At ICON 2016 in Johannesburg (organised by GeekXP), I ran into a whole bunch of my good old wargaming friends. What an absolute pleasure after having been stuck with my two rugrats for, what felt like, forever. We roamed the stalls and had our books signed by Raymond E. Feist (who is, by the way, a truly humble man and an absolute pleasure to talk to).

Daniël, who had served with me on the Tuks Wargaming Council in 2005, was bubbling with praise for Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn series), talking about his lectures and the idea of having a writing circle of authors who write roughly the same number of words per day/week/month. I really hadn’t seen him this excited since 2008, when the MEAD Legends LARP started up (my friends decided this kind of thing needed to happen in South Africa’s northern parts too).

That afternoon (it was Friday, 24 June), Daniël, Hendrik and I stood in the convention parking lot and founded our (hitherto unnamed) writing circle. It’s a moment that has been graven onto my memory banks, despite looking like nothing special to the bored car guards standing a few metres away.

Since then, we have met two times *cough cough*…but it has made a massive difference to my writing drive.

It led to a long-time friend of mine sending another writer my way and, after a bit of an unpromising start (where I was dreading having to help an aspiring writer through the discovery that they had much to learn), she has changed my writing (style/planning/drive) drastically. At this stage, I can hardly fall asleep at night because my brain is buzzing with ideas and thoughts on how to edit my one flagging story. It feels like rain has fallen on the drought of my writing mind and all forms of new life is springing up faster than I can keep up with.

I can’t wait for the next post I want to write about my epiphany about “show don’t tell”. *bounces around with energy*