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 (just the) "Clarion" Entries SALE! "A Wizard of MapQuest" to LCRW #23! October 28, 2008 Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Flytrap are two of my favorite zinelike entities (I subscribe to both, and you should, too), so finally breaking into both makes for a solid end to the year. And just as cool: "A Wizard of MapQuest" is my first Clarion story sale. It's a tiny thing, well under 1,000 words. I wrote the first draft quick in the first week of Clarion, because I didn't want Chip Delany to choose either of my godawful application stories for a class critique. It ended up being the first non-application story to dare the gauntlet*. Consequently it was critiqued not only by all my classmates and Chip that day, but also by all the subsequent instructors (including LCRW coeditor Kelly Link) looking for my writing samples. So thanks, all! Couldn't have sold it without ya. Response time here is tricky to figure. I actually sent it to LCRW in February of 2007. I pulled it six months later so I could rewrite it and send them something else which I thought would be more appropriate (still under consideration, as is my judgment). About six months after that, LCRW's other coeditor Gavin J Grant emailed to ask whether I'd sold it elsewhere. I hadn't, and I asked if they wanted to take another look. Six months later, he asked for a bio. So twelve months. Or six. Or it was a requested submission, so it doesn't matter. Also, it was my 4th and 7th submission to LCRW. Also, you don't care. Which BTW isn't the most database-incompatible journey for a story of mine, and probably not even the strangest for this particular tale. Among other things, I think "A Wizard of MapQuest" got me my first "I love this, but..." rejection from a SFWA-qualifying editor. But I should probably stop before this entry becomes longer than the story it's a story about. Dontcha love it when people in good moods won't shut up? *But since "MapQuest" was barely flash fiction and the critiquing order was Chip's decision, I have to point out that the first real non-application story we critiqued belonged to Steve Berman, whose normal-length story immediately followed. Man deserves credit when he writes eight words in the time it takes for me to write one.
 WisCon 2008: Best Mistake Evar! May 31, 2008 So WisCon was probably a mistake, healthwise. I was beat even before my reading Friday night, and compromised my immune system so quickly and thoroughly that I caught a bug probably from the first hands I  The Clarion 2006 partial reunion. Photo courtesy of Vince, who has a larger version (and his own blog about WisCon) here  Alex does his, um, reading? as JoSelle looks on in horror.  Is Will testing the camera? Or is the camera testing Will?  This made me sad. And I don't think I made a fool of myself too often throughout the rest of the con, though I don't think I've ever felt so self-conscious as I debated with each interaction: do I bring up the brain injury and risk looking like a sympathy whore or do I let this person walk away assuming I'm just a flaky dumbass? Tried both. Felt like a tool either way. Gonna sign me up for next year and see what WisCon's like coherent. And it'd be nice to actually go to more panels, readings, and parties than I reluctantly miss out on. *Watched Recount. Brilliant performances, except for the cringeworthy Gore and Bush impersonators. Overall, allowed me to relive that unique visceral disheartenment of 2000. So... thanks, HBO!
"Shooting Dogs for Fun and Profit" free at ChiZine October 9, 2007 My story "Shooting Dogs for Fun and Profit" is up at ChiZine/Chiaroscuro. As a comedy piece, it should be a bit more amusing than the story behind it, below: I don't give a lot of thought to genre when I'm writing. Or if I do, it's more comedy vs drama rather than science fiction vs mystery vs non-genre or anything. There've been times I've written an entire story specifically for a market only to discover that, in the process of turning an idea into what I think is a workable story, I'd taken out the very element that would have made it appropriate for that particular market (no speculative element for an SF publication, no pirates for a pirate anthology). Even after years of writing and reading genre fiction, I spent the first half of Clarion failing to figure out the expectations of genre, and the second half failing to figure out my expectations of genre. I've never made it any further than the addage: good stories are good stories. So I've come to haphazardly put works into categories only after the fact, which probably contributes to my difficulty in placing my favorite work, and is probably why regular readers of non-genre fiction enjoyed "Outgoing" so much more than regular readers of science fiction or fantasy did (and why it's no great gamble to recommend "Shotting Dogs" to people who don't typically like horror; it's the horror fans who'll be wondering what the hell they're reading...). "Shooting Dogs for Fun and Profit" was a ten-minute play I submitted in 2005 to the Actor's Theatre of Louisville's National Ten Minute Play competition, which I try to enter every year. It didn't place, but this summer I dug it up because a filmmaker friend was looking for pieces we could shoot in a weekend. I realized there were still things I liked about it. So I'd meant to send it to another short play competition, but misread a deadline as "postmarked by" instead of "received by" because I'm silly like that. At the same time, I was trying to come up with a story for James Van Pelt's Hardboiled Horror, a crime-horror crossgenre anthology. It occurred to me (two years after I wrote it, of course) that "Shooting Dogs" had elements of both crime and horror, but I'd never thought of it as anything other than a comedy. So I kept most of the dialogue, and filled in some gaps, completely Hemingwaying it at times with... "DIALOGUE, DIALOGUE." He stood. His eyeballs itched. "DIALOGUE, DIALOGUE." ...an example which thankfully didn't make it into the submitted draft. So I felt like a hack. But prose can take many forms, and some stories are all about the dialogue. Why try to make "Shooting Dogs" something that it's not? I finished the prose version of the story at the end of June, plenty of time before the anthology deadline, which meant plenty of time to sit on it, work on other things, and come back to it with fresh eyes (which might mean a completely different thing in horror than it does in writing in general; I'll have to be careful). But the ChiZine/Chiaroscuro short fiction contest closed in a few days, so I figured why not let it sit in their slush pile instead of on my hard drive? And I forgot about it, except to wince when the Michael Vick/dogfighting allegations were dominating the news in the months between the ChiZine deadline closing and the announcement of the winners. I thought: okay, there goes the chance in hell I had of placing in the contest, and I'll need to change the title (which is figurative--no dogs even appear in the story) before I send it out to Hardboiled. But I never got the chance. It won third place in the contest and became my second SFWA-qualifying sale. And, for what it's worth, I offered it up to Mr. Van Pelt as a reprint, but it wasn't a good fit for the anthology in the first place, alas. Ah well. I've got nothing to complain about, and clearly I've demonstrated that I'm not the best judge for where mys tuff belongs. Now of course, I'm wondering whether we can really film it on a weekend...
2007 Submission Log: Week 18 May 9, 2007 Including my 100th submission since I graduated from Clarion nine months ago! Submissions 374-380 Stories to MF&SF (my 17th), Futurismic (2nd), and Realms of Fantasy (8th). Poetry to Sport Spec (1st) and Tin House (2nd-4th). Rejections 260-264 Asimov's (sent 1/17). Gizmodo. Sporty Spec (3 days). ASIM (Sent 2/13, Hold request on 2/17.) Powers Letter Column Writing Contest. Some nice comments in the Asimov's rejection. Of interest: Don't want to jinx anything, but I might be over that "post-Clarion writing depression." Only took nine months and 101 submissions to do it, but here we are. I've been shocked at how many writers I've met at Clarion and beyond who say that, more often than not, they actually dislike the act of writing. It shocks me because they're pursuing this as a career just as I am (and in many cases are far ahead of me in their careers), and I guess I don't differentiate my enjoyment from my compulsion when it comes to storytelling. But for me, Pre-Clarion, I would enjoy the act of writing and be pretty pleased with my final results about 60% of the time. There'd be challenging, awful days, but plowing through the tough times and finding solutions to the worst problems generally left me with a feeling that it was worth my time and effort. Some of the bliss would wear off after a few days, of course. But that, too, was a plus because it would give me enough perspective to revise. Now, post-Clarion, particularly with prose, I can probably count on one hand the number of days I've felt good about my work in either enjoyment or satisfaction, much less both. And I write almost every day. But the last three prose stories I've written have been positive experiences overall. This isn't to say they came easy. They just didn't hurt so much, most of the time. And I don't hate what I've written yet. Some Clarion graduates (including successful authors I admire greatly) have said they waited a year after Clarion before they started writing again. I totally get that. I've been at this since 1998 and the only worse writing-year I can remember is after my father died in 2000. So my strategy has been to plow through, and write my way though it. If it's paid off, maybe my reward will be three months of that 60% bliss I was hitting before the workshop. I'll take that. Now let's see if I can't translate that into a sale or two. How's everyone else doing? (I mean besides my classmate Sarah Kelly who just made her first pro sale: a novelette to Analog, no less!!)
Clarion Epilogue: 2nd Podcast in February December 21, 2006 No more written epilogues. I'm finding it's still too soon to have the proper prospective about Clarion to write these, so I'm going to save what little I have left to say for the sequel podcast, which I'll do in February (the sixth month mark from Clarion, whether I'm ready or not). If you want to participate, listen to the pre-Clarion episode, and then share your own story.
Submissions 303 & 304 October 31, 2006 Manga proposal (cowritten with Felice Kuan) to "Women Working: Thinking, Creating, and Making Science" from Feminst Press at CUNY. And another caption to the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. I figure as long as I've got something in their slush pile, it can't hurt for New Yorker staffers to see my name as often as possible. These are subs 49 and 50 for the year, and, unless I continue sending weekly captions to New York when I'm on novel-break, these should be my last subs until December. Phew.
Rejection 194 October 30, 2006 Thirty day rejection from the Magic in the Mirrorstone YA anthology. This sub was a new experience in a couple of ways: I had the opportunity to submit on-spec to an invitation-only anthology, and I submitted a story that I got from concept-to-early-draft in about a week. If accepted, I would later have a chance to revise and polish before publication. Alas, it seems this draft impressed about as much as my early drafts did at Clarion (meaning: this is something I still need to work on). But it was still a very cool opportunity and I'm glad I gave it a shot. I think I can eventually turn this into a workable story; it'll just have to wait until after the novel.
Submissions 301 & 302 October 30, 2006 My fifth play to the Actors Theater of Louisville's annual Ten Minute Play Contest. And my eighth story to Analog. So now I have three Clarion stories revised and in slush piles.
Clarion Epilogue: Look Who's Sucking Blood Now September 23, 2006  Ted Hobgood turns me into a super hero and makes me think twice about ever posting another photo again. You outdid yourself this time, my friend. (Source image by Robert Levy can be found here.)
Clarion Epilogue: Final Photodump September 9, 2006
My Own Clarion Sets
Photos by other Clarionites (If I missed any, then it might be because I wasn't sure whether a photo or photo set was meant to be public. Check everybody's Clarion journals regularly. I'll add any more sets as people bring them to my attention.)
Submissions 282 and 283 September 6, 2006 Genre fiction subs to Analog (my 7th) and Clarkesworld (my 1st). Two newer stories, including my second revised Clarion story to hit the slush piles. Four more revisions to go.
Rejection 184 September 5, 2006 On Sub 279, a July 31 sub to A Field Guide to Surreal Botany from Two Cranes Press. This was the only submission I sent out while at Clarion, and it's no surprise that I couldn't write coherently enough at the workshop to come up with a publishable submission. Ah well. Designing a plant was a fun exercise and a needed break from the typical Clarion fictioneering-and-critiquing, so no regrets except I won't get a Janet Chui illustration of something I wrote. (But huge congrats to my fellow Clarionite Shveta for making her first writing sale to this book.)
Clarion Epilogue: Revisionist His Story September 1, 2006 On a generous day, Swanwick might say the above title is a "nice try." So I'm doing an overhaulish revision on another one of my Clarion stories. It's one of the pieces Michael Swanwick had major issues with, and he was kind enough to do line edits on it anyway. Since my target market for the story is probably Analog, Swanwick's critique was proabably the single-most-valuable marked-up manuscript I would take home with me. So why I sent it home via UPS rather than tape it to my chest for the flight home is a mystery. Okay, it's because I'm hairy and because it would hurt and because today I'm prone to hyperbole, but still.
Continue reading "Clarion Epilogue: Revisionist His Story" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, Prose and Poetry Kelly Link's "The Girl Detective" August 30, 2006 
Just released a free narration of Kelly Link's story "The Girl Detective" over at Spoken Alexandria. It's the first recording I've done post-Clarion, and my second favorite story in Link's first story collection. Last week my narration of my favorite Link story ("Most of My Friends Are Two Thirds Water") got a mention in The New York Times as "worth downloading" and I guess I felt emboldened.
New York Times Hearts Telltale Again August 25, 2006 EDIT: Article and Sidebar reprinted in full at the N&O (no login required). Thanks to Craig Silverman of The New York Times for including me and my audiobook project Telltale Weekly (and sister site "Spoken Alexandria") as part of his Public Domain Books, Ready for Your iPod article (onine with free NYT registration, or page B29 in the today's print version. Sidebar here). The article also offers positive mentions of other great audiobook projects for spoken word connoisseurs: Librivox and LiteralSystems. And fie on my spam filter for earlier this week not understanding that sometimes "Interview Request" in a subject line actually means interview request.
Clarion Epilogue: Imagine What They'll Do With My Crossdressing Photos August 24, 2006 My Chapel Hill buddy Ted Hobgood has determined that Chris's Clarion-volleyball photo was actually Photoshopped. And now Ted has found the original.  Click for a larger version.
Submission 281 August 23, 2006 My fourth comic script and synopsis to 2000 AD. I sent my first sub to them a year ago this coming Saturday. Bothering them every quarter sounds like a good rate of output, I think. Took twice as long as I expected to write this. Hope it's because the story is a stretch for me (closer to what 2000 AD tends to publish) rather than because Clarion has broken me as a writer. Very glad to finally walk this one to the post office.
Clarion Epilogue: The Business of Writing August 22, 2006 Update: I still have at least three more of these I want to write (Craft, Critiquing Process, People, plus the Final Photo Dump), and then I'll get started on the podcast. Feeling much better (though my cough still lingers enough that spoken word narration for Telltale is impossible), and my new writing seems to suck slightly less than it did over the last eight weeks, though it's a painful process to create anything. Soldiering through. Saying that I'm self-taught in anything is one of those backhanded brags. I'm certainly proud of the things I picked up on my own, and the cheapskate in me is almost proud that I could spend 100 hours in trial-and-error situations to avoid spending five dollars for instant access to the same knowledge.
But the more significant problems with being self-taught in anything are that (a) it might have taken me half a decade to figure out what I could have picked up in an afternoon lecture, and (b) there are always holes in my knowledge or skillset, sporadically marring what should be an expertise after so long a practice. And filling in those holes requires better listening skills than I've ever had.
Continue reading "Clarion Epilogue: The Business of Writing" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, Prose and Poetry Thirty August 17, 2006 So I'm thirty years old. And the cats are one. They're too old for kitten food and Cosmo says I'm too old to wear mini-skirts. I think that's bullshit.
Clarion Epilogue: Health and Motivation August 15, 2006 First off, a hearty congrats to Livia for being the first Oh-Sixer to make a pro sale with a Clarion-workshopped story (and just ten days out from Clarion no less)! That's one down, 119 left to go? Finally getting over my sore throat and cough, but I'm still struggling to get my momentum back post-Clarion. At the workshop I was never satisfied with either the amount of work I got done or the quality of the very rough drafts I was producing. Now I'm not satisfied with anything. Still a few days away from being able to talk normally without coughing, but I'm feeling well enough to pretend that this is behind me already. Though Clarion was a great experience and I'm glad I went, it's rather frustrating that I interrupted a moderately successful workflow, ostensibly to improve it. And ten days later I'm still producing at Clarion-levels (at best) rather than where I was in early June. Yes, I know I have unreasonable expectations for myself. That's my charm.
Continue reading "Clarion Epilogue: Health and Motivation" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, Well Awareness Clarion Epilogue: They Remember Me August 11, 2006
We rescued Thor and Loki from the shelter in November, when they were three months old. That puts their birthdate in mid-August, so we decided that the three of us (Alex, Thor, Loki) should all just share a birthday. They'll be one year old when I turn 30 next week.
Clarion Week 6: Graduation 2006 August 10, 2006  I'm back tracking a bit to Wednesday night, but I wanted to end talking about Week 6 with the Clarion graduation photos (view the complete set). Thanks to Will Alexander for snapping the above picture of whatever muppet got through the Clarion screening process. Man, I'm missing these people already.  For a more complete set of graduation day photographs, see Livia's Flickr set, though my set's got one advantage: I grabbed the above photo of Livia while she was preoccupied being in it. To those I owe phone calls to: I apologize. Just when I thought my five-week cough was finally gone, it returned with a sore swollen throat. I'll know more tomorrow.
Clarion Week 6: Always Bet on Black (in Mafia)! August 9, 2006 Long entry, but if you want to skip the boring parts there are more, higher-res Clarion Mafia photos here. The last Friday of Clarion was a pretty good day. I made some radical eating changes (giving up cough drops completely, giving up eating almost nothing but toast even though my stomach had trouble handling anything else, switching to bottled water exclusively for the last 36-hours) and by the afternoon I was feeling better than I had in weeks. More about health in a later entry, but the important thing is that in spite of health issues, I never missed a critique session and I read and critiqued every story at Clarion, even the ones I could have taken a free "pass" on. I don't have the sheet handy, but I believe that's 120 stories critiqued or 20 per week. 
Continue reading "Clarion Week 6: Always Bet on Black (in Mafia)!" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, Pretty Pictures, Prose and Poetry Submission 280 August 8, 2006 It's the first post-Clarion Tuesday and my first Clarion story is revised and in the mail as my 11th fiction submission to MF&SF. Not too bad, but I'm finding it very difficult to get my momentum back now that I'm home.
Clarion Week 6: Kelly Link and Holly Black Bring the Pain. August 7, 2006  On Friday night, the last night of Clarion 2006, Kelly Link and Holly Black brought the pain. And by pain I mean squirt guns.  Complete photo set here.
Clarion Week 6: Impromptu Twelfth Night Reading August 6, 2006
Clarion Week 6: Week Six Ain't Over But August 4, 2006 A bit sick, and conserving all my energy to get through these last few days. I've got more stories and photos to post, so I'll continue talking about this final week of Clarion well into next week. More Sunday or Monday.
Clarion Week 6: Kelly Link's The Cannon August 3, 2006
Kelly suggested a few of her pieces, and, time-wise, the only one I'd be able to read in its entirety was "The Cannon" from Magic for Beginners. I read it for the first time an hour or so before the reading, and, because the piece is structured as a series of questions and answers, I asked fellow thespian-turned-Clarionite Will Alexander to read the questions. (more after the jump)
Continue reading "Clarion Week 6: Kelly Link's The Cannon" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, News, Pretty Pictures, Prose and Poetry Clarion Week 6: Our Final Clarion Story August 2, 2006 When Clarion Director Liz Zernechel said five weeks ago how she and a fellow student did a collaboration when she was a Clarion student, I thought: well, bully for you, but it'll be a cold day in hell... and then I forgot all about it because Superman Returns was starting. Little did I know... Last week my suitemate Felice (as opposed to my sweetmate Jen) and I decided to give it a shot for a jointly final, Clarion Week 6 story. When it comes to habits, I can't imagine a more opposite set of writing partners:
So you can see why we thought this was a good idea. The only way we could be have more opposite writing habits would be if one of us never actually finished a story. But we both do, and both of our routines produce stories at about the same intervals (while we're in East Lansing, at least). It's obvious that we had a collaboration learning curve when our compromise on when-to-write was: morning, afternoon, and night. We came up with a piece with a very different scope from anything we've seen at Clarion so far (but within the SF tradition), and it's something well outside both of our comfort ranges. Yay for week 6 experimentation? Very fried, very tired, with a very early draft turned in right as the class started this morning. We have at least one scene each where the other person has barely skimmed it. Butit was a fun trip and we accomplished our main goal with the story: we're still friends. Or we will be after we've both taken some naps.
Submission 279 July 31, 2006 Took a break tonight from my sixth Clarion story to write a plant submission for A Field Guide to Surreal Botany from Jason and Janet's Two Cranes Press. Got it off an hour before the deadline, but no promises as far as coherence goes. Have to admit it's great to write a non-story for the first time in 5+ weeks. Blogging doesn't count so much. More about the sixth Clarion story forthcoming. It's not just my sixth...
Clarion Week 5: Fancy Dress Party July 30, 2006
So most of my photos of Saturday night's Fancy Dress Party didn't turn out so well, but here's what I got. Luckily Livia and Vince have already posted their Flickr sets with plenty of manskirt goodness. And I know Robert caught a kickass action-shot of me with Kelly Link, so there should be more coming.
Clarion Week 5: Ouch July 29, 2006 Played volleyball this afternoon. Cut out early after just 1.5 hours because of the heat and the sweat washing away my sunblock. Sorry to do so, but it ended up being a smart play: My head doesn't look too bad but my face sure is burnt. Photos taken in the next couple of days might have to be in black and white.
Clarion Week 5: A Laugh Observed and The Happy Dance July 29, 2006 My fifth story went over much better than I expected. In fact, I think even the people who didn't like it, still liked it better than I did. I had worried that the story was too heavy-handed with the theme, but most people didn't even see it. Kelly Link and Holly Black both had very positive things to say about the story, which surprised me as well. I think they both gave this story the shortest critiques they've given all week. I'm not so sure this is a good thing as I'm almost afraid to show them any more of my writing now.
At Clarion so far, I've done two "serious" stories. This is my third "humorous" story.
I'll have to crosscheck my notes to make sure I'm right about this, but I think it's interesting that those who enjoyed the humor in my first piece (the flash fiction I turned in after only a few days at Clarion) have not enjoyed my subsequent humor pieces at all. Which means I'm either really stagnant or really inconsistent in my humor style. After a long week, a handful of us tried to go to a karaoke bar (Fridays at Crunchy's, across from Archives) last night. As Brad put it, they were using a toy karaoke machine that you might give to your child. We couldn't find a table where we could see or hear the "stage," and five feet away from the singer, you couldn't hear the music (and her/his voice only sporadically). So we bailed and went to Harper's, and got some dancing in before bedtime. It's too bad. I'm a better singer than I am a dancer, and it's been about a decade since I've done karaoke. Decide amongst yourselves whether these photos were taken in the critique circle or at Harper's.
Clarion Week 5: Ten More Days... July 27, 2006 ...til I see my babies again.  I've become such a sap in my old age.
Clarion Week 5: My Fifth Clarion Story July 27, 2006 Finished today at 7AM. Another attempt to be funny. The initial idea for this (pseudo-outlined a few years ago; it wasn't working then, but I figured out a way to make it work now, maybe) came from a half-serious place, so maybe some of my crappy attempts to stuff poignance into a humor piece will actually show up in the draft this time. I hope Nancy Kress would forgive me for starting with exposition; if she ever reads it, I'll try to convince her that I did it ironically. Still not very comfortable with torturing my peers with such rough drafts, but it's all I can do to keep up with the faster writers here. And it really crystalized with me, hearing critiques of my Week 4 story, how many issues my classmates caught that I wouldn't have ever caught, even if I had another six weeks on the story to polish it and get it to pass my own high-but-still-imperfect standards of quality. Rahul just realized a pattern in his wordcounts, where his fiction submissions to the Clarion workshop have been consistently getting shorter, starting at 7,700 words and dropping to 2750 by week 5. For me, my wordcounts had the opposite pattern: Week 1: 700 words Week 2: 3500 words Week 3: 4100 words Week 4: 5000 words Week 5: 5100 words Granted, the flash fiction of Week 1 could be a fluke. I just wanted to turn something in quickly so I wouldn't have to inflict any of my 3+ year old application stories on the workshop (and my story ended up being the first non-application story workshopped here, though that was luck. Steve B. also turned in new story for that day, but Chip happened to choose to start with my shorter one). I wonder if this means I'm just getting more used to working at Clarion, since novelette is my natural length, and, on a long enough timeline, I might actually be able to produce one of those stories while I'm here. Or it's possible that once I finish revising the above stories, they'll all top 10,000+ words or more, and I just need the time to flesh them out. My Week six story is going to be an experiment and challenge in a couple of ways, but I'm almost positive I'll top this week's wordcount with it, assuming it works out.
Clarion Week 5: Higher-Res Photodump July 26, 2006 Will Ludwigsen wins for posting the best shot of my legs on
And I've published a higher-resolution photodump of my non-Cyclotron Clarion photos so far (along with some fun new stuff) here.
Clarion Week 5: Happy Birthday, Roomie! July 25, 2006 Felice, my Clarion suitemate*, turns 23 today.  *Pictured above with birthday flowers sent from her boyfriend. Yes, due to a dormitory clerical error, I'm rooming with someone much prettier than I expected
Clarion Week 5: Jim C Hines and the Picnic July 25, 2006
Because I was a bit distracted during his visit (Jen was around), I'll point you to the man himself for the blog post about his visit: here. And about half of what he talked about, he also covered in his essay on landing anthology invites. We finished the day with a few volleyball games. As with chess and pool (where I proved able to consistently sink the 8 ball before I was required to do so), it's been years since I played, and Clarion has reawakened my interest in the game. Not that I'll do anything about it. At least I hope I won't. The last thing I need is another hobby. I know, I know. It's Tuesday and I still haven't said a word about Kelly Link and Holly Black. They're both here for two whole weeks, though. I'm pacing myself.
Clarion Interlude: Saugatuck July 24, 2006
Jen came up for a visit and we celebrated our five year wedding anniversary in Saugatuck and Butler, right near Lake Michigan. We found out too late to go that it's got one of the best freshwater beaches in the States, but we still had fun. Our four-year-old camera broke on the way out there, so we actually replaced it Saturday, which means I'm more likely to be able to take photos that will look okay at better-than-web resolutions. (more photos, etc. after the jump)
Continue reading "Clarion Interlude: Saugatuck" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, Pretty Pictures Clarion Week 4: Misc Photos July 23, 2006  One final photo dump to close out last week. Enjoy or ignore.
Continue reading "Clarion Week 4: Misc Photos" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, Pretty Pictures Clarion Week 4: Jamming with Joe Haldeman July 21, 2006
Tonight was poetry and music night courtesy of Joe and Gay Haldeman. Tough that it came on a night with five stories to critique, a few of them pretty long, but it was a good stress reliever (or exacerbator, depending on how difficult it was to squeeze in writing a poem this week). And I got to jam with Joe, so I'm a happy man. (more after the jump)
Continue reading "Clarion Week 4: Jamming with Joe Haldeman" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, News, Pretty Pictures Clarion Week 4: My Contribution to Hell Week July 20, 2006
My fourth Clarion story will be critiqued in the circle tomorrow and I just got a chance to see it on paper vs the computer screen. How can anyone miss this many typos just from not printing it out before submitting it? Sorry, all.
Clarion Week 4: My Fourth Clarion Story & The Clarion Tree July 20, 2006 Finished my fourth story (about 5,000 words) yesterday morning. I'm not at all happy with it, but I'm finding there's enough in my hastily-put-together Clarion fiction that my fellow students are able to teach me things by critiquing it, even if the stories themselves are undercooked. And the parts that are there I'm unsure enough about that I'd like to see if they're working at all. I'm uncomfortable writing this much sex-related stuff, too much teenage angst, and this unlikeable protagonist, but maybe that's all going to add some interesting tension to the piece. We're here to try new things, right?
Tonight's a poetry slam/party thing. Joe and Gay Haldeman randomly served us a topic and poetry form on Sunday and we'll read the poems tonight. I got cloning for topic and a limerick series for form. I usually hate limericks because they're so easy and unpublishable, but this morning after feeling so drained I was glad it wasn't something that required more thought. Gay says Joe brought his guitar as well, a Martin Backpacker, which I think is the nylon string version just like mine. I hope we'll have time to jam tonight, but I know we've got at least five stories to critique and at least two of them are in the 9,000+ word range.  Too fried to come up with a story for the tree-hugging pics of classmates Felice Kuan and Shveta Thakrar. But they turned out well, and it'll beef up another short post. Click for a larger version of this last photo.
Clarion Week 4: Tobias Buckell Visit July 19, 2006
Author and Clarion alumn Tobias S. Buckell came to visit Clarion this weekend. We workshopped in the Cleveland-based Cajun Sushi Hamsters critique group together, and I haven't seen him in about six years. His visit overlapped our last few days of Nancy Kress. A handful of photos after the jump.
Continue reading "Clarion Week 4: Tobias Buckell Visit" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, Peers & Peerless, Pretty Pictures Clarion Week 4: Hell Week Begins July 18, 2006 I want to talk about Tobias Buckell's visit, and the last two days with Joe and Gay Haldeman. But it seems our Clarion Week-4 Crash has for the most part taken the form of lethargy and lost momentum. I hear it's usually high-stress levels and getting on eachother's nerves, so maybe this is a good thing. It's been almost a full week now since I got this current story to its first draft. Since then I've worked at least two hours a day, slowly turning it into a story that might work. And I'm still not sure it's at a place where I'm not embarrassed to show it to anyone. When the story's finished and out of my hands, I'll talk about the fun stuff.
Clarion Week 3: Chess with Kress REMATCH! July 16, 2006 
After Tuesday's chess game with Beggars in Spain author Nancy Kress, she requested, nay, demanded a rematch. After some delays that neither of us will admit were due to cowardice, we finally met again in Owen Hall to settle some scores. (more after the jump)
Continue reading "Clarion Week 3: Chess with Kress REMATCH!" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal, News, Pretty Pictures Clarion Week 3: Nancy Kress and the Me of 2003 July 13, 2006 My third story survived a critiquing on Tuesday. I'm a little disappointed, because the serious threads in a mostly-humorous story got completely lost, but overall the class seemed to enjoy it. Livia described Nancy Kress's teaching/critiquing approach as an iron fist in a velvet glove (I didn't actually hear Livia say this. Aimee mentioned it in her blog. Now if you quote Livia via me, via Aimee, make sure you add something small to the legend, like Livia was on a white horse when she said it.) That sounds about right. For those interested in what she covered in her lecture on Monday, Rahul took better notes than I did. In our one-on-one conference, Kress was able to identify (I think accurately) patterns in my fiction, even though I wrote the application stories more than three years ago. The big one is that the SF element (whatever makes the story a speculative/science fiction/fantasy story) is often the weakest point. I've been working on this and structure over the past few years, and, while I'm getting a pretty good grasp of the latter, I have to admit that the SF element is often the least interesting part of great SF stories I read.
Continue reading "Clarion Week 3: Nancy Kress and the Me of 2003" Filed Under: Clarion, Journal Clarion Week 3: Chess with Kress July 12, 2006
This week's author-in-residence Nancy Kress is a chess nut (as opposed to a chestnut), and she expressed interest in playing a game yesterday. I was the only volunteer. We were pretty evenly matched. I think she's a recent learner and it's been years since I played. I'd forgotten how fun it was.
Tonight she gave a reading of her new story "Endgame" (sold to Asimov's, but not yet scheduled) at the Archives Book Store in East Lansing. In her introduction she explained the story's genesis as a byproduct of learning the game of chess. She said she wasn't very good "as Alex can tell you" because I (barely) beat her in our first game yesterday.
Nancy and I have a rematch tomorrow. In lieu of my fourth story, I should work on my to-be-famous last words tonight.
Clarion Week 3: My Third Clarion Story July 10, 2006 Kind of went into a panic mode to finish my third story by this morning. Last week we had 22 stories (essentially everyone turned in something) which led to six hour critique sessions and one night with as many as 6 stories to critique. Two people have stories for today, and we realized yesterday that only two people were planning on handing in stories tomorrow (and everyone was planning on handing in stories during the week). Which means toward the end of the week we have a chance of critiquing at least five a night. I didn't want to contribute to the bottleneck, and I thought it would be an interesting challenge to see exactly how quickly I could push myself to get to a serviceable draft. I could have stood to wait another day before submitting, but I'm not too embarassed at what I'm turning in. On the sentence level, I'm having trouble with the flow of this piece, but most of the beats I want are in there. Still this is probably the roughest draft I'm comfortable with showing anyone, and it's only 4,100 words. Guess all that training paid off after all. I should find out tomorrow whether the story makes any sense at this stage. On to the next one.
Clarion Week 3: Proof of Asimov's July 9, 2006 The galleys/proofs for my novelette "Outgoing" arrived yesterday (Jen forwarded them to me, along with some organic fruit leather). After a week of dissecting stories with Michael Swanwick, I was worried that I would use that recently acquired perspective to hate every word, that I would actually be embarassed at what I wrote about nine months ago (and revised more recently) even as it neared publication. I was very pleased to read it over again and find that overall I'm still happy with it. I had a few tiny changes ("replace poetry with poems," etc.). But I probably would have been okay if it went to press as is/was. And the most exciting news with the proof: on the top of every other page it says "February 2007." Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a publication date. Also got Telltale contributor payments figured out, statements sent. I went on a walk yesterday to find a local Kinko's-type place to print some related PDFs and get an extra photocopy of my proof, but all the locally owned shops were closed. So Kinko's it was. Also stopped at a local comic shop to pick up the Sergio Aragones issue of Solo. Not his best work, but still one of my favorite single issues of the year. I realized this weekend that I've now made a post every day since I got to Clarion. That was never my intention, even though I do get some processing benefit out of it. But I bring this up now because I'm not going to post just to post. If I miss a day it's not necessarily because I'm blog-slacking or overworked in other areas; it's just because I didn't think I had something particularly interesting to say just then. Oh and the general malaise I felt last Wednesday lasted about a day. I'm not loving my current story, but I'm not very down about it. Thanks, all, for asking, for caring. This week: Nancy Kress.
Clarion Week 2: The Cyclotron July 8, 2006 
Yesterday a bunch of us (including our author-of-the-week Michael Swanwick) got a tour of MSU's Cyclotron. Our fearless director Liz talked about it in her LJ a bit, and I'll let Wikipedia explain the rest. It was Friday afternoon and my brain was fried after a six hour critique session, but it was still interestering, what little I was able to absorb. And I took my camera out for the first time at Clarion.Complete pictures. I also posted lower-res versions to Flickr, but I'm new to this service and it didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. And Steve G. posted more pics as well.
Clarion Week 2: Clarion Theme Song at ISBW July 7, 2006 My "Clarion Journey" theme song got some additional airplay on writer Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing podcast. Thanks, Mur!
Clarion Week 2: Clarion Cuisine July 6, 2006 On our walk to Michael Swanwick's reading at the Archives bookshop in Lansing, a few of us stopped for dinner at Beggar's Banquet. What we expected to be a half hour meal ended up closer to 1.5 hours and we consequently missed the reading. Very unfortunate, but it's hard to regret having a non-Owen-Hall meal. The vegetables were fresh and everything had taste without requiring help from Mrs. Dash. The cafeteria food hasn't been agreeing with my stomach. I guess our within-walking-distance food co-op back home has been spoiling me and I'm used to too much organic in my diet. Or maybe I'm just getting old. The Owen Hall salad bar is almost entirely iceberg lettuce. I've taken to skipping the lettuce entirely and making myself cucumber-broccoli-tomato salads and that's my standby. I got some pseudo-natural peanut butter and put that on fruit at least once per day. We've made infrequent runs to the local health food store and I'm getting some good food to supplement my Owen Hall base, but my fridge is too small and wallet too thin to fulfill my entire diet that way. But I have Odwalla bars, Stretch Island fruit leather, the occasional fresh fruit, organic pop-tarts, Stacy's Pita Chips, and some hummus. I have dried blueberries and dates to put on cereal with non-organic milk (oh, how I miss Maple View Farm--a local dairy farm in NC that doesn't use BGH). Tastewise, I'm coping. I have a bottle of Mrs. Dash Garlic and Herb seasoning, which is the exact substance that allowed me to tolerate the rather bland Ashland University food as an undergrad. I'd just be happy if I can find a few bland things from the Owen Hall cafeteria that don't bother my stomach.
Meanwhile, Back in Chapel Hill July 5, 2006 A few days before I left for Clarion, a Chapel Hill News reporter interviewed me as I donated blood in Carrboro. I think the article was published the Sunday that both Jen and I were out of town, but the full text is now online. I remember cracking a lot of jokes, but I guess he didn't think they were newsworthy. The attention-whore in me is still amazed that my name is the first thing in the article. I would have gone with something about the Red Cross.
Clarion Week 2: Writer in Morning |
