Wednesday, June 16th, 1999

One of the many amenities that the Clarion Workshop offers is the atrociously bad food in the Owen Hall Cafeteria. Owen Hall has turned bad food into an art form. Not only do you see bad food once, but it magically mutates by the next meal into something even more horrible. For example, greasy buffalo wings at lunch will turn into greasy pizza topped with dried up bits of buffalo wings by dinner time. It is a sad commentary on the food here that the best meal was "Wet Burritos" (yes, that's how the Owen's official cafeteria menu described them.)

I have noted a number of advantages to being surrounded at all times by bad food:

• It's one of the most effective weight loss programs I have ever seen. Upon entering the cafeteria, many of us have found that we lost our appetites altogether. A majority of the Clarion students here have started losing weight, whether they wanted to or not. Even I have lost two pounds so far this week.

• It has entertainment value. If we ever run out of conversational topics in the dining hall, we can always look at each other's plates and exclaim, "What is that?"

• It has inspired an absolutely hilarious filk by one of my classmates. Please read it.

• It promotes group solidarity and bonding. You will never be alone if you want to escape the cafeteria and go out to a restaurant instead. In the cafeteria, you will feel great empathy for your fellow diners. It is us against the vast piles of yucky food. Tums or Rolaids, anyone?

  I Share A Brain with Tim Pratt

  Tomorrow the group will critique, "The Grand Cheat," one of the stories that I submitted with my Clarion application. I read my story over and gagged. The prose was even worse than I remembered. What was I thinking when I submitted that awful thing to Clarion? Oh well. I'll hug the elephant, take copious notes, and survive. My next story will surely be better.

  One of the other pieces up for critique tomorrow is Tim Pratt's "Sarah and the Reptile God" which like "The Grand Cheat", features Hindu gods and lawyers. It also has a dying grandfather scene (much like the one in my novel) and giant reptiles (much like the ones I was planning to do in my next story.) Tim Pratt has never read any of my fiction before. Is the man plugged into my brain?

  This is very spooky for me. I have always been enormously proud of the originality of my ideas and settings, and now someone else is spontaneously coming up with them, and writing them faster than I ever could. Tim Pratt is prolific. He can write 7,000 words in a few hours, and have it all be heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Even worse, he's such a nice guy that I can't even have the satisfaction of hating him or anything like that. :-)

  Sometimes, life just isn't fair. Oh well, time to stop griping and start writing again. Maybe I can come up with some ideas that Tim will miss...

  Hmm