How it Feels Getting Back to a Writing Workshop After 3 Whole Years

Sadly with the pandemic and the rest of the nonsense I didn’t attend our usual speculative fiction workshop at ALEF since 2019.

Our writing workshop has been going on for 20 years and the number of inside jokes and rituals has come up to a ridiculous amount.

• The short stories are anonymous so we try to guess who wrote which.
• We do a reveal every time, and writers who ended up guessing right get an “award certificate”. We also gave one for the worst guesser of all time, who got 0 guesses right, a statistical impossibility.
• We have a time limit of 1 hour per discussion round because it used to be recorded on a 60 min cassette, now it’s digital but we keep it the same
• We have a printed card that we can play once per workshop where the writer can play it and rant on about the story because he has lots to say, regardless of the time limit. That’s a joke because one writer used to do that and he was unstoppable.
• and lots of other inside jokes that make no sense at all to an outsider, like asking the host to fetch you a beer (you simply don’t do that).
• Also the workshop is an excuse to bring in lots of food and pastries to share from all over Greece, and even from abroad.
• an entire weekend wasn’t enough so at some point we established a meet and greet dinner the night before at a meat tavern. That helps new members get to know us before spending 2 days at some stranger’s house. We always order kokoretsi.

All in all, it’s an intense experience where we get to talk with other authors actually doing the witting and the publishing instead of getting just academic comments on our stories. People seem to like my own suggestions, which I tend to keep to a minimum. It’s great fun!

Sadly I realised that I haven’t been writing much these past 3 years. I want to get back to it and I have made a challenge for myself to start creating more stories in the future.

My short story was a cyberpunk retelling of the Arachne vs Athena myth in the God Complex Universe, people liked it but it needs lots of work. I’ll make it available in English at some point, in the meantime you can join the mythographers to get my free starting library and read lots of my stories. https://mythographystudios.com/join