…for pootling about with magnificent and luxurious aimlessness! The Christmas festivities, which included a devil’s lasagna orchestrated by Delia, the witch queen of deceptive recipes, are all but over and I am unable to access any official emails until January 5th so that makes my time MY OWN for the forseeable. Yesterday I put together some pieces for my OU short course in writing fiction and then decided to keep them to myself as no-one else had posted anything on the block’s forum.  The previous block’s postings had, disappointingly, been all mine bar that of one brave soul who’d put his head above the parapet first and then retreated. Pity, I was rather taken by my character’s descent into murderous psychosis and the requirement to write the same story from three different angles.  Nice seasonal topic though, don’t you think!  

I also joined Critique Circle which is an online critiquing group for writers of all brands. As a newcomer, I have to submit critiques to gain points before I can use those points to have my own work critiqued. I’m not sure how this internal market economy operates entirely but the upshot is that you are unleashed onto someone else’s precious product before you have much idea of what it’s all about, which feels a bit risky. However, in the interests of discovering whether the two rejections of my futurismic short story are due to lack of plot per se or to the fact that the plot is actually a bit chick lit-ish and the rejectors were male, I’ve plunged in with a couple of purring crits which I hope avoid both sycophancy and insult. I plan to see what they do with those and then decide whether to risk putting my Baby in CCs hands!