Guilt and Conventions

(this was under a freeway in San Diego. it made me laugh.)

I spent this past weekend in San Diego, playing truant from rehearsal (with Liss's approval) and stretching my usual one day per week away from the studio into three to accommodate this year's World Fantasy Convention. Twelve of my Clarion classmates were there, and two of our instructors. It was a joy to see them. I think there must be something uniquely traumatizing about Clarion, something rather like the battering that baptizes baby fowl as they emerge from their eggs. My Clarion classmates are my comrades in arms and my siblings in storytelling. They have propped me up through frenzy and desperation, held me accountable, and flayed my stories with their fine, sharp knives. Seeing them again is always a very good thing.

It is also the lion's share of the reason I go to conventions. I've been to three (Montreal, San Jose, San Diego), and each one was mostly an excuse to see some people I met in the summer of 2008.

Other reasons I go to conventions:

1. Meeting new people.

Please consider in particular the wonderful aspects and charming demeanor of the following characters: Nicole Taylor, Ben Loory, Joe Monti, Matt Kressel, William Alexander, and Charles Tan.

2. To admire the work of writers who I am excessively fond of.

Example no. 1: Jeffrey Ford read a short story from the upcoming Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling edited anthology, After. He was cut short by scheduling, and I am still, several days later, on cruel tenterhooks about the ending.

Example no. 2: Neil Gaiman read "The Case of Death and Honey," which is a story about Sherlock Holmes, bees, death, and China. I have been in love with this story for some time, ever since Neil mentioned it to me in an off-handed way back in the spring. And I had read it, several times, before this weekend, but still there I was, surreptitiously blinking my eyes harder than usual to disguise the tears.

Example no. 3: Nalo Hopkinson read a mad and bizarre scene from her upcoming novel, Taint. It was so vivid and impossible and absurd and shivering with movement and invention that all I could do was fall face-first into it and enjoy.

(I am possibly biased. Nalo and Neil were our instructors at Clarion, so I love them dearly.)

3. Guilt.

I am not as persistent as I should be in the pursuit of stories. I love writing them, even when it's difficult, frustrating, and involves a great deal of studying the wall above my desk. But I am slow, and when I'm tired from dancing (something that currently happens often), I tell myself that there is nothing finer than telling stories to the audience of one that resides inside my head. But it's a bad lie. Stories, for me, are always better, stronger, and more defined when I've done the wrestling required to put them on a piece of paper. They might not actually be better, stronger, and so on and so forth once they've actually hit the paper, but the work of putting them there changes the story in my head from a vague mess of images to something that makes a kind of sense.

Being around people who make stories happen, the ones who live them and breathe them and believe fiercely in the creation of them, floods me with guilt. I look at the dusty scraps drifting through my head and am struck with shame that they should be so foggy and indistinct.

I go home, and I retrieve my notebook from its lonely corner, and I start dredging things up by putting down one word and following it with another.

And that is why I go to conventions.

leftovers

I found this loitering in a notebook. It claims to be from December of 2008.

"A thing is still a thing no matter what you place in front of it."
"Why are people always so happy when they collide with someone from the same place?"

I like to imagine that if I could remember what I was making notes about, it would be clever or, at the very least, deeply felt. I'm almost certain it was not. I use notebooks indiscriminately and unfaithfully, dating entries at whim, littering them with post-it notes, newspaper clippings, and the tattered dregs of fashion magazines ("What Surrounds a Legend?" asks a fragment of the New York Times. "A 3,000-Pound Gilt Frame."). I mostly don't use them, except to write in, drafting stories and essays and interviews straight from beginning to end. I am not a habitual note taker, except in an academic setting (in which case my notes are minute and color-coded), and I rarely refer to the ones I commit to paper once I've finished writing them down. 

From the notebook next to my bed: "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?"

The thought of composing from notes seems romantic. There must be satisfaction in building something from the accretion of thoughts had over a certain period of time. An assurance that what you're working on is strung along a consistent theme, something tested and engraved on your brain by the repetition of picking it up and putting it down again. 

On a piece of Hello Kitty notepaper the exact shape of a dollar bill: "Cameroon, Africa. In 1986, the great lake Nyos (a name that means "good" in Mmen and "to crush" in Itangikom) turned red. The hue was a precursor to an explosion and a fountain of water 262 feet tall caused by pent-up gases deep beneath the surface of the lake. Limnologists (scientists who study lakes) have explained that the equatorial location of Cameroon, with its constant temperatures, enabled the layers of water to remain undisturbed by natural shifting caused by changing water temperatures in places of greater climate variation."

I enjoy making notes. I persist in keeping a piece of paper and a pen tucked into the pocket of my purse that contains inviolable necessities. Lip balm. Cash. Paper. Pen. I like the act of transferring some thought into words, or the comfort of copying down an interesting item in the belief that I will then never lose it to my own forgetfulness. I have notebooks that are composition workhorses and I have notebooks (a very few) that are only repositories. It's a pleasure to pick up those latter ones after abandoning them for months or years to read cryptic fragments, their meaning usually forgotten, or shuffle through bits of paper, whose selection for preservation is usually baffling. But, for the most part, they feel like leftovers, and while the details that piqued my interest may still be discernible, their allure was consumed in the moment of meeting.

A clipping from Smithsonian Magazine: "Another phenomenon of the ballet world that fascinated him was the presence of a number of men in top hats and fur-collared overcoats who were permitted to pay court to the dancers in the foyer de la danse (a kind of greenroom), as long as they took out a subscription for three seats a week."

I've never really been the kind of writer who can reanimate her notes and make them run together in a wholly satisfying collage. I have to worry at something in my head and, if I write it down in notes, it's like the entire thing has already been written, and where's the charm in doing it again? Maybe I'm just out of practice. Maybe I'm just shockingly lazy and the single fell swoop (even if this swoop is achieved in slow motion) is the only way I can fool myself into getting something done--beginning, middle, end.

An inexplicable description of a clown act that I never saw: "He had a long white lance, which he dropped. He had a sleek silver sword with which he skewered little flower wreaths and juggled them until they were sliced all to pieces. His armor, which was made of paper, fell away and all he wore were flannel pajamas."

monsters

It has just occurred to me that, in the story that I am writing, the character whose head I am sitting in is going to do a terrible thing. I am not writing it now; I am only sitting in my bed, my fingers stained with the scent of a fashion magazine, and thinking about it. It looms ahead, but doesn't move closer. It's like watching someone walk into a darkened room while they're in a horror movie, except that you can't tell them to stop, not even in the hopeless and futile way you might shriek about the Man With the Knife!, because the monster that is hidden just ahead in the dark is the character themselves.

Alice is in a natural history museum. She is going to do a terrible thing.

point of no return

When I am writing a story, there is always a point when I know that I can no longer turn back. There is an ending and I am falling toward it, like a marble that's been dropped down a series of connected tubes. Procrastination and free will won't deter it, and neither will manipulations of things like plot and character and color of the wallpaper. In some cases, I know what the ending looks like, and sometimes I don't recognize it until it hits me in the face; but once I pass the point of no return (and that's how I think of it... sometimes I hesitate because I know that, somewhere along the way, the story will clasp me to its chest and I will be doomed, but I never know how long a reach it will have), there's nothing that I can do except go onward to the end.
--------------->
I am, for some reason, completely obsessed with "All You Need is a Separation Barrier," a short audio documentary by Niall Farrell. And though I'm delighted by the Third Coast International Audio Festival site in general, it being full of treasures and useful inspiration, I keep going back to Farrell's piece and listening to the litany of walls.

glass and hearts

I am in the middle of revising a story I wrote some time ago, about a dancer who has a glass leg (I thought that this was a terribly clever idea when I came up with it, but some time later I realized I took a hint from Anderson's "The Snow Queen" -- "Some people even got a little piece of mirror in their heart, and then it was quite dreadful. The heart would turn into a lump of ice.").

In any case, I'm trying to say, in a way that makes sense to someone who is not a dancer, how silenced you feel when your body (which is your voice and your brain all at once) abandons you. And then there's all the usual wondering about stories... Do the levers and strings all pull on the right parts? When I look at a story for too long, it starts to blur into a Rube Goldberg machine, with all these clanking, whirring, shiny parts that I want, so badly, to strike a match at the end and ignite a fuse to explode some sort of empathy in an unsuspecting head. But sometimes things don't quite line up and I end up with damp and disappointment...

***
I've always liked the idea of Valentine's Day. The idea of one day, even among all the ridiculous candy and fluffy cards and pink, frilly pieces of junk, that is devoted to love -- unabashed romantic, make room in the cramped space of your life for another soul, kind of love -- is sort of fantastic. I've never understood why I should feel sad for not having a valentine when it's so wonderfully incredible that anyone bothers to celebrate it at all.

My friend, Kat, says it smartly here.

***
It's late. All that morning wisdom that I hear about in Russian fairytales seems much too far off. I think it's time to put the story to bed for the night.

before bed mutterings

I've just started a book which opens with a character performing a coin trick in his pocket where nobody can see it. Brilliant. Wish I had thought of that.
(book: The Magicians by Lev Grossman... I believe it comes out in August)

***
I'm writing a short story right now. Well, not right now. I was writing it earlier, back when there was sunlight and my brain still worked. Anyway, it's about the strange chill that falls upon you when you drink too much wine in the summertime. Or, it's about dancing. Or, possibly, it's about an old woman who guards the door to faery. Or, then again, it might be about losing things. I'm not entirely sure. It's all vague and foggy, and while I know what happens, I don't actually know what it's about, so it's hard to figure out what I need to tell and what is best left untold.

And, I have a character named B. because I can't think of a name for him. Sad.

***
My sister has the best taste in YouTube treasures: How Wings Are Attached To The Backs Of Angels (Comment Les Ailes Sont Attachees Au Dos Des Anges) by Craig Welch. An easy comparison of flavor would be to Edward Gorey. Also, I've always liked that Chopin nocturne.

don't forget

Have been a bit late in mentioning this, but Clarion is open for applications. If you want to spend an insane, ridiculously intense and wonderful, six weeks writing stories and learning how stories work in the company of a small band of wild and magnificent fellow writers... well, you should apply.

My six weeks at Clarion did three rather extraordinary things for me, and they are as follows:

1. Introduced me to a group of people who I love and adore, who have brains that understand the strange turns imagination takes when presented with a shiny tidbit, and who are absurdly talented, driven, intelligent, and kind.

2. Introduced me to the inner workings of story: the levers and pulleys, the shapes and shadows, the paint and clockwork and bones, that hold a story up and make it walk around of its own accord. Before Clarion, I never seriously considered how a story worked. At Clarion, I read lots of stories several times through, looking desperately for things to say in critique (I was quite terrified the first day of critique. What if my turn came around and I had nothing to say?). At first things were hazy. I knew something wasn't working for me, but I couldn't articulate why. But reading things carefully, and hearing what other people say, and having certain things pointed out for you by six brilliant teachers, makes everything much clearer.

3. Made me want to tell stories. This is huge for me. I always liked stories. I made them up when I was little, wrote a few every now and then when I had spare time or vacation, but that was it really. I'd have ideas sometimes and think, oh that would make a nice story, I wish someone would write it so I could read it. Clarion smacked me in the head and said, WAKE UP, this is something you want to do, something that makes you happier for doing it, something that is worth falling in love with.

Clarion West is also open for applications. You have until the 1st of March. This is a long time. I did my application in four days (including the stories), so if you start now, you'll be well on your way to one that is far more brilliant and polished than mine! Good luck.

touch the art of work

I have a postcard from the SFMOMA on my desk. It has, in gold ink on cream paper, odd combinations of the words PLEASE, DO, NOT, TOUCH, THE, WORK, OF, and ART. My favourites are:

TOUCH THE ART OF WORK
DO TOUCH OF THE ART
DO NOT PLEASE THE ART OF TOUCH

and, PLEASE DO WORK.

I'm going to work on a story in a minute. It begins with a woman standing behind a man and telling him that he is making one of the ugliest pieces of art that she has ever seen.

department of lost letters

So, this afternoon I sent a story to an anthology (Interfictions 2... a name that, for some odd reason, I find very funny) because of the open submissions and the rather fascinating guidelines. Sadly, I've just gotten an email telling me that the internet is having trouble delivering my email. I think this means I've missed the deadline (why yes, I do love deadlines, particularly the kind that get really close and breathe down the back of your neck... how can you tell?), which puts a wrinkle into my grand plan of sending things out rather than stuffing them into drawers and forgetting they exist. Ah well. I can always send it somewhere else, preferably in a way that involves postage stamps and an envelope.

The story is a detective story, but not a mystery, and it indulges my fascination with beaches and collecting. The first draft was also incredibly opaque. I feel sorry for my friends who had to slog their way through it. Utterly baffling.

One of the most bizarre things about writing, for me, is how much trouble I sometimes have just saying what I mean. I skim over enormous things like connections and rules, and even bigger ones like desire and consequence, without noticing. At first, it's because I don't actually know what's going on. And then I have it so clear in my head that I forget to write any of it down. (This is when I picture Geoff shaking his head mournfully and asking whether I've thought about turning to poetry... An excellent motivation for trying to tell proper stories because I have never written a poem that was not truly and dreadfully horrible.)

I absolutely lust after story.

***
On Thursday, I'm going to see this exhibit at the SFMOMA. And because 19th C. science is one of my pet fascinations, I'm excited. Ok, I won't lie. I'm really excited. Excited enough that I hope it doesn't crush my soul with mediocrity. We shall see. If all else fails, there's always the (bizarre?) option of "free beer salons as social artworks."

writing, as an archaeological dig, with pickaxe

I'm really tired. It's not even midnight and I am so ready to drop into bed and sleep like a lump of undreaming rock.

But, somehow, magically, there has been writing. There has been writing every day for nearly a week. Writing on the same story, but not the same beginning over and over. It is going very slowly, glacially even, but I've closed one door and walked into another part of the story and things are still happening. It is even entertaining me.

Now if only I can get to the part that goes, "THE END."

I am now going to read a Michael Moorcock story, because I've never read a Moorcock story before and it seems like an adventurous sort of thing to do when all you have energy for is keeping your head above the blankets on your bed.

letters from unregarded scraps of time

My latest enthusiasm is for letters. I am crazy for them, for the writing of them, for the folding into envelopes and marking of addresses and sticking on of stamps (not licking, not anymore... I remember when postage stamps tasted different; some like a bad imitation of sugar, some like a foul and bitter chemical). Receiving letters is fun too. You open them up and read the other half of a conversation that you had days or weeks or months ago. I like letters that wander about, the ones that put in the details to tell me what it was like to be the person sitting there and writing it. Letters are entirely different from emails. I only get to keep the part of the conversation that isn't mine. I send my thoughts and questions, all the little bits and pieces that happen to fall out of my head, off to someone else; and someday I can look through my box of papers and see what they had to say in return, but whatever I said is somewhere else entirely.

This is the long way of saying that I've been writing a great deal of letters.

I've been reading (Michael Chabon's Maps And Legends, a collection of essays about the wonders of genre fiction) and nervously writing. The story that I'm working on is an idea that is almost worn thin from long imagining. It takes up all the space in my head and leaves no room for anything else to grow there, so I am doing my best to pry it out with diligent effort (though I'm beginning to think that an ice pick might be a more effective tool). I've been dancing (do you know how delicious it is to do your first grand jete in an entire year?) and working (my favourite moment of the week: a woman asked me whether Macbeth was a book or a play. The only answer my amazed brain could come up with was, "do you mean the Shakespeare?" To which she said, "oh. I think so.") and discovering that time vanishes very quickly if you don't keep a close watch on it.

I've also been deciphering my notes from Clarion (mostly in search of a useful icepick) and one of the things I've been pondering is something that Geoff told us. He said something along the lines of, "What will telling a story in prose add that no other medium can give? Not film, not theater, not poetry. I suggest that it's interiority and how the characters think and feel. You can salt prose with their thoughts."

That's about it. I'm trying to figure out when I can go admire the California Academy of Sciences and the De Young Museum, when I can take my bike out for a spin, and when I can try that fascinating rowing machine at the gym, but I haven't quite figured out the time thing yet. Soon.

revision

The interesting thing about looking at a story again, after you haven't looked at it in a couple of months, is how alien it is, how strange and full of unfamiliar people who you can't quite imagine making up.

The nice thing is being able to strike things without too many pangs of regret, to ruthlessly circle things for being too ambiguous, or not thought out, or just clumsily written. It's like getting let loose with a pair of scissors and a red pen and going to town with no compunction.

The slightly less exciting thing is too look at all your gleeful notes ("confusing!" "what?" "unnecessary" "quite silly") and then realize that now you have to actually fix the broken bits. And the question now, in sizes large and small, is "how?"

cloaks of invisibility

In fairy tales, the young hero (or, heroine) walks off into a bright morning and meets a crone. Or a poor traveler. Or a talking fox. Or a fairy in disguise. And they generally get some advice, and some magical object that may be useful, or useful and dangerous, on their journey. I always liked the part where the witch, or the peddler, gives the young man a cloak of invisibility so that he can follow the twelve princesses down to the land of enchantments and watch them dance.

Advice is very useful, because you can use it or ignore it as you wish, and either way it gives you a hint of what is up ahead. So, these are the things I'd say to someone who is on the way to Clarion, for what it's worth:

1. If you have the opportunity to go to Clarion, and you can make it work, timewise and moneywise, then snatch it up and run with it. If you aren't sure what Clarion is, then read through the website and just know that it is more wonderful and intense and exciting than they can possibly get across in tidy website language.

2. This worked for me, but may not be the thing for everyone: Don't get too buried in the pre-Clarion internet social madness. It's so much more exciting and delightful to properly meet your fellow travelers when you stumble off the plane, or into the room where you pick up your keys, or wandering around trying to find your apartment. There are the refreshing moments of awkward recognition, the fumbling conversations, the subtle slide into familiarity. You think I'm joking, but these things are wonderful. Or, I may just be internet-challenged.

3. Bring a few story ideas that excite you and creep around at the back of your head. I didn't do this, and each week was a bit like leaping off a high cliff and hoping that there would be a handy rope to catch on the way down. But don't clutch at your ideas. If something new comes along and follows you around, see what it has to say. It might be stranger and more fun to chase after.

4. Bring many pens. Stories and critiques eat pens like you would never believe. Or, be very clever, like Emily and Neil, and bring a fountain pen, with a bottle of ink to refill it.

5. Bring comfortable shoes because there is much walking to be had. Walk down to the beach and see the odd squirrel creatures that live there. Walk out to where the Torrey Pines Paragliding Center launches their customers over a cliff and watch a sunset. Wander around campus at night and look at all the strange sculptures. Try not to get lost while going from classroom to cafeteria, and if you do, just keep walking until you find a friendly looking person and ask them to point the way (likely behind the building that you had just passed three times).

6. Try to write a story each week. This causes sleepless nights, dependence on many cups of strong tea, and possibly panic as the story becomes more and more recalcitrant, but it is entirely worth it. Each instructor helps you to look at your work from a different angle. They stand next to you and focus the lens, just so, and suddenly you see all sorts of things that you can take in for that story, and also for the next. Also, if you write a story each week, your classmates get familiar with your habits. They know the direction you tend to lean, they figure out your weaknesses, and they are not fooled by how you might cover them up with things you are better at. They figure you out as a writer, and then they help you tell stories better.

7. Sunscreen is your friend.

8. You don't need to bring too many books. There is a very well-stocked library that looks like a spaceship and is named after Doctor Seuss.

9. Take copious notes. I've just read over my notes from the first week, and there were a couple pages about sentence structure from a talk with Kelly and Jim that I had already forgotten the details of (then again, I have a really dreadful memory. Notes are my friends).

9. Have enormous fun. In six weeks you will: meet several new best friends, have ideas and realizations explode your head every day, stay up much too late talking about impossible things, write and write and write, examine many stories closely so that your brain is forced to learn a bit about how stories work, and go slightly crazy so that you can see things properly again.

If you want to hear my Clarion mates, who are much more sensible and articulate than my ramblings, give their advice, have a listen to this.

beneath the cliffs of doom

There is this gorgeous beach a short walk from our campus. It's at the bottom of some steep bluffs, so you can either take a very sloped, but paved road, or you can walk out to the para-gliding center and clamber down a crumbling, rocky set of stairs that make you feel like you're Indiana Jones. Obviously, we prefer the stairs. The very last bit disintegrates into a sandy slide that you have to take at a jog. If you try to make measured, careful steps, your feet start slipping out from under you.

Stairs or road, either way you get one of those breathtaking and entirely Californian views:

Though, if you take the stairs, you get to pass the Salk Institute, which looks like nothing so much as a place where mad scientists breed nightmare creatures for nefarious ends. It is a gloriously forbidding building made up of cement blocks and very few windows, with turrets and sad patio furniture and signs that say "NO LAB COATS IN THE CAFETERIA".

We've taken Kelly, Mary Anne, and Nalo to the beach. Other times we've just skipped off there on our own and admired the sunset. It's a nice, sandy beach, but it is at the bottom of some cliffs, and one of my favourite things about it are the signs telling you to beware the cliffs that may fall on top of your head.


We went to the beach this morning (down the stairs this time), and then we had some Mexican food, and then I fell asleep on the couch in the middle of reading a story, and now I'm having a think about what I'm going to write for next week. There are little hints of lycanthropy, Victorian circuses, and fairy tales swimming through my head, but nothing solid enough to start writing on yet. Hopefully, I'll find a trail to follow this evening and pick my way along the messy bits that are my first drafts.

tiredness

Hullo. I'm just back from getting one of the lovely custodians here to unlock my room. I popped into my room to check on my computer and popped back out to go for a walk, and the second--the very second!--that I shut my door, I realised that my keys were still sitting on my desk, no doubt luxuriating in their uselessness.

My head is all foggy with too little sleep.

I had to turn in a story this afternoon, and because my head was being stubborn and resisting thinking in "story", I couldn't get down to it properly until yesterday afternoon. Then I had to write and write and write. The story came out all lumpy and amorphous, but at least it's on paper (though I had to delete some TRULY awful and maudlin lines that probably occurred to me at three o'clock in the morning), and that makes it easier to think about. Someday, I want to be able to tell a proper story, something with characters to love and a real yarn down the middle. Right now, it's hard for me to think of anything even remotely like that, but once a story is out of my head, it's so much easier to look at it and see where the wobbly bits are.

Neil says that you have to walk a fine line between giving a reader everything and leaving them enough space to make art. I've been thinking about that quite a bit lately. I don't think I've been able to work that balancing act properly yet, but it's a thought that's fascinating to poke at from different directions.

Owls and Cricket

It's entirely because of Neil Gaiman that I'm here at Clarion. Not just because I love his work (which I do), but because I only found out about Clarion through his blog. I had never heard of Clarion before, so when he mentioned that he was teaching, I followed the link and poked around the Clarion website and decided that this was a very cool thing and that I should apply, if only for the excuse to write two stories.

My supply of stories is very thin, and I didn't have any stories at all that fit the word limit for the application. So I wrote two new ones and had much fun. Thank you, Mr. Gaiman.

Neil is lovely, he really is. He is very kind and generous, with his time and thoughts, and he tells fantastic stories. He does these voices that are just hilarious. Some that I remember in particular: Harlan Ellison, William Shatner, and this wonderful, elderly librarian voice that made my stomach hurt from laughing too much.

Random reasons for happiness this week:

1. The cricket players and owls who arrived on Neil's first day.

2. The discussion of story, which broke all sorts of new holes in my head to let in more light.

3. Watching Liam McKean do breakdancing moves... The boy is a miniature Renaissance man and he can dance his feet off. I am such a fan.

4. A Saturday afternoon of NOT going to ComicCon and instead lounging about on the grass and getting lightly roasted while talking about radio plays.

5. Hearing about the Danse Macabre, the Mack-a-bray, in a chapter from The Graveyard Book which says, in a few sentences, what it feels like when you're really dancing, when it's going so well that you forget that you ever had to learn the steps.

6. Dancing until 3:30 in the morning to Neil's odd, and yet wonderfully appropriate, DJ-ing skills.

7. Getting picked up for a huge hug, which I've always felt are the best sort of hugs anyway.

8. Tea. Lots and lots of tea. The only way to survive critiquing SEVEN stories in one evening is to drink copious amounts of tea.

...And this is all on top of insightful and articulate teaching. Neil is very, very good at what he does, and he is able to articulate his thoughts about it, which is what makes for good teaching. He spots out the weaknesses in what you're doing now and points you towards other paths that you might not have noticed, but which you can explore, if you like, and find interesting things.

Some suggestions from Neil:
Angela Carter
Martin Millar
Gene Wolfe (Peace in particular)
"The Gardener" by Rudyard Kipling
Drowning By Numbers, a film by Peter Greenaway

I'll be missing him so much! Next up though are the wonderful Geoff Ryman and Nalo Hopkinson. Geoff has been around and he is very tall and very lovely. Nalo comes in later this evening and I can't wait to meet her.

Clarion, or, why sleep is irrelevant.

Hullo.

I haven't been writing here, mainly because I am very lazy. I am incredibly lazy. Supremely lazy. Extraordinarily and over-the-top lazy. Writing in any kind of journal is one of those projects that are doomed to fall by the wayside for me.

However, right now I'm at the Clarion workshop in San Diego, and since I have been a horrible friend and fallen behind on all phone calls, I thought I'd write a bit here, make it a big letter of sorts. Six weeks is a long time, especially when you're drenching yourself in an unfamiliar world, and I feel like I've crammed in more new thoughts and ideas than could possibly fit.

So. Clarion is kind of fantastic. Right before I left for San Diego, I got really unenthusiastic about the idea of spending six weeks writing instead of dancing. I even thought about pulling out so that I could spend the summer in the studio doing boring physical therapy and moping about (when I look back, I'm not sure why this seemed so tempting, but dancers are crazy). But then I told myself to get it together and go. At least I'd be able to find out whether writing stories was really as fun as I thought it was.

It turns out that, not only are stories fun, they're also fascinating, frustrating, and addictive. The way you can create a version of a truth out of all the loose scraps rattling around in your head is interesting to me. In dance, you can't really stand apart from what you're making, so having something that sits outside of you when you finish working is really odd, but wonderful to me.

A recommendation to all of my bookish friends: try some Kelly Link. Kelly was our instructor for week one and I hadn't read any of her work before I got accepted to the program, but I'm now a solid fan. Her stories are flat out weird, but they're also intensely honest. Sometimes I don't understand what is going on in her stories, but it doesn't matter because, somehow, they slip in and make sense in all the shadowy, dreamy parts of your head. She introduced me to the term "night logic," which is now my favourite way of saying, well, that was weird, but I completely got it.

The people here are wonderful. I won't describe them now because it will take too long and it's so beautiful outside that I want to run out there and take a walk while it's still afternoon. Just take my word for it and know that they're great. Except for when they tempt you into staying up all night and going into workshop the next morning on zero sleep. Just say no. It may be fun, but the words start to come out of your mouth in the wrong order.

safety scissors and glitter

I'm trying to find my way back into two projects, the first being my fairytale about jester, servant girl, prince, et al., and the second being a something that started as a quiet little story about a postman and then devolved into a mess of uncommitted murders, telepathy, and different narrators.

They are both giving me headaches.

The thing about me writing is that I haven't done much of it. I've always made up stories, but I hardly ever write them down. I'm always too busy with dance things, or too lazy, or too content just reading the work of others. So the writing is hard work. I feel like I'm just learning my way around a story, seeing how the hidden gears work, feeling the strong joints and the faulty ones. I really want to give it a go though; it's so refreshing to have a project that you can work on and then pull apart and then rebuild in a different shape altogether. It's like playing with a box of odds and ends, with some modeling clay somewhere in the middle. I don't know if the thing that I end up with is any good, but it's fun to poke around in the supplies.

progressing through the glass story

Right, so I was feeling so flush after finishing that last story that I decided to have a go at another. A nice little fairy tale this time, I thought. Only now it's getting all out of hand and sprawling and going sarcastic and being generally ornery. I'd like to chuck it all off till later and go back to my postmen, but I want to finish it off. In my head, it was going to be an easy job to finish it in an afternoon, but I've done nearly 3,000 words and only feels half done. Needed to take a break because I felt like I was hurling myself towards a finish, only to discover that someone moved it several miles further along. Meh.

What happens when you feel cocky? That's right, you trip and slip on a banana peel.

excitement

I just received an email from Barnes and Noble informing me that the third season of Doctor Who is on its way to my mailbox. I feel like I'm waiting for Santa Claus. Cue "Up On the Housetop."

P.T. is happening at 8:15 tomorrow morning. Which means leaving at 6:30 AM because I'm not sure of the parking situation. The meters in front of the building are limited to one hour, which means I either have to find street parking (HA), or beg the ladies at the desk to feed my meter and hope they remember. So far, P.T. mostly consists of me staring at the few inches of muscle located over my knee and trying to bunch it up as hard as possible. They attach this fancy little shard of plastic to my leg which measures how much work I'm doing and celebrates with an orange light when I'm doing well, and berates me with a wimpy green light the moment I slack off.

The first chapter of the new story is nearly done. I could have written more, but laziness and malaise prevented me. Some days the words are easy and I'm watching this story happen in my head and only a bit aware of the words coming out on paper, and sometimes it's really hard work. Not that you can tell afterwards which is which. Today it was really hard work and I sat at my desk for awhile and stared at the wall and for an hour only saw that wall, so I gave it up and went to the library.