Get in on the 2011 action!

Define a love letter for $20

Head on over to Objects of Love to see new work emerge. It’s not too late to sponsor an object!

Clarion Writers Workshop Write-a-Thon runs concurrently with the workshop (June 26 to August 6, 2011) and raises money to help the workshop exist and enable scholarships for new writers. Scholarships helped me attend the workshop in 2009. I will be participating and you can make a donations over on my profile page.

You can sponsor me a random amount, no strings attached. You can sponsor me for a certain amount per word (you can cap this amount if you wish).

Or for $20 you get to determine the object of affection of one love letter.

You, the donor, will be e-mailed a copy of the love letter ahead of everyone else. The love letter will then be made available on my website and available to share under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Think of something inanimate, as mundane or strange as you wish and help me raise money to support the development of wonderful new emerging writers. I have a few challenging objects bubbling and boiling. I look forward to seeing what else gets thrown at me (you can tell me early, but I think it’s even better if you wait until we launch into it on June 26)

So please sponsor me, we’ll have a lot of fun!

… also, if you do sponsor me you are automatically entered into a raffle to win sweet prizes!

Never!

So I shall work on my novel every day during the write-a-thon, plug away at the beasty regardless of other things that suck up my creative energy. This will be an inverse Clarion experience in many ways! At Clarion there is the amazing sensation of being in a place for one purpose and one purpose only. How often do you get to enjoy that? It felt wonderful to me. This year during the Clarion time slot I will be juggling multiple projects (from Indigenous mental health to website copywriting), travelling north and south, east and west, judging Comikaze 24 Hour Comics Challenge and I will be working on a novel, not short stories.

I’ll need your help. This novel is ambitious and a bit scary. I’m exploring many unknowns and taking a lot of creative risks.  During the write-a-thon I’m going to post every day, letting you know how I’m going. I need you to nag me, poke me, encourage me, ask questions, be provocative, whatever you will (say ….cash monies to the Clarion Foundation). Neglecting a novel is a terrible thing and I must persevere and push through somehow. Four days to prepare and then it’s Go on June 27.

Lots of love

Liz

Dear Clarion Class of 2010,

Congratulations and welcome. I hope you have an amazing time. I can’t believe it’s been a year already! It feels like yesterday I was running round the house waving my hands and opening bottles of champagne.

Here are some things I think helped our year and I adore my year. There are many variables, I hope this is useful.

Rearrange the tables in the cafeteria every day so that you can all sit together. I am so glad we did this and I know for me at least gave me a much stronger feeling of one whole community — a foundation for community without the strange and mysterious logistics of different eating tables.

Make community as a conscious act. Re-arrange other physical spaces to make them seem more welcoming (we did some crafty, collaborative decorating of our common room, goodbye ugly white walls). Have fun together (work hard, play hard) and find out ways to let off steam (remember to buy your water pistols, or like me you will be running around with clumsy plastic cups instead). Do STUFF.

I could go on, but this is your Clarion, have fun exploring it. May your Clarion bring you everything you hope for and more.

Best

Liz, Clarion Class of 2009

—

Jeff VanderMeer, one of the instructors posted his congratulations… squeee, look at the tribe forming in the comments section :-)

Clarion buddy Ken Schneyer posted even better advice on his blog.

This month I’ve added to my Clarion Blog posts collection with

Eugene Fisher – Clarion 2008

• Advice for those who didn’t get in, congratulations to the Class of 2009, reflections and links to Kathleen Howard’s Clarion survival advice

Kari O’Connor – Clarion 2007

• Many and various blog posts about Clarion

William Shunn and Geoffrey A. Landis have been added to the collection.

Other news

The skribit question (see right hand side of the webpage): How to find a comics artist? has been buzzing around in my head a lot. I’ve composed about 20 zillion answers, generally while trying to fall asleep or not wanting to get out of bed. I have finally found an approach that pleases me and a very rough draft has been written longhand (yep, I’m old school). I have a few other things I have to write before I’m allowed to indulge in finishing it off, but it is coming.

Clarion Writers Workshop was a fantastic experience and really exciting for me. I write across many genres (from ‘literary’ to horror to spec fic) and I write across a range of media (prose, poetry, song and comics) and I felt developed and respected in all my guises. The focus of this workshop is the short story, but the lessons learned go much deeper and broader than that. As someone who has been slogging away at comics career for quite a while now Clarion made me really excited for emerging comic writers.

The life of an aspiring comics writer can be lonely, frustrating and it can be very difficult to get access to tha constructive criticism that will help you develop your craft. I see enormous potential for comic writers to deepen their storytelling craft through this writing workshop. I also see how comics writers can give different approaches to the craft of short story writing -> the discipline of writing comics schools you in different ways.

Clarion Writers’ Workshop is a short story writing workshop, you have to write short stories, but I strongly encourage any emerging comic writer to apply. Short stories have an interesting relationship with comics. Both media have to get in there and tell a tale, pack a punch, build a world. They are not the same, but they are crafts that give to each other.

When I attended Clarion in San Diego I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who also wrote comics or had an interest in comics. Robert Crais, one of our instructors, spontaneously organized Chris Ryall the Editor in Chief from IDW to come out and chat with us. Comicon kindly donated day passes, which allowed us to explore its gigantic wonders en mass at the end of week 4. And more important than all these cool shiny events is that I write better comics now. (Much gooder, I write gud!)

Emerging comic writers, you deserve an opportunity to develop your core story telling abilities. You should apply to Clarion. You’ll need to submit two short stories to apply, applications open in December and close 1 March – so if you haven’t got two short stories start writing them now. That’s what I did! I converted one old comic script into a short story.

Here’s the scoop from Clarion:

The 2010 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop will take place June 27 through August 7, 2010 at University of California, San Diego. The instructors will be Delia Sherman, George R.R. Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff VanderMeer, and Ann VanderMeer.

The application period for the 2010 workshop is December 1 – March 1. Applicants must submit two short stories with their application. For information and applications, check the Web at http://clarion.ucsd.edu/ or email clarion@ucsd.edu

Established in 1968, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop is the oldest workshop of its kind and is widely recognized as a premier proving and training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction. Many graduates have become well-known writers, and a large number have won major awards. Instructors are among the most respected writers and editors working in the field today. The six-week workshop is held on the beautiful beachside campus of the University of California, San Diego.

Clarion has been known as the “boot camp” for writers of speculative fiction. Each year 18 students, ranging in age from late teens to those in mid-career, are selected from applicants who have the potential for highly successful writing careers. Students are expected to write several new short stories during the six-week workshop, and to give and receive constructive criticism. Instructors and students reside together in campus apartments throughout the intensive six-week program.

I attended Clarion, there is also Clarion West and Clarion South – they all get rave reviews. Clarion West (Seattle) and Clarion (San Diego) occur around the same time and many apply for both. Clarion South is held every two years in Australia, the next one will be January 2011.

You want more Clarion info? Instructor and student Clarion, Clarion West and Clarion South experiences from around the globe.

Clarion will have the pleasure of:

• Delia Sherman
• George R.R. Martin
• Dale Bailey
• Samuel (Chip) R. Delany
• Jeff VanderMeer
• Ann VanderMeer

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer will be the bring it home team for the last two weeks. I’ve just finished reading Delany’s essay on Clarion, I’m so excited for next year.

Clarion West will have the pleasure of:

• Michael Bishop
• Maureen McHugh
• Nnedi Okorafor
• Graham Joyce
• Ellen Datlow
• Ian McDonald

Clarion West doesn’t do the two week bring it home thing, but still looks freaking awesome.

Oh, how I wish it was possible to do Clarion more than once, I want to do them all. I shall just have to work really really hard and hope, twenty years from now, that I can be an instructor.

Applications for Clarion opens in January, applications for Clarion West open in December. They both run for six weeks, starting in June. I highly recommend it to writers who are serious about story and developing themselves (I know a couple of people who came to Clarion to find out if they were/could be ‘writers’ who have had beneficial experiences). The process of applying in itself is valuable and if you get in… well you’ll have one hell of a ride.

One of the many joys of Clarion was to get recommendations for good reads from wise teachers and co-clarionerds. This is an incomplete list, I forgot to jot down the list on the fridge and I’m sure there are ones mentioned in passing that I neglected. My dear co-clarionitics, if you read this and see absences and would like to recommend… or indeed other wise minds who read this and want to add to my enormous reading list please make some suggestions. It’s delightful to have such a rich and diverse list.

Creative resources

• Outdoor Emergency Care – very detailed, step by step instructions for dealing with really diverse situations, very handy should you want a protagonist injured in some way.
• Laboratory Life and Science in Action, Latour
• Psychology of Science, Maslow
• Macrocosmos, Lyn Margoulis
• any popular book by a scientist
• Science News (Magazine) - subscribed (http://www.sciencenews.org/)
• a history text called “Daily life in…” will give you a great snapshot of a culture and time period at the grass roots level

Writing technique/tools

• About Writing, and essay “52800 words” Delaney (read)
• On becoming a Novelist, John Garner (includes how it comes out of your core and highly recommended by Elizabeth Hand) (read)
• Crafty Screen Writing – Alex Epstein
• The Chapter Negation of the Negation in Story – I must confess while I own a copy I always struggle to read past Robert Mckee’s self indulgent feminism slapping. It is handy to have a specific bit to of reading homework in this oft cited tome
• Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, Blake Snyder
• Writing down the bones
• Elmore Leonard’s Rules
• The Full Oxford Dictionary

Literary Criticism for Writers

• Narrative Discourse, G. Genette – Novel Structure (but read a Proust novel first to get full value)
• Anatomy of Criticism, N. Fry – Includes the five modalities of criticism
• The Novel, F. Marettii
• Shakespeare’s Imagery, C. Spurgeon
• The Language of the Night (and other essay collections), Le Guin (read many of them, though not recently)
• Stuff by Delaney (some read)

Short fiction/Anthologies

• “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse”, Andy Duncan
• Geektastic
• Kim Stanley Robinson “The Lunatics”, “Black Air”, “A short sharp shock”
  
• Italo Calvino, especially his Italian folk tales (read 6 memos, Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities)
• “Good Country People”, O’Connor
• Things that never happen – M. John Harrison
• Borges
• Cortazar
• Guy Devenport
• Wolfe
• Delaney (esp Driftglass, Trouble on Titan)
• Hemingway
• WC Williams
• Tom Disch
• Tiptree (especially “The girl who was plugged in”, “Love is the plan, the plan is death”, “The women men don’t see” and “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death)
• “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” Lawrence Watt-Evans

Novels

• Light, M John Harrison
• Engine Summer, John Crowly
• Space Skimmer, David Gerrold
• Celestus, Paul Park
• A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsey
• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
• Titan, John Varley
• Jonathan Living Seagull, Richard Bach (read)
• Wildcard Anthology, George R Martin
• Ulysses, Joyce
• Starmaker, Stapleton
• 100 years of solitude, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez (I have read this half a dozen times, so I have bought and read Love in a time of cholera for a fresh Marquez)
• Notes from the underground, Dostoyevsky
• Hills like white elephants, Hemmingway
• Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
• Three Guinees, Virginia Woolf (read – though now working on her diaries, not quite sure how this got on the list, there’s better Virginia Woolf)
• All that summer she was mad, Hermoine Lee (a good biography of Virginia Woolf)
• Books by Mollie Gloss
• Trouble on Triton, Delaney
• The girl on the swing, Richard Adams
• The Willows, Algernon Blackwood
• Lulu in Marakesh
• Canticle of Leibowitz
• The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
• Gun with occasional music, Jonathan Lethem
• The Magicians – Lev Grossman
• Diaspora – Greg Egan (read)
• Wedding Album - David Marusak
• The Stars My Destination, Bester
• Demolished Man, Bester
• Light, John Harrison
• Being Dead, Jim Crace (title might be wrong)
• Living Will, Alexander Jablokov
• Read Proust for complex figures of speech
• Roddy Doyl, Paula Spinster
• Gilead, Marion Robison
• The Wonderboys, Chabon
• Dying Inside, Robert Silverberg
• Nigger to Narcissus, Joseph Conrad
• The White Tiger
• A Suitable Boy
• books by Patrick O’Brian
• Joan Aiken
• Kelly Link

Poets

• William Carlos Williams (the plums, the plums!)

Recommended reading notes I cannot decipher

• Dina Mestburg

I wrote up this anecdote to share with my Co-Clarionaters, we’re getting to know each other and Mr Nicholas Bede Stenner suggested we share funny (which to me means embarrassing) stories. I shall share it with you as well.

The scene. Midnight, an eight year old Liz is cutting up a chocolate syrup bottle with stanley knife (box cutter). The plastic is really hard and I am tired and impatient and get careless. The stanley knife suddenly swishes really smoothly through plastic and over one of my fingers.

There’s a lot of blood. Everyone is sleeping and I know I shouldn’t be up and I don’t want to bother anyone and I don’t want to get into trouble so I stifle any kind of sound and try to apply first aid.

My parents, woken by random sounds and movements late at night find a bathroom with blood splats and a messy pile of bandaids that keep floating off.

My parents say “What’s going on?” with some urgency.

I hide my hand behind my back and say “nothing” convinced I am going to be in the biggest trouble ever for being so stupid with a knife.

I don’t get into trouble at all and am whisked off to hospital where I get a tetanus shot, many local anesthetic injections and get two stitches. I watch with fascination as the thread passes through my flesh and somewhere in the back of my head I’m thinking “Wow this will make a great story.”

I’m particularly pleased that I will remember this as I’m still cross that I don’t remember breaking my leg when I was three ’cause that was really cool and my leg bent at a funny angle. It’s very unfair I don’t remember breaking my leg especially because my brother says that when you break a limb it heals to be stronger and so my chances of ever having a broken leg again have been reduced by 50%.

I get a day off school to recover and I traumatise my little sister for years and years with slow graphic descriptions of watching needle and thread go through flesh.

Even at eight everything was material to observe and absorb to use for later and my technique for any kind of trauma or scary thing is “this will be useful material”.

• Walter and Marjorie Farrell Scholarship
• The Farrell Scholarship in Honor of Tina Spell
• IBM
• Clarion Foundation and UCSD Knight/Wilhelm Endowed scholarships

You can find out more about the scholarships on the Clarion Sponsorship page.

I feel honoured that they’ve deemed me worthy. Excuse me while I do a happy dance.

I feel so fortunate, going to Clarion is a scary financial commitment, especially on the variable wages of a freelancer. Since my acceptance the Australian dollar has rallied and improved, saving me a considerable amount of money. I have sold my car for a good price and earlier than I thought (saving money on servicing and insurance, not to mention parking and petrol as I have no choice but to walk, bus or car pool). I have got several chunky projects that have also helped to bring in the dollars as well as give me amazing life experiences and see more of Australia before leaving my homeland.

The life of a freelancer can be financially precarious and as a person of relatively modest spending (or at least no regular expensive habits) one of the psychologically difficult things about shifting to a freelancer has been the struggle to save money. I discovered how much of my self esteem is tied into being able to put a little away each fortnight and being able to pay off debt quickly. Now the struggle is more epic, clawing ahead, then taken out by unexpected bills and the grind of a morgage, a quiet spell or some surgery. The joy of money and the sorrow of payments more profound, it reminds me of being a uni student.

The scholarships do not pay for all of my tuition, but it makes such a difference. I can feel my mind expanding, knowing that I have more savings to cushion me during the ups and downs of a freelancers life. A few more dollars to support my ongoing creative development and the scary adventure of living in a new country.

I am filled with gratitude.