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Clarion Week 2: My Second Clarion Story July 2, 2006 I think in the 24 hours or so between Michael Swanwick arriving (Saturday) and Chip Delany leaving (Sunday) that the average IQ on this side of campus rose to nigh-singularity levels. Finished polishing my second Clarion story, final tally at 3500 words. That's a length I've been trying to hit over the last four months and it's only now that I finally succeeded. And the story works, I think. But I won't know for sure until Tuesday or Wednesday (I turned it in around 3PM, but a lot of other students are planning on turning in stories tonight too, I think) and I still don't have enough perspective to know its merits, or whether I'll want to turn it into a novelette by the end of the year. But I do know this one's the opposite of my first: Serious instead of humorous, poignant (hopefully) instead of cute/clever. However... What I really want to go for is is a balance of both cuteness and depth in the same story, which I think was the strength of my Asimov's sale. Most of my other stories (including all that I've written since) swing the pendulum more widely into one camp or the other, to varying degrees of success. I'm not looking for the formula that will teach me how to write a story like that every time, but I would like to give it another shot and figure out whether that's as close to my actual "voice" as an SF writer as I'm going to get at this early stage of my career, or whether it was just the appropriate voice for that particular story. I think I've finished a story outline that has that kind of potential--but that also pushes me in a new direction--and, because my second story's now done at the beginning of Week 2, I have at least ten days to work it out and still have a story done for critique during Nancy Kress's Week 3. It's breathing space, but I'm a slow writer. There are no guarantees. Back to work. Filed under Clarion, Journal, Prose and Poetry  
Comments: Discuss this entry at LiveJournalby Alex Wilson. This is from an online journal/blog I kept from 1998-2009. Back to alexwilson.com. |