Four days. Last night when I was trying (unsuccessfully) to get to sleep, I found myself composing text for one of my story ideas, and got up and typed out a few hundred words. This was promising on a couple of levels: first, it’s been awhile since text spontaneously appeared in my brain; second, my wrists appeared none the worse for wear after the half hour or so of typing I did.

My “things to pack” pile grows steadily larger. The luxury of being able to throw whatever I want into my car almost guarantees that I will bring twice …

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For some reason, I’ve been craving doughnuts lately, so this morning I went to Krispy Kreme and got a cup of coffee and not one but *two* doughnuts. Sigh. I actually feel worst about the coffee, I’m supposed to be laying off caffeine (!!) because apparently it isn’t good for my wrist problem. My wrists have actually been better lately, though, so maybe I’ve reached the point where coffee is okay.

I’m now officially giving up on my goal of getting all my trunkies out the door before the workshop. Looking over them, I think I’ll be better off retiring …

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Long time, no posts. I blame the tendons in my wrists. I finally broke down and ordered voice recognition software, which should arrive tomorrow. My previous strategy of avoiding the computer didn’t seem to be working (in part because I have a hard time avoiding the computer), and this way I’ll have a few weeks to train the voice recognition (and for it to train me!) before the workshop. I have my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to generate stories by speaking them out loud…I’ve read passages out loud for editing purposes before, but I’ve never tried to write …

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One of my pre-clarion goals is to touch up my trunk stories (“trunkies”) and get them out to markets. I think it’s a reasonable goal–there are about 7 weeks left before the workshop starts, and I have 4 trunk stories, most of which were retired after being submitted only to the Writers of the Future contest and/or the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There are a lot of other markets out there, and I have to get into the habit of having stories make the rounds before I retire them!

In light of that goal, I sent a revised …

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This summer I will be spending six weeks at Clarion West, a workshop designed to help writers prepare for a professional career in speculative fiction. I’ve started this journal so that friends, family, and anyone with an interest in Clarion can read about my experience.

The workshop doesn’t start until mid-June, so until then my posts may be few and far between. . .

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