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April 3rd, 2008

April 3rd, 2008

08:11 am [Link]

The Major Announcement This summer, Neil Gaiman - author of Sandman and American Gods - will be personally teaching me how to write. As will Hugo award-winning author James Patrick Kelly, World Fantasy Award-winning author Nalo Hopkinson, Tiptree award-winning author Geoff Ryman, Strange Horizons editor Mary Anne Mohanraj, and World Fantasy Award-winning author Kelly Link. That's right - I got entry to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, where each of those writers will lead me in a summer-long intensive to improve my fiction. I'll have a week with each of them (along with seventeen other students, each dutifully critiquing me), as well as an hour-long sitdown with each of them at the end to discuss where I need to fix myself. That sounds good, but it gets even better when you consider the graduate list, which reads like a Who's Who of recent sci-fi authors. Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow, Vonda N. Mcintyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, Jeff Vandermeer.... It's prestigious, to say the least. I spoke to sci-fi author and Clarion grad Tobias Buckell about it, and he says that six weeks at Clarion pushes you ahead about two to three years from where you are now. If you were on the verge of getting a book published anyway, then Clarion will make you a much better book writer. If you were about two years away from being publishable, you'll probably be good to go after you emerge from Clarion. Which makes the hope that maybe, just maybe, I can have that breakthrough I've been looking for, since I know my fiction is flawed. Getting in involved an audition of two short stories, which they obviously found to be okay. Last year there were over 80 students applying for 19 positions, and this year's addition of fanboy phenom Neil Gaiman probably pushed that well over the top. I'm quite lucky to get in. And I'm worried, of course, about juggling work and finding the finances and not being the uncool kid at summer camp - I'll be living on campus in San Diego - but thankfully, thus far my boss Pete has been supportive about me taking several weeks of unpaid leave, even as we're working out the details. (He's a really good guy, and I don't mention that often enough here.) But my friend and co-author yuki_onna pushed me to be a part of this, and now - barring some awful, soul-destroying issue before I get there - I will. And not only will I learn to write better, but I'll meet editors, have one heck of an achievement for my cover letter to publishers, and possibly attend the 40th anniversary reunion party that rumors say they're trying to orchestrate. I've been stalled on my own fiction work for so long that I've been looking for something to push me over the edge, to show me how to utilize the marginal skill I display in essays here and take it to the level of imaginary characters. And God willing, this can do that for me. I'll keep you informed. But yes, I'll be face-to-face with the guy who created Death and Dream and Delirium and all your other favorite guys, and he will sit down across a table from me with a short story that I wrote... And he'll tell me what he thinks. Hard to ask for more than that. (151 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)