One Trick Pony

Every year at Michigan State, the Clarion Workshop becomes a working home/boot camp to around 20 aspiring science fiction and fantasy writers. They live in the graduate dorms and a different published writer teaches the course for each of six weeks. It’s an intense period of full frontal writing and critiquing and being critiqued.

I’ve often wished I could attend Clarion. To be admitted, you need to submit two complete short stories. The tuition and board is amazingly cheap. As I look at the pictures of each class, though, I don’t see any wisdom-induced silver hair like mine. They all look 25. Have I missed my moment? If so, I can at least attend vicariously through the communal web site that Cory Doctorow helpfully pointed to today. I’m poking through there reading about their ups and downs. I’ve already uncovered an interesting blog by Jason Erik Lundberg, one of this year’s participants.

A summer at Clarion. Is that something I should shoot for?

Went to the JCS warehouse to get them set up with Readerware. Ted has teenage helpers (including his son) and fully-adult teachers coming in over the next few weeks to get these thousands of books organized and inventoried. A lot of chaos has been eliminated just since my last visit on Friday but it’s still going to be a daunting task.

Ted was wowed by the software. Now that we’ve got him getting the books into Readerware, J & I need to get started putting the online database together. My first PHP/SQL project is no textbook toy exercise; it’s going to involve real data filling a real need.