Caroline M. Yoachim

Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!

Well, I’ve done a third pass on my spiders, and they are now neatly packaged up and ready to go to F&SF in tomorrow’s mail (aka, I’m setting them free…hehe). That’s one down and two to go for the submission challenge (3 subs in Sept). Submission number two is in pretty good shape, and it’ll probably go to WotF. Submission number three…*shrug* There’s still a fair amount of time left, I’m sure something will come to me :)

Thanks to the excellent recommendations of my Clarion classmates, I’ve been reading tons of great SF lately (in reverse chronological order): Marooned …

More photos than words…

I’ve been spending more time on photography lately than writing (thus the new icon – for bigger pix check out my flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/78523822@N00/ ). It’s not necessarily a bad thing…photography is easier on my wrists, but still keeps the creative juices flowing.

This is not to say I haven’t gotten any writing done. Mostly I’ve been focusing my energies on revisions – I polished up my twice-workshopped draft of my spider story and did a first pass of revision on one of my other Clarion stories. I’m still stalled out on my fresh stuff, but rather than force it, …

Artificial Deadlines

Well, I finally met my goal of writing a post-Clarion story. No, it isn’t the one I was working on when I wrote my last post. Yes, it’s flash fiction. And it’s more than a week late for the deadline. (I think the deadline went by so fast that there was a doppler effect on the whooshing noise it made!) As a result, I find myself questioning the utility of self-imposed deadlines as a motivational tool — they just don’t have the bite of real deadlines. So I think I’ll try writing without deadlines for a bit and see how …

Time to start something new…

Well, I got the spiders revised by Sunday, and haven’t done much in the way of writing since then, so the time has come to post another goal…a brand new story by August 27th. I haven’t picked out an idea yet, but I do have a few things swirling around in my head.

I’m hoping to set up a pattern for myself where I alternate between writing something new and revising the stories I wrote at Clarion. That way I’ll always have something to do while the fresh stories sit for a bit, and I’ll always have a backlog of …

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!

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!!)

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …