Critique Group Love

This morning I woke up just feeling total love for my critique group, the wonderful FNC chicas, Donna, Sara and Janine! We had a kind of momentous night--our writing professor, Gretchen Haertsch, who teaches the Writing for Children class where we all met in the fall of 2007, invited us to come and speak to her spring 2010 class. We got to relay the story of how we all met and came together--at the very spot where it all epically happened--which was seriously cool and made me all nostalgic and just happy at how far we've come together as a group but also as friends. We're so lucky to be a critique group that lives in close proximity to each other so that we not only get to meet regularly for critique meetings, we get to meet up for fun and just hang out.

Talking to the class was very cool None of us are really that shy--3/4 of us are teachers and so that kind of smites the shyness right out of you--but sometimes it can be intimidating to get up in front of strangers and talk without a plan for almost an hour and a half. But its nice to know that you have some of your best friends with there talking beside you who totally get everything you're saying and can add in the point you missed, or laugh at the joke you're making. Plus just being together usually makes us laugh, so we may have been a little more entertained by our talk than the class. But it was a seriously fun experience, returning to the moment where it all began and it was fun to see our origins--literally--and then see where we stood now.  I'm really proud of everyone.

Of course then we went out for drinks:-) Which is almost as much fun as running a panel on writing, critiquing, blogging and querying.

Anyway I just had to gush, and then I'm off to dance all night at Rakkasah Spring Caravan which is the largest most fabulous belly dance festival on the east coast.

Hope you all enjoy your weekends!