Sorry that I haven’t been posting lately. Believe me when I tell you that we’ve been worked off our asses here.
For this Clarion class, Week 5 was our week four. There was a fair amount of drama, some people broke down (but recovered), and there were tons of in-jokes in the stories.
We held a Drunken Flash Fiction night. This was awesome, and fully deserves to become a new Clarion West tradition. We all got hammered then sat down in the common room, all sixteen of us, laptops open. We got two “one word prompts” from the person on either side of us. Mine were “motherland” and “gangsta land”. We had twenty minuets to write, then we went around the circle and read what we had aloud. Maybe some day I’ll be convinced to post the story I wrote on this blog, but my arm would have to be twisted something fierce. Let’s just say that I’m the only guy in the world who, when he tries to read in the voice of an African American gangsta, actually sounds whiter. Like Christopher Walkin, to be exact. People were falling out of their chairs laughing.
David Hartwell’s week was pretty tough. He shared a lot of Things You Don’t Want To Hear with several writers, and I know one of us was almost in tears. My story, “GAS PIPES AND SIGILS” (soon to be retitled), did fairly well in critique. The main comments were that my characterization was thin (as always), and the world needed to be developed more (as always in a first draft). Then it got to David Hartwell. He suggested that I was doing too many close-ups and that I needed a better ear for prose. A better ear for prose? Ouch. I went into private conference a little upset, but he told me that I write publishable stuff and that I needed to just take my prose from 85% to 100%. This was extremely heartening. He said that if I wrote an entire novel like the story I’d written it would probably sell, because he didn’t recall anything like it. Zing! He did, however, suggest that I buy a major poetry anthology and read it aloud to work on the meter of my prose. I will certainly do that.
The party on Friday was pretty awesome (for me). I got to meet one of my heroes, David D Levine. I’ve been following (and trying to emulate) his career. He was the reason I entered Writers of the Future, and he was the reason that I signed up for Clarion West. He’s a tremendous writer (did I mention that he won a Hugo!), and he’s pretty free with advice. It’s always nice when your heroes turn out to be great people in real life. Unfortunately, I had to rescue a fellow Clarionite who’d run into some trouble, so I never got to say goodbye, but I hope to meet him again at a local con.
I also got to meet Jay Lake, who’s a pretty great guy. The first time I met him, he gave me a pin that read “My Mom Thinks I’m Better Than Jay Lake”, and when I reminded him of that, he chuckled and said that that sounded like something he’d do. He shared some advice about Writers of the Future (he won that too), and we spoke a little about blogging. Apparently, it kills conversation because people you talk to know all your small talk.
We got to meet Rudy Rucker and he seems really cool and pretty laid back which is definitely what we need. A few people have hit “critique fail”, where they have been reading a story and said “All the words are there, but they just don’t make sense to me in my current state”, not because the stories aren’t strong, but because we’re all so exhausted.
My last piece is entitled GIANT IN THE PLAYGROUND and is a hard-sci fi space opera (does that made sense??). The bones are there, but it’ll need at least two more rewrites. If I had to sum it up, it would be Sherlock Holmes battles Cthulu in space. Reconcile that to the first line of this paragraph, and you might just get it. Oh, and it’s based on a blond joke. So there.
Anyways, five more days until I get to see Alicia. Clarion West has been amazing, but I really miss my actual life. Six weeks is great, but I don’t think I could do a seventh.
Tags: Clarion West, David G Hartwell, Rudy Rucker, Writers of the Future