A Different Sort of Writing Club

Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not abandoning you guys.

Today I became a "High School Mentor" for the brand-new writing club at the elementary school that my sister attends and my mom works at. There were a lot of kids there. There's even a waiting list. Can you believe that? It's amazing.
I mostly sat in the back and worked on my CW homework this time...but they didn't need much help. This meeting was mainly "Hi, welcome to the Reedy Creek Writers (by the way, I get a special nametag that says "Reedy Creek Writers" on it). This is what we will be doing over the next 6 meetings (yeah, there'll only be 6 between now and the summer), fill out these forms, blah, blah, blah..."
For the first 15 minutes while people are still arriving, there's "Free-Writing Time" (which has a prompt...so how is that free?) It's my job to come up with the prompts (with the exception of today). The kids just write based on the prompt...or they can ignore it.

Today's was "Write about something you love."
I wrote about snow, since it snowed this morning, and I really do love it.

Funny story: there was a kid who wrote about Star Wars. Then, later, when the teacher running it told everyone to write their favorite word on a piece of paper and tell why they like it, the same kid  wrote (you guessed it!) "Star Wars is my favorite word because it's my favorite movie."

We (yes, even the teachers and us High School Mentors) all had to fill out a Writing Questionaire. It had all of the things you'd expect. I laugh as I think about the Presiding Teacher reading it....

"What are your hobbies/interests?"

"Reading, writing, philosophy, physics, quantum mechanics, earth-based spirituality, metaphysics..." Yeah. That's me.

I think the kids are kind of um...what's the word...scared? in awe? of me. The Presiding Teacher introduced me something like this: "This is Olivia...she's published in a book and is part of a high school writing club at a bookstore." She made it sound a lot more impressive than it actually is. It's just a poem, in a book that's pretty much only available to the friends and family of the people with poetry or prose in the book. It's also a really bad poem I wrote in about 30 seconds. I'm still shocked I came in the top 40 in my age group in that contest... I mean, really. That was one pathetic poem.

I'm looking forward to future meetings with this writing club. It's cool to see all of the little kids being creative.

Oh, and you guys picked "Saving, Slaying, Sewing" as opposed to the next three chapters of Clockwork, which I had in my folder? That was unexpected.

I'm 2/3 done with The Boys With No Names. It's quite excellent.