As Phil points out, that means our class has now notched stories to F&SF, Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and now Analog in about four years. Add to that sales to Interzone and Black Static/Third Alternative (UK) as well as Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and Eidolon (Australia) and that means we’re covering most of the English-speaking spec fic world with our short fiction.

And then there’s the small matter of boasting about novels by Rebecca Rowe, Grace Dugan, and a dozen or so by Marjorie Liu. And Nikki Kimberling founded her own small press, Blind Eye Books. All from our humble little class. You can check out our class bibliography here, which isn’t even complete since not everyone reports 100% of their sales to me, and this doesn’t include non-fiction or things we’ve edited.

Pretty good stuff. We’d been told by our instructors that we had a very talented class but talent only takes you so far—you still need to put in the time, send your work to the biggest places out there, and stick with it even when things aren’t going so well. It’s discouraging when you find out how competitive and difficult it is to get anything published, but it makes it oh-so-sweet when you crack one of the big markets. So yay Phil, yay us, and watch out fiction editors—we’re coming for you next.

Current Mood: It’s Almost As If I’ve Accomplished Something |
Currently Listening To – Beck – “Modern Guilt”

/ /
We leave for Madrid on Wednesday morning and I came down with a bad cold on Friday. Lots of wheezing, hacking, sore throatiness and stiffness. Nothing a nine-hour flight won’t cure, I’m sure.

I’m bringing four books on my trip: Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich, and Child of God and The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy. Four books sounds like a lot but all but the first one are relatively short, and I have the better part of two days in airports waiting for connections. I don’t like running out of things to read while traveling so I figure better safe than sorry. I also have an e-verision of John Kessel’s Baum Plan for Financial Independence on my Blackberry just in case. (You should go download it from Creative Commons now—Kessel is awesome.)

There were some games happening in England yesterday. Man Ure won the league with the lowest point total since 2002, Fulham stayed up, Reading and Birmingham went down. All in all, a very entertaining year in the Premier League. Normally I would say I don’t know how I am going to survive the summer without any football to watch, but happily it’s the year of the European Championship, and all the games are on ESPN/ESPN2. We’re lucky. We really are. Did I mention it kicks off about two days after we get home? Lovely.

Current Mood: Sick |
Currently Listening To – Eddie Vedder – “Into the Wild Soundtrack”

I say this because we’re reading The Education of Little Tree, a book that tells of a boy who goes to live with his Cherokee grandparents. As it turns out, the book was written by a former Ku Klux Klan member. Yet the book portrays the Cherokee “Way” (always capitalized) to be a good thing, espousing a strong environmentalist ethic and intense suspicion of the “guv’mint.”

The funny thing is that once you’ve been dialed into Native American lit, TEOLT reads more like a list of Indian stereotypes, spending far more time attacking government and championing individual liberty than dealing with Cherokee culture or customs in any significant way. In short, the Noble Savage becomes a springboard for a political agenda that has little to do with historical accuracy or issues native tribes have dealt with for the last hundred years.

Yet it turns out the author is 1/8th Cherokee. Does this matter, yes or no? Problematic? You betcha. This is the kind of thing that makes Native American lit fascinating to me, because there are no right answers and there’s lots of contentious ground.

More on my creative crisis. For the last couple years I’ve been writing short fiction that’s targeted my “dream markets” of F&SF, Asimov’s, and Realms of Fantasy. When I first started writing, I wrote whatever came to me without any thought towards what I would do with it. Post-Clarion, I sort of abandoned that scatter shot method and really concentrated on those big f/sf markets, studying what kinds of stories they published, and whether I might not channel my creative impulse into stories I felt were akin to what was appearing in their pages. I’m really starting to second-guess this approach.

Five of the seven stories I’ve sold were written either before or during Clarion, before I got “smart” about markets. The other two stories I’ve sold were not to F&SF, Asimov’s, or Realms. In short, this “writing to market” has been a failure.

Which has really gotten me thinking. Pre-Clarion, I didn’t even really know what constituted sci-fi and fantasy and just kind of let my imagination go with whatever interested me. I think this is a better place to be, and it’s a place I’m trying to get back to. And learning about art movements from the earlier part of the century has also impacted me—for instance, I see much of my work leaning toward surrealism, which is sorta fantasy, sorta not. (Note the titles of the aforementioned magazines are not “Realms of Surrealism” and “Surrealism and Science Fiction”)

Point being, there is nothing wrong with these magazines and what they choose to publish. However, my creative impulses don’t always result in stories that are fit for the f/sf world. Instead of censoring my imagination, I need to just let it all hang out and get back to not worrying about where to send my stories. I’ve also been told that it would be better career-wise if I had a diverse range of publications, not just those in the main f/sf mags. No time like the present to begin the diversification process.

I have produced some stories that I enjoy very much yet they’ve been bounced by the big markets (and some smaller markets). Are there flaws in them? Probably , but stories with flaws get published all the time, and what one person calls a flaw another person finds interesting. The key is finding editors who are in tune with what you’re up to, and I need to start seeing if my work appeals to people outside that very small group I’ve been targeting.

Like everything in this writing biz, everyone’s experience is a little different. When I wasn’t getting anything published four years ago it was because I wasn’t writing professional-quality prose. That’s not my problem today. And if this “write what interests you” phase fails as well, then I can move on to the “misunderstood artist” phase without any regrets…

Current Mood: A Bit Melancholy About the Whole Thing |

First batch: Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God by Cormac McCarthy)

Yesterday’s batch: Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual by David Treuer, and Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

None of these are very long which is good, but they already occupy a good portion of my recreational reading for the future (yes, I have to plan what I’m going to read when I get time —isn’t that sad?) Reading the above will mean I’ll have finished all of McCarthy’s novels and will have made a good dent in Erdrich’s collected works as well.

I actually think I may squeeze in the Treuer over the course of the semester as his User’s Manual has short, highly readable essays on much of what we’re reading in my NA Novel class. When I first heard of Treuer, I thought he was making controversial arguments just to make a name for himself. Now that I’ve read some of Treuer’s arguments (which is always a good idea before passing judgment) I have to say that I agree with almost everything he says. His major argument is that Native American Literature should be read (and judged) as literature, not as ethnography. Which seems to me to be self-evident, but isn’t for a lot of people. The more I get into Native American studies, the deeper I want to dig.

Last April I wrote a post on the differences between Clarion and grad school. Rereading that almost a year later, I still agree with what I wrote. But as I am ever-evolving as a writer, my experiences make me look at things differently as well.

Clarion is a crash course on honing basic techniques. I wasn’t a bad writing going in, but I came out a much better one. I learned a lot about openings, pacing, and economy of words. In retrospect, participating in the workshop is almost like being a slush reader: there are so many stories coming at you that, due to mental exhaustion, you’re just not motivated to read. That clued me in to the fact that the story needs to work, from beginning to end, to hold someone’s attention. If the story meanders, you’ve lost.

So I think the workshop does a superior job in teaching you how to write a story that can sell. For writers, that is indeed the goal. Yet I think it’s very easy to get caught up in all the rules and forget the rule that trumps all others: you need to be interesting. I see a lot of published stories that have their flaws forgiven simply because they’re unique. And on the flip side, I think I’ve written well-crafted stories that haven’t sold because they’re not fresh enough (at least for the usual f/sf markets).

For instance, I wrote a selkie story that was very well received by all my first readers, but the rejections have come back “Sorry, we see too many selkie stories.” Even the best, most well-crafted selkie story is not going to sell to these places. (FYI, I’ve now sent this to non-traditional f/sf markets hoping that the selkie story may be somewhat unique to them.) The point is, I honestly believe there is no major flaw in this story except that it’s a bit too traditional and therefore predictable. Yet I think if I had written this exact story four years ago, I would have been banging my head against the wall wondering what I was doing wrong.

This obsession with writing a salable story has a knock-on effect on creativity. For a long while, I was only thinking about stories in terms of what I thought could sell: not too short, not too long, don’t deal with many too many big issues, make sure there’s enough of a speculative element, blah, blah, blah. I think I produced a number of very competently written stories with nice turns of phrase and whatnot and the occasional sale to highly-regarded markets gives untold confidence in your ability to write. I’m quite proud of all of my published stories.

But in the same breath, I’m tapped out creatively on targeting those top few f/sf markets. The readership has certain expectations of genre stories, but I’m tired of writing towards those expectations. Most of my work has always had surreal/fabulist sensibilities but I’ve found myself over the past couple years trying to shoe-horn ideas into a form that I thought would sell. Since I haven’t been selling stories hand-over-fist, I’ve spent a lot of valuable writing time trying (and failing) to fulfill expectations other than my own.

There’s the old saying that you need to learn the rules before you can break them. I’m comfortable with the fact that I can write pretty sentences and have a good feel for keeping a story moving. My new pledge is to only write stories that I find interesting; this includes not knowing where the story is going, not knowing why things happen, and not knowing where (or why) things end up the way they do. This throws a lot rules out the window.

Or does it? As I said earlier, the rule that trumps all others is to be interesting. The difference is that now I’m trying to be interesting to me rather than trying to be interesting to a perceived audience. I have a couple stories out right now that I think are really quite good that are getting rejections that more or less say “I didn’t get this.” That’s fine. Instead of scrapping the story or thinking it’s defective, I’m casting a wider net to include literary mags that I hope might find them interesting.

This is different than giving up on f/sf magazines. I have no doubt that all my stories could be better, but I also think that a lot of them will never be more-better enough to meet the expectations of that specific audience. If everything I wrote sold, I’d feel like I found my audience. But since that’s not the case, I’m wondering if a lot of the time my audience might be elsewhere, outside the group of mags I normally submit to.

Enough blather for now. It helps me to go back and read my posts on my writing to see where I was at any given moment in time, so I hope you’ve enjoyed (or at least tolerated) this extended ramble.

Current Mood: Tired |

On to the party suites where we got to talk to superwoman Nina Kiriki Hoffman, our Clarion instructor from week one, for a nice spell. I spent a good long time talking with bud John Joseph Adams of F&SF fame, mostly about his new anthology Wastelands which is slated to come out in February 2008. It’s fascinating to learn about the publishing side of things and all the work JJA went through to secure the reprint rights and get the anthology sold. Good on him!

This afternoon I’m heading back over the convention in just a little bit. Editor Stephen Segal invited me to sit awhile at the Prime Books table and sign some copies of Weird Tales #344 for the legions of adoring fans.

More updates as they happen…

Current Mood: Fine, Thanks |

Last year I read a lot of short fiction and only about 30 or so novels. In the first 4 months of the year I’ve already equaled that number. Here’s what I’ve put down so far and roughly in the order I’ve finished them, although some have been audio books. Which still count the same in my world.

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
Camp Concentration by Tom Disch
Walking the Nez Road by Jim Northrup
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick
One Good Story, That One by Thomas King
Valis by Philip K Dick
The Divine Invasion by Philip K Dick
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K Dick
The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin
Me Funny edited by Drew Hayden Taylor
He, She, and It by Marge Piercy
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Wild Shore: Three Californias by Kim Stanley Robinson
Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K Dick
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Physiognomy by Jeff Ford
Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Heirs of Columbus by Gerald Vizenor
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany
Critical Theory and Science Fiction by Carl Freedman
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia by Fredric Jameson
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Current Mood: Medio medio |

Clarion is, of course, the famed six-week sci-fi and fantasy writing workshop that’s helped launch many a pro career (my reflections on Clarion one year after coming home can be found here.) One of the things I heard from instructors at Clarion was that it beat the pants off creative writing courses offered at universities. I agree 100%, but my experience is that this says more about Clarion than university workshops. What Clarion does that a university cannot replicate is the sense of pressure Clarion puts on students. It’s writing, reading, and critiquing non-stop for six weeks, five days a week. You begin to smell story problems from a mile off. You see annoying mistakes in your classmates’ work that mirror mistakes you’re also guilty of making. You must put words on paper, especially when you don’t feel like it. There is no coming up for air. It’s story, story, story, and then when you think you’ve had enough, you get a double-helping of story. Slow, steady pressure turns coal into diamonds. I think Clarion works the same way.

The other biggest benefit of Clarion is the emphasis placed on publishing. Or at least submitting stuff for publication. The message was that you’ve got to send stuff out, the more the better. And until you’re doing this on a regular basis, you’re kind of spinning your wheels. In order to be a professional writer, you need to sell things. Don’t kid yourself. You will get rejected a lot. That’s part of the game and it takes a lot of patience. If you can’t deal with that, get into another business.

These strengths highlight some of the weaknesses I perceive in the grad school program. The instructors and classmates I have had are every bit as adept at pulling apart stories but there’s not that sense of pressure. Over a 14-week semester, each student puts out two stories for critique. Compare that to Clarion, where in six weeks most people put out five or six. In school, we meet once a week to kick around fiction writing. In Clarion, it was every day. Universities can’t replicate that kind of intensity, and that’s okay. Grad school has other things going for it.

On the flip side of this, my grad school workshops really push students to experiment in different styles. Some critics of Clarion say that it teaches students to write in a certain way, and I think that’s a valid claim. (I believe the student must ultimately bear the responsibility for writing cookie-cutter fiction, but whatever.) The grad school workshops I’ve been in encourage experimentation, blending prose and poetry, toying with fiction conventions, etc. That’s not to say you couldn’t push that stuff through the critique circle at Clarion, but there’s a reason “Just tell me a damn story” is one of our class’ favorite phrases from the workshop. I would say my grad classes actively encourage such experimentation where Clarion did not.

The biggest advantage a graduate program has is on the other side of the house: the reading. Workshops are actually only one-third or so of a creative writing degree. The other two-thirds? Literature. You have to read, and you have to read a lot. As a writer, it’s natural to pick up on techniques you like and techniques you don’t. You read a lot of stuff you never would have known about otherwise, and even the stuff you don’t like can be interesting. In other words, you’re bombarded by ideas. So in your head you start comparing Native American Literature with James Joyce, or Angela Davis with Philip K Dick. The only reason this happens is because you’re stuffing so many goddamn words in your head from week to week that a cross-subject mash-up is inevitable. For a creative person, this is a Very Good Thing.

Neither Clarion nor grad school is inherently better than the other. In short, I’d say Clarion helped me get published but grad school may help me raise the intention of my stories, if that makes sense.

Of course, the most depressing factors in this whole comparison are those of time and money. Clarion is over relatively quickly and you can go back to your day job, which most everyone does. It costs a couple thousand bucks when all is said and done. A graduate degree in Creative Writing is a much longer, more expensive haul with horrible job prospects at the end. The sacrifice Clarion calls for pales in comparison.

Take this for the grain of salt that it is, one person’s perception of two writing programs. Just thought I’d get it off my chest.

Current Mood: Great, Actually |
Currently Listening To – Beck – “Mutations”

* A Touch of Hell by Richard Parks * The Rope: by Noreen Doyle * Stephanie Shrugs by Josh Rountree * Black Jack Davy by Trent Hergenrader * Red by Jackie Kessler * Bottles by Samantha Henderson * The Tao of Crocodiles by Euan Harvey

Go check it out and let me know what you think. Unless it’s mean. Then keep it to yourself.

And you may or may not find this interesting after reading it.

Current Mood: Gassed from Soccer |

I’m more selective in where I send stuff now and more selective in what I send. I’ve got a few older stories that I’ve never sent out that I’m thinking of dusting off and submitting out there just for kicks as some of my other ones that have been circulating for awhile are inching towards the trunk. I was starting to lose faith in “Working Out Our Salvation” before it sold to Weird Tales, so sometimes you have to stick with it.

Officially, I’m disappointed in the decision to move Clarion to San Diego. This echoes a lot of what’s been circulating on the blogosphere, there’s nothing sacred about East Lansing but I don’t think the west coast should have both North American Clarions. Can people still get there? Sure. Our workshop pulled heavily from the midwest and east and I can’t help but thinking that being within driving distance is the difference between attending and not attending for many applicants. There’s also the issue of culture-shift between the midwest and southern Cal, but that’s something else entirely.

Current Mood: Okay |
Currently Listening To – Bob Dylan – “The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 – No Direction Home (Disc 1)”

My story "A Change of Seasons" was written in week 3 of Clarion, presided over by Nancy Kress who praised it and encouraged me to submit it with only a few minor changes.

Of all the stories I’ve written, this is one of which I’m most proud so I’m thrilled to see it finally in print.

Current Mood: Very Happy |
Currently Listening To – Bob Dylan – “Bootleg Series Vol. 7 – No Direction Home (Disc 2)”