Part of the 2020 Clarion West Write-a-thon series! Sponsor me, sponsor another writer, or learn more about the Write-a-thon I know, I know, it’s week 4, but this is my week 2 essay, because I’m behind. My excuse — do I need an excuse? I don’t know, it’s the middleContinue Reading
Part of the 2020 Clarion West Write-a-thon series! Sponsor me, sponsor another writer, or learn more about the Write-a-thon When I went to Clarion West, I had a room of my own. It was a room designed to hold four young sorority women during the normal academic year — IContinue Reading
Shown above: most excellent villains Hello everyone! It’s the last day of the Clarion West 2019 Write-a-thon, and there is still time to sponsor me, or sponsor someone else. We’re all great! And all the money goes to Clarion West! As I explained in the previous essay, my original goalContinue Reading
Hello everyone! We’re already halfway through the Clarion West 2019 Write-a-thon and here I am, finally writing my first essay about it! (Sponsor me! Or sponsor someone else! We’re all great! And all the money goes to Clarion West!) (Note: at publication time we are 4/6 of the way throughContinue Reading
The 2017 Clarion West Write-a-thon is happening now! You can sponsor me, or sponsor another writer. A shout-out to all the summer birthday kids, who marked their passage through life on family road trips and dried-out summer days, in suburban isolation or Vacation Bible School. Or, you know, during writingContinue Reading
Hello everyone and welcome to the first day of the 2017 Clarion West Write-a-thon, where you can sponsor me, or sponsor another writer, or sponsor all the writers. Sponsor somebody who isn’t me just to spite me! It’s okay! I realize it’s become one of my traditions to write weeklyContinue Reading
Halfway through the final week — we’re really in the home stretch now! (At the actual workshop, this was the point where we started painting each others’ toenails.) Accomplishment-wise, week 5 was kind of a mixed bag. I was on vacation for my birthday and was hoping to check twoContinue Reading
In 2006 I started telling the “How Saint Expedite got me into Clarion West” story to anyone who seemed interested. A version of it existed on a previous version of the gothhouse.org website. That’s how my husband’s sister Dorothy knew to call us up and say, “You know that statue that’sContinue Reading
During the Great Boxing Week Ice Storm of 1996 Paul and I flew to New Orleans for the first time. We spent a day crammed into SeaTac airport with thousands of other stranded travelers, as the airport gradually ran out of food, plane de-icer, civility, and hope. The airline promised us,Continue Reading
Part of the 2015 Clarion West Write-a-thon series! IT IS NOT TOO LATE! Sponsor me, sponsor another writer, or learn more about the Write-a-thon In my notebook observations , I wrote: Six weeks is longer than it seems at first It’s also shorter. And this year, once again, it’s alreadyContinue Reading
Part of the 2015 Clarion West Write-a-thon series! Sponsor me, sponsor another writer, or learn more about the Write-a-thon Returning to my notebook observations after the first Shadow Workshop: I sometimes put barriers up that are wholly artificial. Like, “I have to finish this thing before I work on thisContinue Reading
“Are you a plotter or a pantser?” I was asked this while sitting at the Clarion West booth at Emerald City Comicon. I first saw this dichotomy outlined in a post on the NaNoWriMo blog. (NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month, where the challenge is to write a 50,000 wordContinue Reading
Part of the 2015 Clarion West Write-a-thon series! Sponsor me, sponsor another writer, or learn more about the Write-a-thon Writing six stories in six weeks means six ideas, right? At least, that’s what I thought during my do-it-yourself Clarion West shadow workshop. With a deadline only I cared about, andContinue Reading