Wow, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I posted here anything of value to anyone. The two weeks of teaching the Master Class just toasted the writing brain, at least the part that has a desire to talk about the process and the business of writing.

Let me talk for a minute about that Master Class.

This year, the first master class in four years, we had 16 writers attending, all housed in this really wonderful hotel.  The Anchor Inn is just made for writers and is one of the nifty places on the planet. Each writer had a two room suite and we had a wonderful meeting room that felt like a living room, with old over-stuffed couches and chairs. They got free breakfast every morning and there was also another huge lounge to go write if they wanted to get out of their rooms. The beach was also just a block or so away.

We met every morning at 10 and the class, taught by me and Kris and Loren Coleman went for four hours every day, all 15 days. Then in the evening, they were back in class at 7 to be taught be me and Loren Coleman and Christina York with help from Steve York as well. That class also lasted 4 hours. Scott Carter came in one evening and helped out on marketing and Mary Rosenblum helped out on another night with a great genre discussion. And then New York editors Ginjer Buchanan and John Douglas came in for the last three days as well and did a fantastic job.

The writers also had a lot of writing and exercises to do, along with other smaller questions and assignments to answer. So the 16 writers who attended, all published in one way or another, were jammed busy as we poured information at them and forced them to work. Someone totaled it up and said the writers attending wrote almost 400 thousand words of short fiction, novel queries, and assignments in the two weeks while attending eight hours of class for 15 straight days.

And all of them made it through with flying colors. Tired and exhausted, but full of more information than they will ever remember.

As for the instructors, well it darned near killed all of us.

Loren Coleman, editor, publisher, and author of over twenty novels, stayed in a room beside the meeting area and helped glue back together everyone at one point or another. He got maybe three hours of sleep per night. Maybe.

Kris taught in the morning and then spent the entire rest of the day carefully reading the fantastic amount of writing, exercises and other production that the 16 writers turned in. Her job was to help them find the weakness and the strength in their craft and then help the writer solve the issue. She had the toughest job of all of us in my opinion.

Chris York was on book deadline during the master class and also works this wonderful job at another hotel, yet she still came in every evening for 5 hours to help me and Loren with the business. She even managed to get pages done on her book deadline, but she was as tired as we all were when it was over.

My job was to do all the detail work, hold the entire thing together, and be the lead instructor for both sessions, putting some sort of form and logic on all the information. And read the short stories and about six thousand query and novel blurbs the writers were constantly turning in. And run the writing business simulation we put the writers through called The Game. Teaching for eight hours a day, basically on every detail of the business, was draining to say the least. And when everyone finally left town, the idea of talking about writing here on this blog just didn’t seem attractive to me for some reason.

But now time has passed. There is the time before the Master Class and the time since the Master Class and they seem to be divided by this void in my mind. So if you asked me a question about writing before the Master Class and I didn’t get to it, ask it again and I will now. The brain’s interest in actually thinking about writing is coming back again, along with other details of life that I tended to space over the last two or three weeks.

Now I remember why it was four years since the last master class. It took that long to forget how hard they really are to teach.

We pushed the marketing workshop that was supposed to be ending right now back to March and the next Master Class back to next October. So if you are interested in any of the classes, the new schedule is under workshops here on this site. Don’t hope or expect us to teach any after the ones listed. We’re getting burnt out again.

And besides, I have novels to write as well. And so does Kris. And that’s how we make our living. Thankfully, the book industry is mostly recession proof.

I’ll be back to these posts regularly now.

Cheers, Dean