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epitome of incomprehensibility
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QWF, which stands for Quebec Writer's Federation, has an activity in Atwater library called Shut Up and Write. I went there for the first time on Friday.
I've been to Atwater Library a few times, but this is the first time I saw the QWF office. It's in a cozy room off the main library part of the building. By cozy I mean big enough but comfortably crowded - a desk, a side table, a big round table in the middle, and shelves with Quebec-published books (in English; QWF seems to deal mostly with the English side, though encouraging translations and collaborations). By cozy I also mean homey, as in slightly dysfunctional - you can't have the teakettle and coffee machine on at the same time; next to the little table, there's only one outlet free.
And which is the proper Canadian spelling, cozy or cosy? These are the important questions. Portail linguistique du Canada says both. Okay, linguistic portal of Canada.
Anyway, there were eight or nine people, sitting around the round table. We introduced ourselves with names and either general or specific descriptions of what we were working on (me: "a novel"). The schedule was five writing bursts of 35 minutes each, with four 5-minute breaks.
I think I'm better with longer chunks of time, say an hour - despite or because of ADHD, I don't know. But I liked the breaks and the talking, even though I was still partly absorbed in my writing so that I used the word "embarrassing" where another word might have worked better - badly influenced by my fictional Carol Winter, who keeps calling things embarrassing. Anyway. It was a good sort of priming for more shutting-up-and-writing, because I then went to Concordia and wrote a chunk more.
Total: 6.5 hours in one day - is that a personal record? I mean, I've spent more time than that writing in one day, but working on this novel in one day?? I don't know. It's weirdly tiring, writing fiction. Not in a bad way, and I don't want to compare it with hard manual labour or emotionally stressful jobs. It's not the first and usually not the second. But it's still tiring.
(While I wrote at Concordia, Wet_Debby was doing her raining job, so after the weekend I could pick up spoils_of_the_flood.)
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