THE NEXT LEVEL: Craft Intensives for Dedicated Writers

THE NEXT LEVEL: Craft Intensives for Dedicated Writers

Award-winning author Joyce Sweeney and Woodstream Writers director, Jamie Morris, know what writers need – time, support, instruction, accurate information, cameraderie, community, and the opportunity to practice the skills that will help them take their work to THE NEXT LEVEL.

Each Next Level Craft Intensive is an engaging, instructive, market-savvy weekend focused onthe writer's craft. Attendees meet individually with workshop leaders; participate in group discussions; attend craft presentations complete with Q+A; revise or develop new work with on-the-spot writing exercises; and have opportunities to present their work to the group--and that's just the beginning!

Join us in Mt. Dora (Lake County, Florida) for . . .

THE NEXT LEVEL: Build Your Novel from the Ground Up, September 16-18, 2011

This workshop is equally perfect for writers with a great idea they're ready to track all the way to a first draft--and writers who have a draft that's somehow gotten off its track!

Have you wondered exactly which tricks of the book-writing trade will take you from the glimmer of a first idea to the strong and shimmering structure of a concrete outline? Whether you're starting from literary scratch or bringing a work-well-in-progress, you will leave this workshop with a viable outline.

Let Joyce and Jamie show you how to . . .

. . . shape your core idea into a powerful, foundational concept,
. . . expand that concept--step-by-step--into a summary, a synopsis, an outline,
. . . use the mysterious, magical "plot clock" as a guide to strengthen your story.

Over the course of three days you will

• achieve a clear(er) vision of your story.
• explore themes that add resonance and meaning to your story.
• add depth to your characters and their world.
• make a map that makes your next steps concrete and specific.
• confer privately with a workshop leader to aim your efforts for best effect.

The cost for THE NEXT LEVEL workshop intensives, $525, includes snacks and supper on Friday evening, full breakfasts and lunches on Saturday and Sunday. Enrollment limited to 14 participants.

Joyce Sweeney is the award-winning author of fourteen novels for young adults. Also a lauded writing teacher and coach, many of her clients have gone on to publish.

Jamie Morris directs Central Florida's Woodstream Writers, leading workshops and intensives regionally--and coaching writers in many genres, towards publication. 

Register with Jamie@WoodstreamWriters.com or 407-644-5163 for more information 
or Joyce Sweeney at grackle@bellsouth.net

'Nothing Personal', said the Oil Spill to the Dead Seagull

I haven’t sat, or known the ocean for some time. The endless soft waves that heals the caked up blood and scar tissue of my wounded child. The little pig tailed girl swirls around, her toes holding her life with sand and sun, but then she plops down. Her tuss all filled with muddy clay and all she can feel is the loss of this splendor and innocence she once believed lasted forever.

I am an adult, but all I can feel is the feelings of the child. The abandoned promise that she would be loved, or own love, or have love, or walk on love like a cloud from twilight stars. So much nails and soot to pull out of her arms and legs; the ones life left behind, as life rolls its holy terror through her soul. She can’t get over it, she just can’t. She needs to dig and cry down into the earth’s core, scratch away at her skin and let the blood drip and mix in with the cracks and swigs and dead ocean fish. How can life be so alive and yet so dead with shame? So afraid to show the depth of one’s sorrow because only joy is written as our inheritance...what of the grief? What of the desperate need to hug you until the life is squeezed out of your lungs, and then she can suck it all like a vampire and attach to you like a vine to a tree. She is enmeshed in every feeling and word. Her life depends on how much she can drink your moods and swish them around in her body and then run off into the sun and jump for joy that she finally felt you, felt you, felt you in her...

Stop it! Just stop the damn blazing cold, hard, nothingness of cruelty that says "it’s all in a day’s work, she’s busy so she has no soul, she’s cut and dry, she’s business, she’s off to the races, she’s driving her car, she’s focused on her taxes". Where is everyone? Don’t they see?
What are you here for? Die, pay taxes, eat, sleep, fuck?

I give up. I just give up. Vulnerability is buried in the mouth of God. Deep in Her throat, choked in a scream. It is caught, like a fish hook in my bowels, strangled in Her larynx. Don’t take anything personal-- just don’t, don’t! Cheating, not personal, lying, stabbing, ignoring, coldness, indifference, murder, rape, not personal. Hide it, cover it up, forget it, just get on with it, nothing personal. Sad, core hurt, a tearing of my nerves, a ripping of my soul. A battle between my head and heart. Inside a tangled mess of blood and cartilage. Screams. I am tight and sore and distraught with emotions...death and despair. I can’t keep smiling because it makes you feel good, so you can pretend that I accept the cold, hard world of 'business as usual'. It’s not personal. I feel good now because you’re not my business.

Make it all go away. I will just bury myself among the dead gulls washed up from oil spills. The baby seals clubbed to death and I will bury myself in their death and their shock that man can be so cruel and then forget it ever happened.