Umm... yeah.

[Slight cat waxing since it turns out that my scene 2 is probably really scene 3... or 4. This means I need a new scene 2. *sigh*]
Boston Improv Festival was this weekend. I didn't get a chance to catch any of the acts, but I did decide to make time for a couple of the workshops. Clarion sucked up pretty much every moment of my free time (and then some) until now. Figuring out whether I wanted to keep learning improv was something I'd do "after Clarion." What would be... uh... now. I figure this is a good chance to do that.

Saturday, I did two workshops in a row: An introduction to the Bat, and techniques on developing organic group games. As it turns out, they were an interesting juxtaposition as they were polar opposites.

The Saturday afternoon workshop was an introduction to the Bat, a long form which is kind of like a Harold, but in the dark. (But not a structured Harold. This was much more freeform and organic.) When I'd registered for the workshop, I hadn't realized that it was also an audition for a performance of the Bat Saturday night. After we'd all introduced ourselves to each other, Joe Bill, the guy conducting the workshop, basically mentioned that this was an also an audition for the 11pm performance and that we should put this out of our minds.

I had no problems with this. Three-quarters of the class were seasoned improvisers already performing at the festival. One-third, at least, had done the Bat before. Joe mentioned he already had four people in mind. I was not getting cast for the Saturday night performance. (Those of you familiar with this story structure, or are my Facebook friends know what's coming next.)

The Bat is conducted in the dark. It is an almost purely verbal exercise. The organic group games we worked on were purely wordless. So, I had two hours of all talk and no physical action followed by two hours of all physical action and no talk. Kind of neat how that worked out. I had a great time at both workshops. What I learned from both will help me in my future work should I do any.

After the second workshop, I walked out of the main theater space towards the lobby. Or I attempted to. Now I wonder if the festival's co-director was waiting for me because I literally did not get one step past the door before he stopped me. He tells me that I'm doing the Saturday night performance. Fortunately, I was in "improv mode." Rather than freaking out, or saying "WTF?", I simply accepted the offer and moved the scene forward. I'm thinking that Joe must have posted the cast list in the green room. (i.e., if someone didn't tell me, I wouldn't have known to show up.) So, suddenly, I find myself performing at the Boston Improv Festival. (The freaking out and "WTF?" hit on the subway ride home which is As It Should Be.)

Fortunately, the festival's co-director was also the guy Saturday night wrangling the performers. I didn't have to explain "No, I don't have a performer's pass because I didn't know I was performing until 6 hours ago." As it turns out, when the cast congregated in the green room, it was very much a "one of these people is not like the other" moment. Let's just say that everyone else cast had performers' passes. (Note that the only person who seemed to notice or care was me.)

As we passed 11pm, one of us joked that they'd stashed us down here as a decoy and everyone else from this morning's workshop was doing the show as we spoke. Made perfect sense to me. I was still back on "Why am I here?"

(As it turned out, Joe had shows back-to-back, the second of which was at 11pm. We didn't see him until just at little before we were to go on. It started late in any event.)

Anyway, after the delay, we did do the Bat. It was wild, chaotic, and a lot of fun. There's lots of stuff you can do with overlapping scenes and transitions that are much easier when it's voices only. The Bat we did felt like it'd gone so quickly, but it'd ran just over 20 minutes. I really wish we could have done another right after. Also note to self, after 20 minute in the dark, the lights, when they come up, are really bright...

I went to a few more workshops on Sunday, and they were good. My thought coming out of them though is that what I need the most is practice. Like writing, I don't improvise well if I'm panicking. Running scenes over and over will help me more than anything else right now. Maybe if I can get through an audition without panicking, I'll get cast in something. (The Saturday afternoon audition doesn't count. I was not actually auditioning. I was much too distracted by learning how to do a Bat.)

ImprovBoston has a weekly open practice session. I was thinking about going to some of them. (Unfortunately, I can't make it every week.) Now, I probably will, at least for a while.

Like I said, not quite the weekend I'd expected. It turned out well. (Now, I just have to write the new scene 2...)

Wow. Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain is stunning. Everything Yoon Ha Lee writes mates sheer audacity of idea with incredible, beautiful language. I want to write like this when I grow up (if it's not already too late).

Wikipedia's page on A Dance with Dragons currently contains this sentence:

On July 8, 2010 Martin spoke at a conference and confirmed the current length of the book to be 1,400 Manuscript pages. He expressed his disappointment that he was unable to completely finish the book by the conference, although he would not speculate how soon the book would be completed after his return home on the July 11.

For me, this was a mini-WTF. If he had said any such thing on the 8th, I'd have known, possibly have been an eyewitness. The 8th was the Thursday of his week of Clarion. (Coincidentally, the day the class workshopped my week 2 story.) The phrase "spoke at a conference" implies that he said this in the course of teaching at Clarion. This, AFAIK, is not what happened. (And, honestly, not counting GRRM, there are only 17 other people who know first hand what he said on the UCSD campus that week. A couple more if GRRM called anyone.)

On the plus side, Wikipedia is nothing if not all about the verifiability. The cited source makes much more sense:

8 July 2010 Update:
At a book signing in San Diego, whilst teaching at Clarion, GRRM confirmed that ADWD has reached 1,400 pages in manuscript. He indicates that he was disappointed not to have finished the book before attending Clarion, but was not drawn on how close completion might me after his return home on the 11th.

On the 7th, he did a reading/Q&A session/book signing at Mysterious Galaxy. Questions about when he'd finish A Dance with Dragons was explicitly off-limits, but he may have talked about the book's length. I honestly don't remember at this point. That makes much more sense though than the Wikipedia entry which implied he had mentioned when he "spoke at a conference" on the 8th.

How anyone got from the cited paragraph to the sentence in Wikipedia is beyond me since they don't say the same thing at all. I suppose one can point to the citation and think, "See, readers can still find the correct information." However, no one is going to think to follow the citation unless they read the sentence and think something is off. The Wikipedia sentence in question, though, will not ring alarm bells in many people's heads. Practically no one will think to follow the cite.

Granted, this is a pretty unimportant case. Who cares if he said this in class on the 8th or at a book signing on the night of the 7th? There's nothing special about this particular sentence though. Everything I've said about this sentence, someone else in the world can say about some other more important sentence.

This is just a reminder to myself that Wikipedia may be the place I look first, but it shouldn't be the last. (I knew that of course. I've just never had it demonstrated so personally before.)

[Normally, I'd consider this cat waxing. I'm blogging when I should be writing. Since I've just written 6 short stories in 6 weeks, I'm giving myself a pass this time. BTW, a reason why you haven't heard from me much over the past 6 weeks is because the class of Clarion 2010 decided to go into radio silence for the duration. Also, I have no idea how anyone found the time to blog.]

The worst thing about Clarion is saying goodbye to everyone. What makes it so bad is that we all have different departure times. For a stretch of several hours, you're constantly saying goodbye to people, one or two at a time. Greg drove me to the airport and as we reached my terminal I told him that maybe I could say goodbye one more time before I'd totally lose it. Sure enough, I said goodbye to Greg, entered the terminal, then totally lost it. I'm sure there were people at the airport wondering who was this strange man with the moist eyes and the grief-stricken expression wandering the terminal trying to find his gate. (It actually did take me a few tries to find the correct security checkpoint. It's hard when your vision is so blurry and all you can think about are the people you've just left behind.)

Clarion itself was awesome. I totally recommend it to anyone interested in writing better short stories. There is some discussion of novels, but Clarion at heart is a short story workshop. Writing lots of short stories will lead to better short stories. The way to write better novels is probably to write more novels. Having said that, gaining a better understanding of how short stories work and the ways I made writing them more difficult for myself, I think, will serve me in the future should I ever write a novel.

I love all of my Clarion classmates. Our Clarion was apparently a little atypical in that everyone got along with everyone else. (Srsly. Instructor after instructor pointed out how well we got along with each other as if this were unusual.) I think part of it is that we all united very quickly against a common enemy: the cafeteria. It wasn't just the food. Every once in a while, the cafeteria food was shockingly good. Unfortunately, they managed only often enough that no one was willing to write off the cafe completely. (Also, they'd curtained the cafe into two sections. The people on the other side of the black curtain always got better food.) What really made the cafe the common enemy was that they would not let us have trays when they let everyone else have trays. It's such a stupid thing, but it was the final indignity.

All the instructors were awesome. The just announced 2011 set looks awesome and the new class will be lucky to have them, but I wouldn't trade the 2010 set for anything. Each instructor brought something completely different from every other instructor. Delia brought (along with Ellen Kushner) a devotion to structure, the raising then fulfilling of expectations. George forced us to put our work within the historical context of genre as a whole. Dale insisted that we always write with the best language we could muster so that we were in full control of the effect on the reader. Chip raised all sorts of interesting questions about, for example, point of view and verb tense as well as insisted that we make each sentence as meaningful as possible. (Note that this sometimes means removing words.) The Vandermeers were, for us, the perfect anchor team. They helped us synthesize everything we'd learned in the previous 4 weeks. They took a detailed look at our work and tailored their instruction to hit areas where they knew we needed the most help.

As for the Clarion experience, honestly, the best way I can describe it is that it's like Project Runway without the eliminations (and, hopefully, without the interpersonal drama) but with the runway show and a new Tim Gunn each week. Alternately, Clarion is like an iterated Scrapheap Challenge (aka Junkyard Wars). To get the most out of Clarion, you have to hand in your first drafts. You may have time to copy edit your stories so that at least the text is clean, but they are still your first stabs at telling those stories. If something isn't working, there usually isn't time for radical reconstructive surgery. You make each story work the best that you can. (I definitely learned the importance of being done.)

(Note: Everything I handed in was a story I thought deserved serious consideration. It's a matter of respect and limited workshop time. You don't waste your instructor's and your fellow students' time with a pile of text you threw together just because you want a critique. Not everything I wrote worked, but everything I wrote were credible attempts to tell a story in the best way possible. To go back to the reality TV game show analogy, at the end of every episode of Project Runway, what you throw onto the runway has to be a piece of clothing even if it's one that isn't completely successful. At the end of every episode of Scrapheap Challenge, you have to have a functioning machine, even if it's one that will utterly fail at the final competition. If you don't have a piece of clothing, or a functioning machine, you don't go until you do.)

For me, the lack of time turned out to be a virtue of sorts. Very quickly, I'd gotten better at predicting not only what the class but what the instructors would pinpoint as the problems I need to address in the next draft. Why didn't I resolve them before handing in the story? See above. Also, if I'm going to embark on serious structural changes, what I really need is several weeks' distance first.

In the process, I went from submitting a hot mess for week 1 to submitting a story half of which apparently worked really well and the other half had no stakes to speak of for week 6. (Just to unpack that a bit, the week 6 story had two interlocking threads. One thread worked really well. The reaction was near unanimous. The other thread, not so much. Also near unanimous.) I'd love to be the guy who writes brilliant, or at least publishable, first drafts. Half a working draft after one stab though, is really better than I have any right to expect. (I think that, at Clarion, I've learned to write better first drafts.)

Everyone that everyone says about forcing yourself to write then receiving near immediate feedback on your writing is absolutely true. Attempting 6 stories in 6 weeks was the right move for me. I don't think it's the right move for everyone (and certainly, no one is obliged to do that). Doing that confirmed for me that I'm someone who needs to get the first draft out quickly, but not in a rush. i.e., I write my best first drafts when I trust my first instincts and I don't overthink my writing. One way to do that is to write fast. Just to make it tricky, it's possible for me to write too fast. When I'm in a rush, the result is not thought out at all. (i.e., not only am I not trust my first instincts, I'm not trusting any instinct at all.)

Amusingly, this means I wrote my best work while horribly sleep deprived. I was so tired that I couldn't overthink anything even if I wanted to. Also, being that tired, I couldn't rush. I settled into a cadence where I could get the story out, but it unfolded in its own pace. Now I just have to figure out how to do that, but with sleep.

Clarion is wonderful in the same way that my writing group is wonderful. It's a remarkably safe space for me to fail in. Everyone tells it like it is, but if you screw up something in your story, it's ok. I tried all sorts of stuff and learned so much even when (or perhaps especially when) it didn't work. Clarion has the bonus of near instantaneous feedback, but the demerit that no one, including you, has had much sleep. Like it or not, not only are you writing a short story a week, but you're reading maybe 20000 words every night and you're expected to have something intelligent to say about all those words. (SF writing boot camp? It is *not* a joke. Repeat. *Not* a joke.) My classmates, each one of them brilliant, always had something intelligent to say. I'd like to think that I managed it too most of the time.

Since I went to Viable Paradise in 2006, I'd like to compare the two. This turns out to be really easy. There's no comparison. They're both wonderful experiences I wouldn't have missed for the world, but they are very different from each other. VP, by nature, has to be a much more concentrated experience. There's a reason why VP has to have Wednesday as a planned day off whereas Clarion really has no such concept. In theory, you get weekends off at Clarion because there are no critique sessions. In practice, that was when most of us, including me, got lots of writing done.

VP is a sprint and Clarion is a marathon. It's really up to you which is more your style. I ended up doing both, in part, because I came out of VP realizing that I'd gone too early. I really should have wrestled with storytelling for a few years more before I could get the most out of any workshop. Back in 2006, I simply didn't have the experience to understand everything I was learning at VP. Until I went to VP, I didn't realize how ignorant I was. That realization by itself made VP worth it for me and I learned so much more than that there. Of course, maybe in 2014, I'll realize that I wasn't experienced enough for Clarion in 2010. I have no idea. Certainly, what they both give you, ultimately, are the tools for you to learn whatever it is you need to learn for yourself.

In any case, I'm done with instructor-led workshops. Clarion has sated me. Ok, if I start writing novels seriously, I may consider applying to Taos Toolbox after I've written a few. Honestly though, applying to Taos not likely. The way for me to learn how to write good novels, I suspect, is to keep writing novels. That will take a long time, but so is just about anything worth doing. (No, I have no novels planned. If I write anything lengthy, it will be because I start writing something then realize that the scope is too large for a short story. One of the things I've started to figure out from being inundated with so many short stories over so short a time is a sense of the scope of your typical short story.)

I've left a lot of stuff out. I can't condense a 6 week workshop into one blog post, or even a series of blog posts. (And I'm not going to try. Down that path lies serious cat waxing.)

Is Clarion for everyone? Probably not. Honestly, I suspect there are lots writers who don't need any sort of intensive writing workshop or may not get anything out of one. Some of those who do may be better off with the sprint than the marathon. I certainly have no illusions that going to Clarion (or any workshop) will make me a published writer. Regardless, going was the right move for me. I wouldn't give up those 6 weeks for anything.

Dear kindly podcasting person,

When podcasting a conversation between two people, please try harder to ensure that both voices are at the same sound level. That way setting a volume loud enough to hear one person doesn't blast my head off when the other person speaks. Constantly adjusting the volume is cumbersome at best and, at
worst, impossible when the loud guy makes a sub-second interjection. Mastering is a good thing.

(For the record, what I ended up doing is firing up my audio editor and running the podcast through a compressor. No, it's probably not the right solution, but I just wanted to listen to the podcast, not master it. I can do this only because I was listening at my desktop. If I had been listening on my iPod, I would have been really annoyed.)

Oh, because I know a bunch of people who podcast, I should add:

I'm not talking about you. This is a podcast by someone whom I don't know. (And technical issues aside, it's a fine podcast. Once I was no longer distracted by the sound level variations, I could pay attention to the interesting conversation.)

First thing first, Tony Pi's A Sweet Calling published in the May issue of Clarkesworld Magazine is an awesome story. The writing is at once taut and lyrical, the action is beautifully paced, the world building is deft, sure and subtle, everything the story sets up pays off and to top it off, there's a lovely little twist at the end. If not merely for the sheer enjoyment, everyone should read this story to learn How To Tell A Story. Again, Clarkesworld proves itself to be a venue for some of the best speculative fiction being published today.

Of course, when they first published it at the beginning of the month, I put it in Instapaper, then didn't get around to it. I just read it now because I heard the Clarkesworld podcast of the story, and if nothing else, I wanted to know which words were italicized and which weren't. Chinese words, rendered in flawless (if non tone marked) pinyin were, unless they were names, in which case, they weren't. Instead of tangren, I might have been tempted to write 糖人 instead. (Literally 'candyman' which was used in English earlier in the story.) Or at least tángrén. Interestingly, the one time someone says "dragon" in Chinese, lóng(龍), it is tone marked.

Rendering the Chinese words in pinyin allows him to use Capitalizations of Significance. i.e., the main character is no mere tangren, but rather a Tangren. That actually does convey extra information in this case. This makes me reconsider my 'no romanization' stance. (Well, except that I'm not fond of Capitalizations of Significance either. I get why they're useful and sometimes necessary though.)

As for the podcast, I should say at the outset that Kate Baker is perhaps one of the best podcasters I've heard. I look forward to Clarkesworld podcasts. She brings out the emotion and attitude behind the writer's words with breathtaking clarity and sincerity. I'd consider myself extremely fortunate if she ever read aloud any of my stories.

This doesn't mean that I don't have the same problem with her that I have with apparently everyone podcasting today who attempts to pronounce something in Chinese. Honestly, I'll forgive a lot. If the tones are wrong, I'll deal. If podcasters approximate sounds using their closest English equivalents, well, that's to be expected. And, in fact, if they do just that, they'll get within the ballpark, I'll think, "Close enough" and not bother blogging about it. After all, it's not like I've trained in the diction of every language that might conceivably show up in a podcast. (Honestly, who am I? Henry Higgins?)

[Ok, there is a 'Henry Higgins' exception. Stories where pronunciation is an issue really ought to be podcast with the appropriate accurate or inaccurate pronunciation.]

It would have been nice though if she had known that yuan is a single syllable, that ai is pronounced "eye", not "ay". The consonant j is infinitely closer to the American 'j' than the French one. While tangren is a two syllable word, the syllable breaks after the 'g', not after the 'n' (and the 'r' isn't rolled). There may have been others. This is just what comes to mind.

(Oh yeah, sh doesn't sound like the American 'sh.' The pinyin 'ch' doesn't either, for that matter.)

Are the mispronunciations horribly detrimental such that they ruin ruin ruin the podcast experience for me? No. (In fact, I figured out she meant 糖人 on first hearing.) They were a little wince-inducing, but they don't occur very often in the story so it's not like I was constantly wincing. And frankly, I suspect Kate was just imitating American newscasters. They get it wrong in mostly the same ways. She might have thought their pronunciations were authoritative.

[Of course it's not just Chinese. I hear newscasters mispronounce "Medvedev" all the time. There are supposed to be glides before the last two 'e's.]

Hearing it done wrong leaves me with the impression that the language is unimportant. The unintentional attitude is that these words are just collections of phonemes Tony Pi made up to serve his fictional world. Of course, Tony gets the Chinese absolutely right. (I might quibble that 'yuanzi dumplings' is analogous to saying 'ATM machine', but we do the latter all the time. In his place, I might also have done the same thing.) He could have written the story without recourse to Chinese words at all, but he chose to use them to establish a link to an actual place.

I'd rather hear the podcast and make my small criticisms than not have the story podcast at all, of course. That there are now genre story podcasts where I can criticize the pinyin pronunciation is an advance. Genre is becoming more diverse and this is one of the ways that diversity is showing itself.

This isn't to say that I wouldn't be thrilled to hear a story podcast where all the Chinese is pronounced correctly.

[Edited to fix an italics tag. Thanks, bmlg.]

*Sigh* PodCastle 101: Kristin, with Caprice is yet another story I wish I'd written. The story never ever explicitly states its speculative element. (Not unless you count an extremely literal interpretation of the dialogue.) However, even though the characters in the story don't explicitly recognize the speculative element, I doubt anyone reading (or listening to) the story can miss it.

This is the sort of thing I keep trying. I haven't pulled it off yet.

Awesome story. (And Norm Sherman reads it with just the right tone.)

It's April, 2010. This means we've hit the final issue of Jim Baen's Universe. The death of a market is always to be lamented. In the case of JBU, they paid extremely well and reserved a slot every issue for a new writer. That makes the venue's death even more lamentable.

Mike Resnick writes an eloquent valedictory editorial where he explains what happened and why the magazine is closing. There is one statement, however, I'd like to take exception to. He writes: "Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a simple fact. When JBU started up, we were the only e-zine paying what the Science Fiction Writers of America considers a professional rate."

That can't possibly be true. Strange Horizons has been around since 2000. When SFWA raised the minimum pro rate from $0.03/word to $0.05/word, the venue raised their pay rate to follow. They've always made a point of paying pro rates for their fiction.

Obviously, this is just an oversight on Mr. Resnick's part. The sentiment of what he writes, if not the actual fact, may be correct. Besides SH, I don't know if there were any other pro-rate e-zines at the time JBU started, and certainly JBU has garnered far more attention than SH.

From some reason, Strange Horizon manages to publish some of the best speculative fiction today, and still slip underneath the radar. I also think it's neat that whenever a writer is nominated for their first Hugo, SH invariably has at least one story written by them and links to it. Anyone who likes short speculative fiction and isn't reading SH is missing out. (Why, yes, I have donated to SH. Have you?)

(Oh, and in Mr. Resnick's list of pro rate on-line magazines, I think he meant Apex Magazine, rather than Abyss & Apex. They're both professional in quality, but the latter pays $0.05/word up to 1500 words capping at $75.00. SFWA does not consider that a pro rate since A & A will buy stories longer than 1500 words.)

I got into Clarion SD 2010. (Actually, I found out last Monday, but they embargoed the information until today.) I've calmed down a bit since then so allow me to recreate my reaction:

OMGOMGOMGOMGWTFBBQ!!!!111!!11!1!1! I got in! *pause* How the hell did that happen? *pause* OMGOMGOMGOMGWTFBBQ!!!!!111!!!111!!! *pause* If I don't leave soon, I'll be late for choir rehearsal *scrambles out the door*

It's kind of amusing. Last year, I was so thoroughly on top of the reading. By last March, I think I'd managed to have read something by every Clarion and Clarion West instructor. (And it was all really awesome stuff. I learned so much just reading their work.)

When Jeff Vandermeer blogged this past Monday that they were ready to make their final decisions, I mentioned off-hand to a friend that I'd be so screwed if I got in. Let's just say that I'll be reading Clarion authors between now and June. (And George RR Martin writes some wonderful, but longish, short stories.) But it's a good screwed.

First things first though:

1. Get time off from work. I have a plan. My manager is ok with it. I haven't faced HR yet. (My company offers a 4 week sabbatical and I'm eligible. That's why I applied when I did. It's the other two weeks...)

2. I need to replace my laptop. It's six years old, extremely cranky and the keyboard doesn't work reliably. Again, I have a plan. However, I need to ask the Clarion folks if I'll be doing anything with my mobile computing device besides typing lots of text. (Aside from 6 weeks of Clarion, I don't actually need a laptop. My iPhone actually does everything I'd normally use a laptop for. So if I can buy something that I'll find useful after Clarion... Either that or I'll get a cheap netbook.)

It still doesn't quite feel real yet mostly because, honestly, I didn't expect to get in. I already had a story marked for Clarion 2011 application, unless I wrote something better in the mean time. (Like I'd said last year. The application is a by-product of the writing I'm doing anyway. I still hope to write something better in the mean time anyway.)

The sane part of be recognizes that Clarion, ultimately, is an opportunity to learn about the craft and business of writing. It's not a sale. I still haven't sold anything. Clarion is not a guarantee that I will ever sell anything. And it's six weeks with likely little sleep and reputedly really awful food. But...

OMGOMGOMGOMGWTFBBQ!!!!1!!1!11!! I got in.

Again, a story I loved when I read it, this time at Strange Horizons. Mur Lafferty gives it a terrific reading.

It's definitely not the conventional meet up with the Evil Overlord. What I love about the story is that the main character has a brain and is not afraid to use it. I hate the trope where the main character unquestioningly believes the man who has had her chained and has been cutting her scalp for days is telling the whole, complete and utterly honest truth. (The story undoubtedly explains that she accepts these words due to some heretofore hidden insecurity in our main character that allows her to believe the worst of her friends no matter how non-credible the source.)

Here, the man manages to raise doubt but main character keeps her wits about her, recognizes that if her captain and her lover can lie, well, so can the guy who has kept her shackled for days. She still doubts because she's human and what he says is all too plausible, but she doesn't behave as if he'd taking her brains along with her hair. Implicitly, she recognizes the revelation, even if it is the whole, complete honest truth, is irrelevant to her current situation.

The latest EscapePod story, Wind From a Dying Star by David D. Levine is awesome. I love far future SF. This story has an interesting conception of how spacefarers may organize themselves socially. Terrific world-building that's utterly essential to a heart-felt story.