Calling all SF writers

[jacey]

Most of you already know about Milford, a week for published SF writers to get together and workshop short stories and novel excerpts in a small, intensive peer to peer gathering. This year it's being held in Snowdonia from 24th to 31st October in our venue of recent years Trigonos - a lovely eco-friendly and comfortable venue within sight of Snowdon itself committed to home grown (organic) food

I've been attending various Milfords (off and on) since 1998 and am on the organising committee. When the bookings first started earlier in the year we filled the places quite quickly, but we've had a surprisingly high dropout rate and as of the present moment we have four available places, one of them only notified to us this week. We obviously need to fill these if at all possible as we block book a specific number of rooms at Triginos.

So please pass the word around, or if you fancy a bracing trip to North Wales in October with a bunch of other SF writerly types please get in touch with us via the Milford web site or drop a note in the comments.

Please note that the minimum requirement for coming to Milford is one professionally published story - so relative beginners are welcome, but many of the writers who attend are multi-published novelists.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

There are ways of deliberately generating ideas, especially for short stories.

I know that when one is the type of writer who just gets ideas turning up, it seems unnecessary to try techniques of idea creation, but it is another useful skill to have.

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry to have had to pull out. I was really looking forward to it, but I couldn't turn down work : (

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I can't write short stories because I don't understand short stories. Half the time when I read published shorts I go 'huh' because I cannot see the _story_ in them - all I see is a vignette, a series of events that don't seem to have an arc. Other people obviously see them differently. I get a short story idea about once every five years, and if I 'try to generate one' all that happens is that I have soemthing that's cardboard all the way through - the characters don't come to life, the setting is flat, the plot is clicheed, I hate every word, and there is no STORY.

I wouldn't know a short story idea if it bit me on the bum, so trying to create them is pretty fraught from the start, and if I had one, I wouldn't know what to do with it.