Okay, okay, I don’t actually leave until tomorrow at 5am, but I’m already there in spirit.

I’ll miss my wife, cats, and house (in that order), none of which I’ve ever been separated for such a long period of time, but I’m looking forward to the experience.

Tonight I’m going to set up Skype so Alicia and I can video conference (dry word, but we won’t be nearly so business-like), and I’m sure there will be some cross-border traffic as well.

I’m looking forward to meeting seventeen other students and six instructors who know their way around fiction. But that’s a lot of introductions for a shy guy like me to handle (not to mention a lot of social landmines to step on!).

Quite a few workshop journals have mentioned that some students, at the start of the workshop, try and figure out who are the keeners and who will take a little longer to break through. I guess that’s to establish some kind of writer pecking order. I don’t want to buy into that, so I think I’ll try and keep my Writers of the Future win under my hat for as long as possible, though Todd Vandermark, fellow Clarionite and Codex member, almost certainly knows about it.

Fact is, everyone attending the workshop is at a certain level, career-wise, so no one should have to prove anything. I know better than anyone that it just takes one great story to make or break your career and it could come from any one of us. The fact is, if we’re lucky we’ll form the kind of group that will help each other for the duration of our careers.

The thing to remember is that writing fiction is not a zero-sum affair. If any one of us does well, we all succeed. That’s not to say that there won’t be a little friendly rivalry to see which one of us makes a pro-sale from a story written at the workshop, of course. I hope to make one DURiNG the workshop for a piece I’ll finish polishing on Saturday, but we’ll see what the future holds.

To regular readers of this blog, I plan to leak like a sieve when it comes to Clarion teachings. If you have questions for me, ask them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Tags: Clarion West