Well, the workshop proper, anyway. We’ll still be in touch by email and meeting at cons and whenever we pass through one anothers’ areas, but the Clarion West Workshop proper is finished. Six weeks of intense writing, bonding, and learning from wonderful teachers and classmates is over, and boy am I dazed. I’ll be posting about our last week at Clarion West 2006 in a day or two, when I feel up to it, but I thought I’d note that the workshop is indeed over and I’m now in Saskatoon for a few days, visiting my Mom and whichever siblings …
Month: July 2006
Clarion West, Week 5
Week 5 was great. We’re staring to get tired out, but it’s not a fatal kind of tired. Ellen’s feedback was very interesting, sometimes surprising and sometimes not. I think it’s a sign that our class is still doing pretty well with crits that she often agreed with the bulk of ideas that were floating around; I think it’s interesting that she also often advised us to ignore the more radical advice and be careful to preserve the heart of the story for any given work. She was great in one-on-ones; unflinchingly honest about what she saw in my work, …
Monday, ~8:30pm, In the Main Room
A man not so very long gone might have called them angelheaded, every one of them radiant thieves and pickpockets of the dead or almost-alive. They have been closed up in little rooms, singing songs without guitars, but they come down, and sit together laughing for a little while, and sing of stars and nights and long-gone men with misplaced bodies, and the evening begins to blossom into itself all around them. Do they know that this time, too, will be over soon?
Clarion West Week 4
Hey all. Well, Nalo’s gone, and like all of our tutors so far, we miss her. She was sharp in critiques, friendly both in and out of class, and she spent extra time with us outside class, including a special session depicting people of sexualities that may not be exactly like our own — about tackling the heterogeneity that can exist in imaginary worlds, and which can make those worlds more interesting and exciting. But she wasn’t just great on diversity/sexuality-related writing, and it’d be unfortunate if she were typecast as being mostly about that, when in fact, she’s mostly …
Clarion West Week 3
A great, busy, hard-driving week. We had Ian MacLeod in from UK and he focused on character and how things can flow from that. Character connects to plot and setting and setting connects to character and plot and plot connects to character and setting, yes, but what are the mechanics of character? What are the mechanics of creating a plot and then choosing a character who fits into it? What are the mechanics of working with settings to frame or give birth to characters and plots? How do we generate characters? Why do they have the quirks they do? How …