Oh, my goodness. I am soooo tired. These last two weeks, I've attended THREE different writer summits. So much content, so much stuff to learn, so much well, MUCH.

Ray Brehm and Paul Brodie hosted the first one, and it was called the Platform Building Summit. It was all about building an author platform, getting readers, marketing, etc. The second summit was called Escape the Plot Forest and hosted by Daniel David Wallace. It was about things related to plotting, outlining, and so on. The actual craft of writing. The last one I went to I haven't finished yet, because some of these summits overlapped each other. ProWritingAid had a romance writers summit. And even though it was a romance oriented summit, much of the advice was useful to other genre writers as well. All the summits have replays of their workshops, which is great, because I'll be able to go back to any topic I like and give them a watch whenever I need a refresher and I'll be able to catch up on the workshops I missed.

I learned a few things from these summits. The first is that I know a lot more than I thought I did. I've attended so many trainings, webinars, summits, and so on this year that I've lost track. Quite a bit of what they presented at the three summits I just went to was stuff I already knew, or had learned in the last year. The second thing that I learned is that I can get through replays quicker if I put them on 1.25x or 1.5x speed, and I can still understand them. Though Daniel speaks so slowly, that I can put him on 1.5 and he talks like a normal person then. (I love Daniel's summits, though. I've been to two of his, so far. He is warm and incredibly kind. When he gets excited about a subject, he gets this little smile that makes his cheeks turn pink and he looks like a sweet little boy.) And last, I learned some things about plot and structure that are making me realize I need to plow through book one Cooking Up Magick again. My plot structure and ending still need some work. I mean, I could publish it as is, and the book would be fun, but it wouldn't be as good as it could be.

Speaking of workshops, I gave a workshop of my own for the very first time on Thursday! It was on writing dialogue. So besides attending the summits I was going to, I also worked on my workshop. It was about an hour and fifteen minutes long and was a ton of work to put together and practice. I think it went well, though I may have made the attendees' heads explode.

Now that heads have 'sploded, I need to focus on NaNoWriMo. I'm planning on doing it again this year, and I don't have a clear idea just what it is I'm doing yet. I was going to write my fourth book in the series, or write a horror, but I've decided not to do either of those ideas. My brain needs a break from my Dell Chronicles books so that I can come back to them with fresh eyes. And I'm not in the mood for horror right now, even though it's Halloween season. So... yeah. I've got three days to figure it out. I better get cracking.