Off to a good start this week, in a way. I decided to take a break from To the Happy Country for today, and I started work on a new ghost story set in my home province of Saskatchewan, called The Empty Slough. It’s meandering, but that’s fine: I fully expect to draft it to roughly 5000 words and then cut 30-40% of that in the end. It’s a weird ghost story, but I’ll say nothing more about that until I find out whether it works or not, since the “twist” in the story is metaphysical, and by “metaphysical” I …

Well, I’m off to a slow start — I got not much writing done today, but a lot of reading/research and planning. Of course, I have NO idea what’s happening next, as well as having a strong feeling I may need to skip ahead to Book III and come back to work on Book II once I have a better idea what goes on later in the story. I think the main problem is that I’m so close to the research right now that I’m having a hard time being imaginative enough. A lot of the stuff I’m writing is …

So I need to work out a list of my sponsors to be Tuckerized into my story, and names to use. Some are very easy, some less so, since my story is set in Korea and most (but not all) of the characters will be Koreans, followed by Chinese and Japanese, with a few Americans thrown in. So if there’s an Asiatic-sounding name you prefer, feel free to specify it. (I’m also working on short stories as I go, so I could always work some of you westerner-types into one of those.) You don’t need to leave a comment here, …

I did some conversation exam midterms — the air conditioner in my office was broken, and it was HOT until it was fixed in the afternoon — and when I got home, I suddenly slept until darkness fell. I am still exhausted, but besides grocery shopping, I got in  1,403 words (426 on “McWar,” with a nasty, gross breakthrough, and 977 on To the Happy Country…). I was hoping to do some reading tonight — more on North Korea and all that — but I’m exhausted still, and I can’t complain, since I did finish Cormac McCarthy’s depressing/beautiful/horrible/damned-good novel The …

Things are proceeding nicely. I’m at 2900 words for today, and I may or may not get more done tonight, but Lime and I have a dinner meeting, and I think I’ll go climb the mountain and grade a little in the three hours until then. As for the breakdown, it’s pretty round in terms of numbers: I put in 2300 words on To the Happy Country… and 600 words on what I’m currently calling “McWar” (though I suspect it’ll have a new name when I finish it). I’m not sure why, but working on both things — something very …

Last year, I went to the Clarion West workshop in Seattle. I learned lots. I wrote lots. I made some incredible friends, and found myself some mentors, too. I think other people should be able to do that. But the costs aren’t covered completely by the funding that comes in from students and scholarships. Even with generous funds, like the Susan C. Petrey scholarship that sent me there, a lot of the work still ends up being done by volunteers, and running a world-class writing workshop is not cheap or easy. So there’s a write-a-thon. I’ve committed to doing my …