And We Begin Again

I started a new writing workshop tonight. I'm jazzed.

I was a little apprehensive ... it's with a teacher I've worked with before and enjoy very much, but it's marketed as a gay men's writing group. I don't know why that rankles me, but it does ever so slightly. The whole let's be separate but then complain that we're not integrated conundrum.

Anyway, turns out there's a girl in it. So good on her for signing up and good on the Fortune and Friends boys for not turning her away. (I see now that they've changed their slogan to "for gay guys and our friends." Doubly good on them.

I'm pleased to have the additional point of view in the workshop. Don't know if she's gay or not, and frankly don't give a toss. She's lovely. As are the other half-dozen men. All with different perspectives and individual voices, and all seemingly there to create and contribute with open minds and open hearts.

It's so good.

I'm always amazed by Shaun's classes. I come out with pages and pages of words I had no idea I'd be writing when it started.

Go on then ... for seven minutes ... write a history of your tongue.

Homework for next week is a twenty-minute timed writing in a place you don't normally write. Walking home from Covent Garden, I had a think. Where have I never written?

• On top of Tower Bridge

• In a darkroom

• In a bathhouse

• Sitting on top of Primrose Hill

• Sitting on the beach in Brighton

• Standing in the middle of Waterloo Bridge

• The Whispering Room at St. Pauls

• Inside one of the London Eye's pods

• In the Rothko room at the Tate Modern (no wait, I might have done that already)

• Madame Tussauds (not only have I not written there, I've never been)

This could be fun.