Today was a less productive day for me. I only went to one daytime activity, which was the lunchtime reading with Gavin Corbett who was fabulousssssss (and very attractive.) His latest book is titled “This is the Way.” Here is the excerpt from the back cover:

“Anthony Sonaghan is hiding out in an old tenement house in Dublin: he fears he’s reignited an ancient feud between the two halves of his family. Twenty-first-century Dublin may have shopping malls and foreign exchange students, but Anthony is from an Irish Travelling community, where blood ties are bound deeply to the past. When his roguish uncle Arthur shows up on his doorstep with a missing toe, delirious and apparently on the run, history and its troubles are following close behind him—and Anthony will soon have to face the question of who he really is.”

The main discussion point on this book was how the “travelling community” (which we had to research to find out was the gypsy community) would respond to this novel. Turns out they hadn’t. Which is just fine with the author.

In the afternoon I went to my historical fiction workshop, which I am confident in saying I am enjoying more than my fellow student Christopher Warman. Unlike the other workshops we spend more time discussing than actually writing. Coming in with no expectations this class doesn’t really push my writing capabilities, but the history I am learning from the other 13 older Irish historian ladies is entertaining enough to keep me awake. Our instructor Heather Richardson is very knowledgeable on her subject, it’s just hard to produce something with only seven hours to do so.

So far the historical fiction writers have written about infanticide and a family consisting of three siblings with no parents present in the household. So as you can tell there is a lot of artistic freedom there. Heather uses the free Irish online census as well as old newspaper clippings as the basis of our stories. Today the emphasis was character development and Thursday I think the focus will be plot development. More inspiring stories to come I’m sure.

In the evening I attended a two-person play called “The Duck Variations” which was so simple yet so entertaining. Literally it was two-men sitting on a park bench discussing life and the ducks that surrounded them. I feel like there was a more meaningful message behind it all but the bottom line was it was about ducks. All 50 minutes of it.