I ventured forth to the Iron Springs Writers' retreat this weekend, with fabulous folk too many to name. But I will name jaylake , who ran a great critique group. His energy, humor and friendliness were all at top level and pretty amazing given the stuff the guy's dealing with. Also, he's still damn sexy. That hair...

And the other folks in my crit group--kehrli , criada , Sean Forbes, Laura (whose last name has reached escape velocity at the moment), Jack Bell, and our housemate Sarah Avery who, with her lovely husband Dan and cute-as-sin kid Gareth (named after one of the only consistently likeable knights in Le Morte D'Arthur) was a lot of fun to share a house with. They really buttered me up and gave me constructive criticism on a novel beginning that has been moldering aroudn my computer waiting to get kicked into high gear.

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a critiquer myself, though. I tried the best I could. I think that the stress of graduating and finishing what was a massive load of work for my on-campus job at the end of the year, plus the anxiety of trying to make it financially on what will soon be very much less money, made it just difficult for me to really analyze a story. (Also, it's making it difficult to construct a sentence. These are long.)

The best part for me, though, with the inner wannabe teacher, was doing the presentation on query letters and the Care and Feeding of Agents. People brought their queries, including Chelsea Campbell, who went all the way to book sale from a simple little query. Hark! It's a damn good query Chelsea has there, too.

We went way longer and people were way more into it than I thought they would be. Lots of people practiced pitching face-to-face, lots of people and lots of anal sex jokes. I'm still not sure how that came up. But it was quite cool, so much so that I would like to write them all down one of these days. Not the anal sex jokes, but the insights on breaking in that everyone came up with, and the way we analyzed the heck out of query letters and flap copy.

Also, there was a bald eagle. Pics to come.