Writing Workshop #17 – Celebrating our success and a creative giveaway

Morning!

I have something a bit exciting for the workshop this week. You see, we’re having a little celebration. Part of me is quite embarrassed about this and feels WAY out of my depth, but on Friday I found that Sleep is for the Weak reached number 5 in the Tots100 Index of Top UK Parenting Blogs. Can you believe it? No, neither can I to be honest.

Not only that but I got a first on the big poetry assignment I’ve been working on for weeks. 83%!! Which means I’m a good way towards getting my honours degree, maybe even with a first overall.

So DEFINITELY celebrations all round.

And because this blog, especially the writing workshop, is very much about its readers, it seems right that you get the chance to win something lovely in honour of all this excitement.

Bring Yourself are offering one lucky a reader a free place on one of their Handmade Writer e-courses worth £60.

I’ll let B.Y. founder Amy explain more:

“Bring Yourself e-courses are adventures in creative writing. Each course is a chance to play, explore and discover. You will find the time and space to daydream and the support to develop your writing.

In the Handmade Writer e-course you will take a crafty approach to creative writing and use the fabric of your life to tell your own extraordinary stories.

You will be encouraged to look closer than ever before at the world around you and write about what you find. You will be challenged to take creative risks and begin to see yourself and the world around you differently. You will find fuel for your writing and be amazed by what you can create.

The Handmade Writer e-course will help you gather together material from every source imaginable. You will learn about the craft of writing and how to sew these fragments together to build your own pieces of creative writing. The e-course has been inspired by the strength of craft communities as well as the impulse to transform everyday finds into something amazing.

Handmade Writer is structured as a virtual creative writing workshop. Over six weeks, you will be challenged, find exciting new ideas, develop your writing and begin to really see yourself as a writer.

Amy Spencer, an author, experienced workshop leader and crafter, will be your guide. She will set you a writing exercise at the beginning of each week, twice weekly creative challenges and keep you supplied with enough creative stimulus to keep your imagination buzzing.

At the heart of Handmade Writer is a private online community space. This is a private space where you can share your ideas and your writing and get valuable feedback from Amy Spencer and your fellow writers.

A Bring Yourself e-course is the perfect excuse to immerse yourself in your writing. It is a time to dare to be yourself and write, write, write.”

Doesn’t that sound fabulous? The Handmade Writer course starts on Monday 12th April and runs for six weeks. And one workshop participant will be joining that course for free!

All you have to do is submit a post for this week’s workshop in the McLinky on Thursday as usual. You’ll have until midnight on Sunday 21st March to write and post your enteries at which point I’ll use random.org to randomly select a winner and will announce who’s won on Monday 22nd March. If, for any reason, you’d like to opt out of the giveaway and just enter the workshop, perhaps if you feel like you haven’t got the time to commit to the course, then that’s fine too. Just let me know on Thursday when you submit your post.

SO!

Without further ado, and for any newbies joining us for the first time, here’s how it works… I’m going to give you 5 writing/blogging prompts. Pick one, pick two, or do them all if you’re really keen – it’s up to you. How you respond is your choice. You could share a real-life story, or make one up. You could write a poem or just free-write without thinking too hard and see what happens. It can be funny; it can be serious; it can be emotional. It can be whatever you want it to be. The only rule is to have fun with it!

Prompts each week will take their inspiration from blogs, current affairs, daily life, or just whatever everyone happened to be talking about that week. If you’d like to suggest a prompt then send me an email or catch me on Twitter – I would love to hear your ideas.

Here are this week’s prompts:

1. Tell me about someone from you past who you lost touch with and who you often think about. Perhaps imagine meeting them again. What would you say? What unresolved issues would you love to bury?
- Inspired by Deer Baby’s exquisite and compelling post The Nanny Diaries – my favourite post from this last week and a must-read.

2. Has there ever been a time you felt panic start to take you over? Maybe it did. What made you feel like this and what happened?
- Inspired by Make Do Mum and her day of panic at the station.

3. What excuses are you hiding behind at the moment?
- Inspired by the very fabulous Leslieanne at Life with a Little Dude who has been ‘buying for the baby’ and discovering the dark side to Baby Led Weaning!

4. Tell me about a time your body let you down. When did you mind want more than you body could handle?
- Inspired by Hayley who is working so hard training for her London to Brighton bike ride, despite feeling very under the weather in her post Reluctant Body Vs. Determined Mind (she needs sponsors too! So if you can spare a pound or two pop over to her Just Giving page to help her raise money for the British Heart Foundation)

5. Tell us about something, or show us something that you do really, really well and are proud of. It’s time to blow your own trumpets a bit folks! None of this British modesty and self-deprecation we all seem to be so good at…
- Inspired by Paula  Battling on AND Young and Younger who have both been celebrating their successes and achievements this week (And rightly so, they are fab!)

Now here’s what you have to do. Write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please.

Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.

Feel free to use the Workshop badge on your blog or as part of your post if you like. Code is here:

<a href=”http://www.sleepisfortheweak.org.uk”><img src=”http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj90/flowerfairy82/WritingWorkshopBadge.jpg”></a>

Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.

See you Thursday then!

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This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.

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