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I'm hosting the Australian Spec Fic Blog carnival in a week. If any of you have wonderful posts you've read or written (or maybe written then read), please feel free to add a note to this post, with the URL. I already have a few good posts (there was a film about that, wasn't there?) but I am short on Conflux reports and can always do with more and better and if I don't stop now I'll start giving you Latin tags.

On an unrelated note, did anyone at Conflux who spent much time talking to Marc McBride - did you discover that his sentence structure is infectious? Or was it just me?

I keep wanting to write the way he speaks. It's a lot of fun, but maybe a bit confusing to my students last night. I'm teaching them to write in their own voice, while sounding like someone else. Most of last night was Manipulation of Minds through grammatical awareness and punctuation, so they survived. I corrupted them and taught them how to spot the patterns adverbs and adjectives make, but they survived. Next week I might do full stops and commas and colons and things. That's not something they'll survive, but they'll be doughtier writers for the experience.

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Smith's Bookshop in Civic (for Canberrans) is already stocking Life Through Cellophane. I won't do updates on every single bookshop, but Smith's has had copies since Friday, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

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My life is rapidly returning to normal. This is a warning about incoming workshops.

I have one this Saturday (currently in urgent need of enrolments, otherwise it will be cancelled - I only need 2 more people) on using your local environment in a fantasy novel. It's not just about ENNNA (remember, Every New Novel Needs Ants) and how to warp maps then use them in writing, but they will play a part. So will the Gorman House Markets, since they're on at the same time as the workshop.

The week after, my six part "World building using real history" begins. That's on Sunday. No Gorman House Markets. No parking problems. Not much public transport. I already have minimum numbers so it's going ahead for certain, but there's also still space. It'll be useful for fantasy writers, historical fiction writers and romance writers, mainly, though I can accommodate any writer who needs to understand how to use our known history to build a world for writing purposes.

As always, I teach the people who attend the course, not a theoretical subset of the writing community, so if you want to come to either course and you have quite specific needs, all you have to do is say so and I'll do my best to accommodate. (I always say 'do my best' these days, since people have started demanding a direct download from my brain to theirs - you have to do your own learning, I'm afraid.)

You can find out more about all of this on the Writers' Centre website.

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While I'm on the subject of normalcy, my committee novel will be at first draft stage soon and will need beta readers. It's not set on Earth. It has committees. It is post disaster. It takes the mickey out of most post-disaster novels (in a very polite committeeish kind of way). If it's turned out dull, I really, really need to know.

Right now I'm looking at the end of next week for a complete first draft. I can give beta readers from then till the silly season.