Still Fighting with Spiders

Well, Friday came and went, and I still haven’t finished my revisions :( I did get a complete second draft done, but once I’d fixed the problems from the first draft, a whole new set of problems cropped up that need fixin’ before I can call the story truly revised. Oh well. I have ideas for what I want to do, so my new goal is to have these revisions done by tomorrow. I just hope I’m not making things worse with all this editing!

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I thought this was incredibly cute, so I’ll share…

Every week at Clarion our class got gifts for the instructor that week. Over the course of the workshop, we developed a stuffed animal theme, where most gifts involved surgically altering a stuffed animal to make it relevant to a story that the instructor had written. Anyway, for our anniversary yesterday, my husband made me a stuffed animal *from scratch* from one of my pre-workshop stories. (Granted, the story involved alien creatures called ‘lumpies’ that were essentially big gray blobs, but still!!)

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Today was a good day for my Clarion withdrawal symptoms. This afternoon I went to a crit session with some former Clarion grads and got my fix of both coffee and “ditto.” It was nice to get back into the mode of reading and critting stories, even if it was only two for the whole week instead of seventeen. I’m hoping that being in the group will help motivate me to write new stories and to get my Clarion stories revised. Then this evening I got to go to a mini-reunion with a few of my classmates over dinner, so …

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Clarion Wrap-up

Final word count:

Week 1 (exercises on setting, character, and plot) : 2,000 words
Week 2 story: 1,900 words
Week 3 story: 2,700 words
Week 4 story: 5,000 words
Week 5 story: 3,500 words
Week 6 story: 5,700 words

Total: 20,800 words

I was far from being the most prolific writer of our group, but over 20k words in six weeks is not too shabby :)

Having been through the workshop, what advice can I give to future students?

* Bring ideas with you to the workshop, but don’t feel obligated to use them. I …

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Week 5. Ellen Datlow gave us an editor’s perspective, including: information about markets, the importance of the first read (you can only read a story for the first time once), and insights into working with an editor on revisions. Ellen was great both for her perspective on writing and for being a wonderfully fun person to hang out with. Writing-wise, this week was a particularly stressful week for me, I didn’t get the idea for what I wanted to write until mid-week (which wasn’t entirely unusual for me), AND the idea was pretty complicated so it took me a couple …

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Where did weeks 3 and 4 go? Time is accelerating at an alarming rate and I have no idea where it is going. I’m already dreading leaving, I’ll miss being with everyone so much (I hate it when I start missing people before they’re gone, it’s a bad habit of mine, but the end of the six weeks is rushing ever closer so I can’t help it).

Week 3 – Ian MacLeod was great. The poor man was both sick and jetlagged when we met him on Sunday, but he perked up as the week went on. He reinforced for …

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Well, two weekends have come and gone without a single post from me, which shows how busy they are keeping us here :)

Paul Park’s week flew by. Instead of writing a full story for him to critique, we did a setting sketch, a character sketch, and a plot outline. He would read some of the sketches to us in class and we talked about them. It was lovely to deconstruct a story into these elements and really focus in on what does and doesn’t work. The other nice thing about the exercises is it got us into the habit …

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We met Paul Park yesterday, and I’m very excited about this week. We already had homework! His writing is a very different style from mine, so I’m hoping to learn from his strengths (but I suspect that this week will be challenging for me, because Paul is wonderful with setting, and it’s one of my weakest points).

I’m going to try to update my journal on the weekends, but already I get the sense that we will be very busy, so I may not keep up on my flist, and I won’t answer my comments (though I will read them).

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Bleh. I woke up this morning with the urinary tract infection, and had to spend a good chunk of my day at the University health clinic :( I hate it when you go into the doctor knowing exactly what you need (antibiotics) and and then it takes three hours of mostly just sitting around for them to come to the conclusion that you need antibiotics. Add another half an hour waiting at the pharmacy, and that was my day today. Not exactly my idea of a good time. Of course, it could’ve been worse, it could’ve happened tomorrow morning.

Okay, …

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