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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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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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Baen’s Universe has a nifty submission system where they send confirmation that they got your mansucript, and then a link where you can track its progress. When I submitted my story last week, I got a confirmation email. So far, so good. Then shortly after I submitted my story, the entire site went down for a couple of days, and while the main site is back up, my link to track the progress of the manuscript is still dead.

My question is this: Should I query to see if they have my story? I (obviously) don’t want to annoy the …

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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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