I'd planned to go to the Lift Up Your Pens sessions before breakfast this week, and failed on the first morning. Instead I stumbled into the dining room bleary-eyed at 8.30am, into what would end up being my regular seat.
The choices for the first short course of the week were: Characterisation; Enticing the Media; Flash Fiction; and Scriptwriting. Initially I wasn't sure what to take, but Steve Hartley (yesterday's speaker) was taking the characterisation course, which was recommended to me as being really good.
The course was based on a Jungian idea about our three brains, personality types, and how people react under pressure. A (very) basic outline can be found here. After the first session I could feel my brain being stretched, in a good way - it was nice to be mentally stimulated again.
I'd already decided way in advance that I was going to take the poetry specialist course. Alison Chisholm taught a short course last year, which I really enjoyed, so it was great to be able to build on that. We looked at pre-writing, the importance of reading poetry, and keeping a list of poems you want to write. On the way in we'd each been given a mini-notebook and pen, the notebook for jotting poetry ideas that came to us during the week, and the pen to be our poetry-writing pen. I have to admit this made me think of Full Metal Jacket - "This is my poetry writing pen. There are many like it but this one is mine." Our notebooks came with a poem randomly selected from an issue of Orbis Poetry Magazine. We had to look at why we thought the editor chose to publish it, and then use the poem to inspire one of our own - the first of many pieces of homework.
After the poetry course I made the second of my trips to the Book Room, having already bought more than I meant to. For this year I had at least limited myself to only buying books that are potentially useful - but in a conference full of writers there were a lot of How To books! I also ended up with a couple of issue of Mslaxia, which they were giving out free.
I skipped out of lunch early to get to the queue for tickets for the Tuesday excursion to Haddon Hall, and ended up being the first one there. After that was the second part of the characterisation short course, and the obligatory tea break. I skipped the workshop session to catch a nap, and then went for a walk around the lake with my camera. Then it was on to dinner - fish and chips, possibly the best meal of the week.
The evening speaker was Stephen Davis, who writes a lot of TV drama. Afterwards I had intended to go to the poetry slam but went back to my room to have a cup of tea and do my homework instead. There was a Eurovision disco at 11pm, but by then I'd fallen asleep.