Great news, guys! You…

Great news, guys! You can now read the on-line journal of one of my co-conspirators at Clarion West, C.J. Silverio, aka Ceej. She may not be a purveyor of smut like me, but she is intelligent, articulate, sexy as hell (though she doesn't know it) and a damn good writer. She tells you a hell of a lot more about the workshop than I've been doing. She's making me embarrassed. Maybe I'll write more. Highly recommended. And if you read science fiction, keep an eye out for her work.

Okay, I just read her July journal, half of Clarion so far. Her journal is far more gut-spilling than mine, her pages are prettier, and I think she may be more self-analytical. So if you go visit her pages, don't leave me forever, okay?

I'd praise her more, but Thida is visiting Seattle to see Walt, and I promised I'd be up there at 6, and it's now 6, so I need to get up there before she arrives if I can. I really want to read the June Clarion section of Ceej's journal. Damn damn damn.

7:45. I'm back, having read the rest of Ceej's Clarion journal. Interesting. Very very interesting. I'm going to give her permission to write about me if she feels like it, so you may grab odd tidbits about me over there.

Thida's sitting next to me, reading Ceej's journal. Thank goodness for friends as geeky as I am. :-)

I should update you on last week with Lucius -- it wasn't bad, but I feel almost as if I met a different person than the rest of the class did. On some fundamental level, Lucius and I didn't really connect at all. I wonder if this is perhaps because I didn't like anything of his I read -- maybe in the dank recesses of my brain I decided he didn't have anything I wanted? Probably totally false, if I did, but it is difficult to control the dank recesses. I still learned a lot from my fellow students that week, as usual, and Lucius's nudging at me on dialogue produced a neat little piece that I think I'm rather fond of.

Met Beth and Tappan last night. From what I saw then and this morning, they will be very very helpful in a practical sense. They're telling us all sorts of good stuff about the publishing side of things, and critiquing our stories in a very pragmatic, structural way. Earlier instructors concentrated far more on the sentence/paragraph level. I still need to learn more about plot. Alex has been profoundly helpful with that -- being an AI consultant must require an extremely analytical brain. He's being badgered quite a lot, actually, since the class has generally picked up on his logical nature. Good thing he's good-natured. Of course, everyone's pretty good-natured. This is really an excellent group. CJ gives little thumbnail descriptions on her page -- I'd tell you more about them, but I agree with her that privacy is probably an issue. Without their consent, it just doesn't seem fair.

I had quite a little crisis Sunday night. At the meeting, I asked Beth and Tappan whether they wanted a plot synopsis (which is what I had written) or something more. They definitely did not want a plot synopsis. They wanted a selling document, a work of art, a multi-level masterpiece, in 10 pages or less. Argh. I came back to the 7th floor (screaming in the elevator along with the rest), ran down the hall, bounced around my room for a while, spun with Alex in the hallway, and eventually sat down to revise the damn thing. Did so. Did so on disk, like an idiot, and when I took the disk out to print, it died. Almost broke down and cried on Alex's shoulder (he was very supportive and basically told me to 'buck up', which I did). Went back and rewrote the damn thing. Handed it in this morning. It will be critiqued tomorrow morning. We'll see.

Now I'm going to stop neglecting Thida. Talk to y'all tomorrow...

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