Wow. That was fast. Another month has passed, and now there’s only 3 weeks until I hop on a plane and fly across the Pacific for the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego.

For this month, my goals were to:

• Finish 2 stories (one every two weeks, or half-Clarion speed)
• Critique 9 stories a week (again, half of the 18 stories a week we need to critique at the workshop)
• Read widely across speculative fiction

Not all of this happened. I kind of got lazy in some places and stopped tracking. But here’s an overview of what I did get done:

Writing progress

Like last month, I averaged about ~3.5 hours of writing a day, 6 days a week. The true average was probably lower, as I had some extra days off with friends/parents visiting Japan, etc. Unlike last month, though, where I split 50/50 between “serious” writing and pulp it was more like 80/20 this month, with 80% of my time spent on “serious” writing.

• A melancholy SF about grief/moving on in a post-apocalyptic Japan, 4k words. The premise is good, but I’m not happy with the two most important scenes. The goal is to wound the reader into tears, but right now maybe it just scratches theri skin. We’ll see how my local workshop responds.
• A surrealist noir flash, 1k words. This one was quite experimental and written quickly. Might be rubbish. Might be salvageable, I dunno.
• 80% done with a time travel story, 5k words, leans literary, about midlife crises and meeting the other selves, both good and bad, that we might’ve been. Feels kind of bland and too much in the realist mode. But probably worth finishing, just to teach myself how to finish.
• 60% done with a dark fantasy about misguided love/parenting, ~1.5-2k words. I feel good about this one. It’s written in the same “mode” as my other selling stories. Confident this one will sell eventually as well.
• I also managed to polish up finish the dark SF piece I mentioned last month, 7.5k words. Tentative title Medusa Beneath the Waves. It ended up taking many, many more drafts than I thought. I probably spent 30-40+ hours on it total. I was really proud of it, but the response from my workshop was lukewarm. I can see some of my common mistakes: passive protagonist, too much story in too little a space, sympathetic antagonists not made sympathetic enough, and maybe also a bit too much meaning stuffed between the lines.
• I also managed to add about 15-20k words to my pulp fantasy novel, though this was definitely on the backburner as I worked on mostly short stories.

So, too sum up: I finished two stories and then got “140%” done with two others. So I guess I accomplished my goal. Was it good practice for Clarion?

I think so. I’m confident now I can write a 5k story a week if I (a) know beforehand the general shape of what I want to do and (b) I have 20-30 hours. I know 20-30 hours feels like a lot, but I was relieved to learn recently that Robert Silverberg (who could write an entire novel in a week when doing pulp) took somewhere from 50-100 hours to finish a “serious” story.

Critiquing & reading

This is where I got lazy. I definitely didn’t critique as many stories as I wanted to critique, didn’t read enough of the instructors’ books, and didn’t keep track of my reading. So I don’t really know how much reading I got done … Except that I’m not happy with it and it wasn’t enough.

I did manage to discover a bunch of new writers I like, though. Which is good! I read through most of Robert Silverberg’s stories from the 60s/70s, and discovered some really good spec fic writers by reading through anthologies. Many of them, to my surprise, were past Clarion attendees or instructors: Lucius Shepard, Gwyneth Jones, Eileen Gunn, etc.

My goals for the last ‘month’

For the last 3 weeks before Clarion, I want to do the following:

• 2 weeks of “full Clarion” simulation mode
• 1 week of doing nothing/recovery

For the first two weeks, I want to try and simulate the Clarion experience, which means something like:

• Writing a story draft a week
• Critiquing 18 stories a week
• Studying craft for at least 2 hours a day

That’s a lot of work. It’ll basically be a full-time job. But things will be even more stressful at Clarion, as we’ll also be expected to socialize. And in my case, I’ll be jet lagged …

And then, for the final week before Clarion, I probably won’t do any writing at all to rest/recover. Instead, I’ll be packing, and maybe working on my “Clarion ideas list” so that I don’t drop into San Diego flying blind.

We’ll see.