A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Five-Hundred-And-Eighty-Six

Earlier this evening I had the opportunity to attend an online writer's meetup through the Manuscript Academy.  I've mentioned them before on this blog, though it has been some time.  It is an online program that is designed to provide writer's with various resources of the sorts found at conferences.  In particular, they attempt to help with connecting writers and agents, but they have also been developing more opportunities for writers to interact directly.  Tonight was a fairly relaxed and was mostly just a meet and greet, but there was a fair amount of interest amongst the fiction writers that I was talking with in possibly developing an online critique group.  I have never been in such a group before, at least not anything that wasn't part of a formal program or workshop.  In the past, I've always been a bit shy about joining.  In part, this is born of a fear that my work is just too weird, though I know that is probably just an excuse, not that I can identify the real reasons.  I worry that I won't fit in, or that I won't be helpful to the other writers, or that I just won't be able to provide the appropriate feedback in the right ways because of my difficulty with writing notes.  Again, I think those are mostly just excuses, or maybe not excuses, exactly; they are reasons but superficial ones with something else underneath.  Whatever my hesitation, I was able to get over it enough tonight to throw my name in when the idea of forming a group emerged.  I'll have to wait and see what happens, of course, but I am optimistic that this might be a positive development.

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