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 and nephews end up within visiting distance during the week. I should be back in Korea on Tuesday next week.
The workshop was an amazing experience. I learned a lot about writing, I even learned a few things about myself, and I connected with some wonderful people: the fellow students were great, and I hope it’s true what they say about the most cohesive classes giving rise to more markedly successful writers. This class got along very well, and for good reason: everyone in his or her way was fascinating, and I guess in retrospect, 6 weeks was just enough time to get to know everyone enough to miss them a lot now.
The instructors, as I’ve noted in the previous week, were excellent — as I said, I’ll post about Vernor Vinge’s absolutely outstanding week in a couple of days — and Neile and Leslie are amazing people. I have some sense (though not a complete one, I’m sure) of how much energy they put into making Clarion West happen annually.
Now, I have a stack of stories to revise; I think just about every one of them I can do something with, and I intend to do that. I am also considering starting in September on a regimen of writing one short story every week, or perhaps every ten days. To which end, I think I’ll be blogging a fair bit less, and retooling this site so that the blog is not the central point of it. (Though it will remain the most-often-updated portion of the site.) In essence, the less I write on my blog, the more I write in stories and novels, and I think that’s a good thing. But updates will be coming, of course, and random posts.
Lime’s out there in Korea, still waiting for me to come back, and I have to say she’s held up like a trooper. I miss her a lot, and I’m not sure I showed it enough. Now I’m thinking a lot about when I come back to her.
But for now, I’m in Saskatoon for a while, and coming down off the continual high of writing at more-than-full-time and being surrounded by cool people doing the same; I’m also relaxing after a very intense experience of the same. So I feel like sleeping all day today, though I probably won’t do that at all.
Still, no more posting for today at least.