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Blue Heaven ‘09

September 27th, 2009

I had the most amazing time last week at the Blue Heaven Novel Workshop (on Kelleys Island). This was my second time attending, and both workshops were fully life-changing. The level of writing and critiquing is awesome, plus there’s constant smart talk about writing, storytelling, publishing and on and on and on. It’s like thrice-daily intellectual orgasms. I came home inspired like a mad inspired thing.

Here’s the Flickr set with all my BH09 photos if you’re curious, and here are a few pics for the post.

We took this on the ferry–there’s no bridge to the island!
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I finally got to hang out with Chance Morrison again, who I met at Wiscon. Here we are posing for a publicity shot for her new sitcom, “Chance!” Greg wrote a lovely theme song for it, and everyone contributed episode ideas, including a Very Special episode where fake-English Chance meets her evil twin, Canadian Chance. I’m the sidekick who always gets left holding the bag after fake-English Chance’s spurious activities.
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On the last day, a few of us walked to the island’s park, where glaciers formed these really cool grooves millennia ago. This is Heather Shaw, Gwenda Bond, me and Greg Van Eekhout.
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Me and Rae demonstrating how much fun we were having. Paolo must have said something inappropriate to garner such laughter.
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Inside the girl’s house…
I love this pic of Chance and Bill.
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And this one of Rae and Paolo.
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And this one of Sandra and Greg!
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And this one of Charlie hard at work. Note the Superman hat. All too appropriate.
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What’s going on here?!?! o.O
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Heather’s at The Pump, where we all went for a few hours of beer and internet connectivity each evening. I love this pic; I think she’s talking to her son!
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Here I am posing in the ruins of some old winery. How cool is that?!?
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Here’s Paolo and Greg stirring up trouble at those same ruins.
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Two important notes:
1. Spiders pwn that island. Omg. They became really aggressive by the end of the week. I was so cool about it, though. I only screamed like three times.
2. Srsly amazing time.

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