Milford SF Writers 2011

Seven days, fifteen SF writers, twenty-seven pieces to read and crit, totalling approximately 180,000 - 200,000 words. That's Milford SF Writer's Conference in a nutshell.

We all arrived in North Wales on 17th September, some totally prepared, some not and most, like me, kind of halfway there. I'd managed to read and crit twelve of the pieces in advance, and two oif them were mine, so I only had thirteen to work on during the week. That's not as bad as it sounds because we schedule mornings free for reading time and the official crit sessions start after lunch. With five pieces to crit on most days and six on some, we had a heavy workload.

Milford rules sound a bit formal but they work. We sit in a circle, the person to the left or right of the person being critted starts off and it goes round the room clockwise or anti-clockwise, depending. Everyone gets a timed four minutes to deliver their crit. Underrunning is fine, overrunning id frowned upon. Once everyone has had their say the crittee gets an uninterrupted right of reply and then there's a free for all discussion. We generally allow an hour per piece and that gives us some leeway, but with a full group of fifteen crits were taking up the maximum time allowed and we were lucky to get all five crits in between lunch and dinner (allowing a teabreak, of course, because we are British after all.

Err, well, British only applied to some of us. We always have a foreign contingent, in the past we've had Americans, French, Australians and Swedish. This year we were one-third American. Five out of fiftreen of us. Only one had actually travelled from the USA, the rest were UK residents.

Milford participants 2011
Left to Right: Jim Anderson, Mark Tompkins, Liz Williams, Kari Sperring, Alys Sterling, Heather Lindsley, Jacey Bedford, Chris Butler, Tiffani Angus, Terie Garrison, Deirdre Counihan, Mark Bilsborough, Terry Jackman, Pauline Dungate, John Moran

Milford is exhausting, enjoyable, sociable, educational, inspirational and... did I say exhausting?

It's great to have your work critted by such a brilliant bunch of published writers, but I think ,ost of us agree that being critted is only a small part of it. Working on crits for everyone else really sharpens up your critiquing skills and gives you a good insight into how stories work, or not.

To make sure we got everything critted in time we even did extra morning crits on Wednesday and Thursday because we try to finish the critting by Thursday evening so we can go on a jolly on Friday. The weather was wet all week but it eased off on Friday so we ended up at Beaumaris Castle, which is beautiful. We even got Kari's impromptu castle/history lecture. Well, there's no point in wasting the talents of a medieval Welsh history specialist, is there?

Right: the gatehouse and approach across the moat.

Left: Mark B, Kari and John walk the outer wall.

High point of the week? Tiffani's screamingly funny crit of one of Jim's pieces which not only had us all howling with laughter, but Jim practically sliding out of his seat, helpless. Oh, how we wished we'd recorded it.

Milford SF Writers 2011

Seven days, fifteen SF writers, twenty-seven pieces to read and crit, totalling approximately 180,000 - 200,000 words. That's Milford SF Writer's Conference in a nutshell.

We all arrived in North Wales on 17th September, some totally prepared, some not and most, like me, kind of halfway there. I'd managed to read and crit twelve of the pieces in advance, and two oif them were mine, so I only had thirteen to work on during the week. That's not as bad as it sounds because we schedule mornings free for reading time and the official crit sessions start after lunch. With five pieces to crit on most days and six on some, we had a heavy workload.

Milford rules sound a bit formal but they work. We sit in a circle, the person to the left or right of the person being critted starts off and it goes round the room clockwise or anti-clockwise, depending. Everyone gets a timed four minutes to deliver their crit. Underrunning is fine, overrunning id frowned upon. Once everyone has had their say the crittee gets an uninterrupted right of reply and then there's a free for all discussion. We generally allow an hour per piece and that gives us some leeway, but with a full group of fifteen crits were taking up the maximum time allowed and we were lucky to get all five crits in between lunch and dinner (allowing a teabreak, of course, because we are British after all.

Err, well, British only applied to some of us. We always have a foreign contingent, in the past we've had Americans, French, Australians and Swedish. This year we were one-third American. Five out of fiftreen of us. Only one had actually travelled from the USA, the rest were UK residents.

Milford participants 2011
Left to Right: Jim Anderson, Mark Tompkins, Liz Williams, Kari Sperring, Alys Sterling, Heather Lindsley, Jacey Bedford, Chris Butler, Tiffani Angus, Terie Garrison, Deirdre Counihan, Mark Bilsborough, Terry Jackman, Pauline Dungate, John Moran

Milford is exhausting, enjoyable, sociable, educational, inspirational and... did I say exhausting?

It's great to have your work critted by such a brilliant bunch of published writers, but I think ,ost of us agree that being critted is only a small part of it. Working on crits for everyone else really sharpens up your critiquing skills and gives you a good insight into how stories work, or not.

To make sure we got everything critted in time we even did extra morning crits on Wednesday and Thursday because we try to finish the critting by Thursday evening so we can go on a jolly on Friday. The weather was wet all week but it eased off on Friday so we ended up at Beaumaris Castle, which is beautiful. We even got Kari's impromptu castle/history lecture. Well, there's no point in wasting the talents of a medieval Welsh history specialist, is there?

Right: the gatehouse and approach across the moat.

Left: Mark B, Kari and John walk the outer wall.

High point of the week? Tiffani's screamingly funny crit of one of Jim's pieces which not only had us all howling with laughter, but Jim practically sliding out of his seat, helpless. Oh, how we wished we'd recorded it.