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 …
Tag: Clarion West 2006
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 …
Clarion West Week 2
It was an excellent, amazing week. Maureen McHugh is rock’n’roll. She said a lot of very great, very simple but not necessarily straightforward things… or rather, straightforward things I’ve never heard before, and somehow already heard before at the same time. She is bristlingly intelligent, wonderfully friendly. I some really good advice one-on-one, and lots of great thoughts in critique sessions. Maureen did some wonderful exercises with us, including one which was directly useful to me in writing the story I handed in on Wednesday night. It was due tonight (Sunday, a long time later) but I drafted it — …
Chirality @ Clarion
Brief note: mainly posting this so as not to lose the link or have to hunt for it: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001 was awarded for work in chirality, which is something that looks like it will be an important science bitlet in the story I’m writing now. The link above is a really good explanation of what the hell chirality is. Working like mad, hoping to finish this at midweek and, barring objections, submit it for crit on a day when fewer submissions are currently scheduled. If it’s okay with our very cool new instructor, Maureen McHugh, who …
Clarion, Day 6
I’m about a week into Clarion; the first week of instruction, which was with Paul Park, has finished but it’s only Saturday so the first week isn’t over. Paul has this excellent ability to cut to the heart of the matter of things, or, perhaps, more importantly, to get us to look at the heart of the matter of things. Socratic method — questions, spinning out of implications, changing direction and starting again with more questions, until we seem to have reached somewhere. And storytime: I will really miss hearing him reading stories. The man should be reading audiobooks. So …