Last weekend I went to Peter Beagle’s one-day writing workshop at Hugo House. We did some writing exercises geared toward creating a distinctive voice: writing a monologue in a non-human voice, writing a dialog between two characters where it was clear who was speaking even without any tags. The exercises (at least for me) were as much about thinking from a different POV as they were about dialog per se. I wanted to generate dialog that was unique to the character on more than just the surface level of vocabulary and speech patterns.
tinaconnolly came to the Peter Beagle workshop too, so we got to hang out for a couple days, very fun stuff. In preparation for the workshop, we watched The Last Unicorn on Saturday night. Then the workshop on Sunday, with delicious home-made Pho (Vietnamese noodles) with one of our Clarion classmates, Mark. Monday we headed off to the zoo, where I took some pictures and tinaconnolly did some sketches. Then Monday night we took Peter out to dinner and went to his reading, where he read his story “Salt Wine” and also sang a couple songs (Leslie brought her guitar so he could play/sing). So, all in all, a very entertaining weekend. Oh, and there was also chocolate (thanks tina!) and Puyallup fair-style scones (aka Fischer scones). Yum!
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I’ve forgotten what I’ve listed on journal and what I haven’t, but recently:
Submission #35 – to Fantasy Magazine
– and –
Rejections #27 and #28 – from the Hugo House genre competition (technically a non-response; but they announced the winners) and Realms of Fantasy (29 days).
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And I managed to finish a story today (yay!). It is the SFnal one I’ve been wrestling with for a while because it kept trying to be a novel. I managed to lop off a chunk of the storyline and wrestle it into a 6,000-word story. So now that one’s off to my local crit group. I have a couple ideas (one horror and one fantasy-ish) that I may try to write next. And at some point soonish I’ll want to get started on the novel version of the story I just finished…
no, thank you!!
*shoots wary glance at tuna*
Are you thanking me forwards-in-time or backwards-in-time? ;)