And like you got a lot out of it. Sweet! And yes stories need characters. Without characters you can’t get that person to person commitment from the audience.

Will be interesting what you do with all this. Woot!

You are a $100 dollar bill in a jeans pocket after going 2 days without food, sir.

I am very happy you had such a great experience, but kind of because I got so much out of it. Thank you for sharing.

You would have to chain me in the basement with Mr. Carlson and a crippled cat to not like you any more.

You went. You brought back wisdom.

Nice.

The notebook is the little red one — Writersblok or some such? It was handy; fit in a pocket, no heft or burden, totally portable. My writing doesn’t do well with lines, so the fact it has a light dot-grid pattern made it awesomer.

Conventions are good, but they’re really about business. “Business” was largely anathema at the Lab. There remains an implicit understanding that business is there, it exists, it’s unavoidable — but for purposes of understanding craft, business is a different axis. It was largely about the love of the process, then. Which is critical, I think. Again, it’s not that business is a bad word, but business is The Thing you think about the rest of the time. This omphalos needed no such conversation, then.

– c.

That is awesome. I think you will be really engaged by that process.

Further, I found it amazing how unintimidated I was once the process began; the advisors here were all very accepting and embraced us as peers, and the conversational aspect of it really squashed the tension.

Good luck with it! You need to give us a full report.

– c.

B) Conventions are awesome, and they can get some of this, but they’re business. I sometimes wonder at non-conventions, just vacation weekends to the same hotel. Do it in the off season, maybe at a less-fancy place, and it’s not even terribly pricey. Just enough of a step outside of home to make it more than “having a friend over” but not so much as to make it into a public event demanding the game face.

C) My nerdy heart is intensely curious to know which notebook ended up getting used!

D) Dude. Awesome.

-Rob D.

I love this look at the process, and it’s something I’ll be keeping in mind as my own moves forward.