Free at last! Free at last!

In other words, I just finished the last of my TNEO crits today. As of mid-June, I only had two left to go, but between the time spent on the previous TNEO stories and the critting I have to do for my in-person writing group every other week, I kept putting those two off because I was so darn sick of critiquing. Every time I picked up a story, I was overcome with an insanely strong compulsion to check my email and tidy up my office files and add music to iTunes and work on my own stories and make to-do lists.

Back to the subject of critiques and writing groups and the like, Ekaterina Sedia, author of The Secret History of Moscow (which I won a free copy of from Pat's Fantasy Hotlist about a month ago...woo hoo!), visited our humble little Philly group last weekend. We lobbed many questions at her, and she joined in for our critique session, which made for an awesomely writerly afternoon.

I've also got my TNEO lecture all ready to go. I think it'll be fun. There are entirely too many awesome scenes I could use for the exercises I'll have folks doing, though, which made it hard to choose a few that would fit into the allotted time. But choose I did.

Anyway, now that I've gotten all that down, it's back to critiquing non-TNEO stuff. And then *gasp* doing a little of my own writing.