Week One Instructor: Andy Duncan Week One Instructor’s Best Decision: To impress upon us with his entire, considerable force of personality that we absolutely deserve to be here amongst the elite of speculative fiction’s future writers Week One Instructor’s Worst Decision: To recommend the film Cannonball Run for potential group screening Unexpected Week One Discoveries: It …
First Day: Ready to Launch
Here I am at writer space camp, tucked into my tiny room, which I have cozified like woah because knowingmy work habits I will probably spend a lot of time locked in here, trying not to look at Facebook. (The hardest part of getting ready for Clarion West was locking myself out of my Facebook account. …
The Good Thing
It has been a challenging couple of years. Not bad–challenging. Learning to take rejections and not let them impact my productivity is a big one. Learning to keep moving forward despite the light at the end being too faint to really see is another. But hey, keep trucking, because what’s the alternative? Giving up? Feh. Despite …
Someone Else’s Almost-Death, and What it Feels Like
At first it feels like nothing. It’s just a strange voicemail. Your heart rate goes up but a bit but you’re more confused than anything else. You’re not even that worried. You think: car accident, broken leg? Someone needs to drive her home. She’s going to be so pissed about the car. The phone call …
Continue reading Someone Else’s Almost-Death, and What it Feels Like
The Desert
It is hard, writing about writing when writing is 1) something you are still basically a novice at, and therefore probably not someone who should be looked to for anything akin to Writing Advice, and 2) mostly a long-played exercise in learning how to accept rejection. I do not resent my rejection letters, because so many …
Elephant
Wells Tower wrote a piece for GQ on elephant hunting that is conflicted, honest, messy and great. It’s somewhat rare to find a piece about the life and death of animals that is neither Just The Facts nor a Message. I read both of those kinds of writing with some frequency, but they never feel quite right, because my own …
Patience, Part Two
The simplest and most-repeated piece of writing advice is to just write. This seems stupid, unless you’ve done some writing and have learned for yourself how easy it is to find alternatives to writing: research, building a social media platform (=trolling Facebook), “research,” rejiggering your website, editing, editing again, refreshing your inbox for submission confirmations/those …
Gerbils
Again, I’m posted at Karen Joy Fowler’s blog, again talking about how easily small things die. If you haven’t read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, it is imperative you do so.
The Shitty Vegetarian
Here’s my whole problem with meat: it’s fucking delicious. When my sister was eleven she saw a PETA video and decided she was done. “I don’t like meat anyway,” she said, and that was that, no contest, forever amen. She’s still vegetarian some dozen years later and has never complained about the challenge, nor …
Alarmhat 