Thursday, June 24th, 1999

I went off to my critiquing session and hugged the elephant. Everyone hated the ending I had written for "Run of the Fiery Horse." No surprise there. After having written that ending (at 2:00am, in a state of exhaustion), I hated it too! However, they raved about the rest of the story and made lots of cool suggestions about how the ending could be changed. I'm going to revise it and submit it to the Writers of the Future Contest before their upcoming June 30th deadline.

I also had my private conference with Michaela today. She gave me feedback on my two Clarion audition pieces, and then she talked about my writing in general. She praised my voice, characters and plotting. She also told me to stop being so hard on my short stories, which she thought were really good. "Your train is on the track, and your coal car is well stocked. So long as you keep going, you will get to your destination."

Clarion has managed to be both humbling and uplifting for me.

Another Fifteen Seconds of Fame

When I got back from my conference, Lister Matheson hunted me down and told me that there was another reporter here, would I please talk to him? I'm very amused by this. Lister loves putting me in front of reporters (I've now even had one appearance talking about Clarion on the local television news. Unfortunately, Lister did not tape it and none of the rest of us have VCRs or televisions here. Aargh.) I'm not sure why he chooses me for these little gigs. Is it because I'm the official group extrovert? Or simply that my pregnancy makes a good human interest story? Oh well. At least this time I wasn't the only student interviewed.

The reporter was from the local newspaper and really impressed me. He's a reader of science fiction and he really knew his stuff. Whereas the television guys had asked really shallow questions, he probed deeper. He asked questions like, "What resources outside the science fiction field inspire you to write?" The interview was lots of fun, and I'll try to get a copy of the article when it comes out in the paper.

Prank Update

After I added Michaela's story to the to-be-critiqued box, the folks who do the photocopying got cold feet. They decided that they could not proceed without permission of the author. So Michaela's story did not get distributed to the group.

I was really disappointed, and wound up talking to Michaela about the prank we had planned to do upon her. She laughed and said, "Oh, that would have been great! I would have leaped in and ripped the story to shreds right along with the rest of you. The group should see how awful my writing was back then. Hey, why don't we still go ahead? I give permission, and we can have a special critiquing session on Saturday just to rip it apart. You did pick a piece with lots of adverbs and passive voice, didn't you?"

I assured her that I had.

Hmm