journey, but it wasn't exactly restful. Next time I will avoid the scenic route!

There were five short courses to choose from today: An Animated Journey into Fantasy and Horror; Crime Writing; How To Write a "How To" Book; Writing for Soaps; and Finding Your Inner Writer. I was originally going to go to the latter, but decided in the end it sounded too intense for first thing in the morning on the last day, so I went to Curtis Jobling's Animated Journey instead. He used anecdotes to show the importance of networking, putting yourself in the right place at the right time, and keeping lots of different work on the go. He also let us watch Curious Cow again.

The last part of the poetry course covered revenge, guilt, and excuse poems. Which are not poems about these things, but rather embodiments of them. We all had fun writing excuse poems, my excuses being a list of reasons for not leaving Swanwick in the morning.

Instead of a one hour/workshop session, we had the AGM. This is usually a pretty dry and quick affair to vote in the following year's committee, but this year took rather longer as we discussed (some with impassioned speeches) ways to raise funds for the school in future. We also had the auction for Curtis Jobling's signed doodles. All of the cats (Pilchard, Frankenstein's Cat, and Raa Raa) proved popular, and at one point we even had a husband and wife bidding against each other. The one that really set the floor on fire though was werewolf Bob the Builder

On the timetable after the AGM is designated "Time for You", which I use to pack so that I don't have to do it later. I briefly swung into the dregs party before tea, and then an early start for the evening speaker Deborah Moggach, author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. She was very funny, and an excellent choice to round off the week.

I was tired, but it was the last night which meant the last night disco. I made the effort to stay up and dance the night away, although resisted the temptation to continue the party in the bar with friends. Getting up in the morning is enough of a problem, and Friday is always an early start. It was nearly 1am when I crawled into bed, and that was plenty late enough for me.

Today we were back on the courses. Zoe Lambert, yesterday's speaker, took a course on Contemporary Short Stories, plus we had a drama workshop, The Art of Horror, and the Bish, Bash, Bosh Intro to Blogging. Since I already blog, and I'm not particularly into horror or drama, I went to the short story course. We each had to provide an item from our bags for others to use as a prompt, supplemented by a couple added by Zoe, then pick two and think about who might carry those items - who are they, what else do they carry, and where are they going? We were supposed to write a scene with that character; I mostly ended up with notes. It was a useful exercise though, and I ended up with something I can work on.

In the poetry course we learned about love poems and praise poems, the rondelle, rondelet, and ghazal.

For the second part of the short story course we were supposed to bring something ready to edit. I didn't have anything so gave it a miss and went looking for the Hayes escape tunnel instead. The conference centre was taken over to house prisoners of war, including "The One That Got Away".

The final one hour session slot offered a choice of Poetry for Children, Boutique ePublishing, Characterisation, and Writers' Circles. I took Boutique ePublishing, to offer up an alternative viewpoint to the self-publishing course earlier in the week. It was very nearly a disaster - while we all sat there waiting for the tutor to turn up, he was sat in the room next door waiting for us. Whoever had set up the overhead projector had done it in the wrong room. There was a lot of information, slightly squished into the time due to our late start, but it was interesting.

The evening speaker was Curtis Jobling, an animator and writer who has worked on Wallace and Gromit, designed Bob the Builder and invented Raa Raa the Noisy Lion. After introducing us to Curious Cow (a series of ten second shorts on Nickelodeon), he live-doodled a series of characters to demonstrate how figures from the same show are based on the same set of shapes, to give a unifying feel. He also kindly allowed the school to keep the doodles to auction off to raise funds, and signed them all.

And then guess what happened. That's right, I had an early night!

Tuesday is the Swanwick "day off". Being smack in the middle of the week of classes, it offers an opportunity to rest, reflect, write up the ideas we've been too busy to work on, and catch up on sleep.

It can only be very loosely called a day off, though. There are no classes, but there are plenty of other optional activities. This year saw the return of Write, Camera, Action! Writers, actors, and directors get together to work on previously selected plays by Swanwick delegates, ready to perform them during the evening. There was also the new Procrastination Free Day, which saw Alexa Radcliffe-Hart lock 15 writers in a room and not let them out except at lunchtime. The feedback seemed to be positive - everyone got a lot done - and I heard several suggestions for how to expand on it for next year to allow more people to take part.

There was also a morning interview with Jon Wood of Orion. For some reason (possibly because he was sandwiched between last night's crime fiction speaker and the police panel) I got the impression this would be crimey, when it turned out to be publishey. I'm quite annoyed I missed it.

After the interview, and an all-important coffee break, was the police panel. This was going to be crimey, so I gave this a miss as well.

I had planned for Tuesday to be a proper day off, so I spent some time napping, reading, failing to write: there's little more demoralising being one of four people in a room, and the other three are all scribbling or clattering away. I also found another amusing sign to photograph.

I also took a wander around the lake a couple of times, enjoying the peace and quiet of everyone else being busy. I paid a visit to the sinister willow, from last year's day three, but something had changed. It didn't have the same atmosphere, it was much more light and airy (lefthand picture). It took me a couple of minutes to realise this was because the trees on the other bank (shown in the other picture) had been cut down. Without them, the area seemed a lot less sinister and interesting.

The evening speaker was Zoe Lambert, who has written a collection of war stories called The War Tour, who spoke about war tourism and voyeurism, and how war affects all parties involved.

I had planned to go to Write, Camera, Action! but I was tired (I was still recovering from two weeks of solid training at work) and went to bed early again.