I turned in my second Clarion piece today, my second in three days. It’s — I don’t know, I went to my book thing this morning and then wrote for six hours. I’m too close to predict how it’ll go over.

If I was smart, I’d get to work on the next one, but I just can’t do it.

I met Ted Chiang last night! And he was cool. It’s so weird – Nancy Kress is one of my favorite authors ever, and I got to hang out with her for a week, and then I got to talk a little to Chiang, who likely is constantly approached by random people and Clarion students at these vents.

@ Roz’s blog, here.

While sitting in the living room working on critiques, Nancy Kress strongly implied she needed “a paperclip and a rifle” so she could shoot me tomorrow in group, and said it with a tone that indicated a certain glee of expectation. There were four witnesses besides me.

I heard this morning that one of the scifi mags I apply to has a kind of step-ladder in their rejection language:
– “doesn’t grab” = didn’t read more than a paragraph or two
– “didn’t hold” = didn’t read more than a couple paragraphs
– “didn’t work” = read the whole thing, more or less

Having received all of these, I felt kind of stabbed to hear this, because now I realize that a bunch of them, despite getting nice rejections, didn’t even get read all the way through. Probably.

I don’t know how much I’ll want to say as I go on, especially about people and related issues, but some random thoughts as end the drought caused in large part by my prep…

– I got to hang out a little with Nancy Kress today, and had a total fanboy moment, and she’s awesome. It’s funny, I’ve done a bunch of book events for Prospectus and now on my own, and I still go “wheeeee!” when I meet Kay Kenyon.

– We’re in an empty sorority house, I’m not supposed to disclose which one, but it’s a strange and weirdly depressing environment. But then, according to the poster, their cumulative GPA sure beats mine.

– I’d forgotten what a shithole the University District is. I lived here for years, I know its charms, but holy crap, between the pan handling, the littering, the general crappy attitude (there are twelve of us! let’s walk four by three! whee!) it makes me long to go hang out on Queen Anne, or Capitol Hill, or… downtown Bellevue, hell.

– The people here rock. So far.

A much-revised Cubs of Democracy, in about two weeks. Note but nothing I could go back and re-write on, I think (they weren’t grabbed). I’m starting to wonder if it’s really a good thing to get quick turnarounds, even if they’re with notes.

Sigh. Little depressing: I can see where it’s not a thrill-a-minute ride, where the setting/characters/etc are more interesting than the basic confrontation, which is the problem, but I’m rather fond of it.

Back to working on Archipelago then, in the hopes that larger central confrontation can sell itself.

Or, possibly, a guide to deciphering rejection notes. :p

Or, maybe, I should chill out, go to Clarion West, hopefully get better, and see what I want to do.

I got a quite nice rejection note from Asimov’s for Ember (link to early version). It only took many submissions to get something beyond a form letter.

It’s weirdly encouraging.

Book came out. Huge accomplishment, product of years of work.
Great reviews, including the New York Times, where it got a bad/baffling review.
Ran up ~2k in car bills in four days as my beloved Volvo went through a bad patch.
Horribly sick for weeks, including an ER trip.

And now, accepted to Clarion West. Which is awesome – “Yay, we think you’re super-great, we have picked you out of all the great applicants to come hang out with assorted cool folks for six weeks and graduate an elite science fiction writer.”

But I can’t go. I feel like the world’s taking free kicks at me.

Clarion runs six weeks, mid-June through July. I want to go, because it’s super-awesome, but I essentially can’t go: I have no money. I was about to take a job, but now, if I go, I almost certainly can’t take a job, work for two months, and then be gone for six weeks.

If Clarion started next week, I’d tough it out. But it doesn’t — it’s months out. With no money, I can’t survive for months. But I can’t get a job and work for months and then go. And so on. I’m screwed. I figured I wouldn’t get in – the odds are so long, it’s so competitive – and now, I don’t even know what to do.

Thanks, universe! Hee hee hee hee.

One of the reasons I’ve been slower on getting decent scifi stories out (there’s two in the queue) is that I’ve been spending a lot of time on book proposals and a novel-length fiction project, a mystery written with the lovely and talented Mrs. Zumsteg.

Anyway, the first draft’s done, and now it’s time to get into the re-writes.

It’s weird, I haven’t written a novel since college (which 2, maybe 3 people read), and my re-entry into scifi’s been almost entirely short stories (except, as my friend calls it, “that book about the genetically engineered Kiwi criminal mastermind teenager”), and yet here I am, with a fully-formed mystery. Let the re-writes begin.