RoadWriter

Newbie Lane

“Sure, I can do that. What do you want me to do?”

“Just something about the conference?”

“I’m on? OH! I’m on!”

Hello, out there! Honorary Museling here, guest blogging for the first time. Wow. What an experience at the Muse Online Writing Conference. First time there too! Being a Museling is hard work!

The Muselings are such a great team and well-organized with a clear plan for their online workshop. Lin, my good friend, told me about what they were doing and I said, sure I can do a workbook. Send me the stuff. Then there were meetings, and meetings and meetings! Planning times that everyone could meet because of time zones — big challenge.

If you didn’t attend this online writing conference you missed a variety of different chats, forums, and information for all types of writers. The website was easy to navigate and user friendly. Me, I mostly hung out in the poetry workshop; one to support the Muselings and two, there is only so much time in the week. I work full time and had to grade 15 rough drafts for my online students by Saturday night. Arghh! Time was not my friend. Great thing about this conference is you can go back and visit the workshops to get what you missed. I plan on going back to visit the workshop “Mythology and Fairy Tales as a Basis for New Stories.”

Now I’m not that much of a poet, at least until after the conference. Anyone who can create an Aragman poem and have it make sense, you have officially become a poet. With an aragman, you take a phrase to an anagram maker and see what comes out. I took my Muse name SurfWriter, ran it through the anagram maker and came up with 20, count them, 20. Played with them for a while, but those anagrams weren’t talking. Really? Err Surf Wit? What am I supposed to do with that? So I ran my name through and got over 1000 anagrams. At least something to work with. Don’t let anyone fool you – aragmans are hard to create! Here’s mine.

Alarm! Tracing
the cat who hides
Alarm! Crating
The cat who snarls and yowls.
Alarm! Carting
The cat to the vet.

Alarm! Cat grin!

If you didn’t get a chance to participate, download their participant’s workbook (my contribution to the workshop) and take on the challenge of writing three little known forms of poetry. Be sure to check out Saturday’s chat notes on how to incorporate the poetic form into other forms of writing which was very informative. Michele’s a great moderator and herds cats well LOL! We also presented ideas on revising poetry and how to start a poetry group.

(What? Wrap it up?)
The Muse Online Writing Conference is astounding. Over fifty topics to choose from, hundreds of amazing writing professionals who put together this conference –free. All because they want to support writers who want to become better writers or who want to explore other challenges. I can’t wait until next year!