Northwords Writer's Camp - and thus FOTB is born

I intended to spend my summer volunteering at the Lesser Slave Lake Bird Observatory banding birds and helping to collect migration data - but I was only there for 8 days when a massive forest fire swept through town and left half of it in ashes. All activities in the park were halted until further notice, and I spent a couple weeks drifting from town to town, bunking with friends, relatives, and strangers just waiting for word - and when I finally couldn't take it anymore I decided to call it and go home.

There's not much for meaningful work in the animal health field in the Terrace area, so I decided to spend my summer getting my driver's licence (I'm 25 and I still don't drive!) and working on a research project for a course I am due to take in the fall. This summer has been rainy, cold, miserable, and otherwise dreadfully dull - other than the part where I was running for my life from raging forest fires, which was pretty exciting - so when I heard that Northwords was putting on a 5 day writer's camp, I jumped on it just as an excuse to get out of the house and talk to some humans who were not my parents for a change. Lately, going to Walmart to buy junk food has been the biggest social event I've been looking forward to every week, so I was due for a bit of mental stimulation.

I am so glad I went! I have been contemplating starting a blog for some time, I just didn't think my life was interesting enough or that I had the discipline to keep up with it - but because I am a writer, I have the power to MAKE things interesting, and since there has been a lot of discussion in the past few days about blogging and how to make it work, I feel like I'm up to the challenge. I was born to create things, you see. I am first and foremost a writer - I live to tell stories and love marking up a clean page and then stacking up all those pages into a solid book. I am really not happy unless I am taking stuff from my brain and turning it into real things - I also love to knit, draw, paint, build stuff out of lumber, bind books, and once in a while I've been known to taxidermy particularly cool dead birds I've come across (I was getting quite good at avian taxidermy by the time I was 14 but stopped doing it because it's a rather expensive hobby for a kid whose income comes from bottles).

Just hearing other writers speak about their experience and listening to them share their work is very inspiring to me. It lights a fire under my butt and makes me want to work again. I have two works in progress going at the moment: one novel I call The Road to Venetia which I wrote in first year university is very near completion - I am working on editing the 2nd draft and if I can ever get it done, I plan to self-publish it through Lulu.com as I did with my farming memoir The Urban Farmer in 2009. My other work in progress is a science-fiction novel which I don't have a name for, but it's still in the small stages at the moment. I write only for myself these days - I quit trying to write stuff that I intended to sell to magazines because I found that as soon as I just let my heart go free and write what I want, my work turns out so much better. "Write with the door open" says Stephen King, and I didn't realize just what he meant until I experienced it for myself. Thanks to Northwords and the brilliant people there who got me back on track again!