No FenCon for me.

I haven't finished the new story I wanted to send. I don't want to send the Merlin story again, I feel like it's bad form to send the same story to three workshops in a row. Plus I seriously can't afford the workshop at FenCon right now. It's $35 on top of the regular membership that's $70. I'm still gonna go but just as a convention going not a workshopper. That makes me kinda sad but this is my last week of summer school and somehow I need to make myself focus on finishing my classes. Trying to write a story during that just won't work. It's ok though. Because I really like where the Shep story is going and I don't want to rush it.

AND!!!! FenCon will be my birthday weekend. You better believe I'm going to panels hungover. :D I need to bring someone with me to be my keeper. lol. Hey I'll be 21. You're supposed to engage in debauchery on your 21st birthday!! No I won't really be that bad. I'm just trying to cheer up because I can't do this workshop. It's ok! I'm going to work on querying those Wainscot essays to Strange Horizons. Oh and they might want to publish my Merlin story eventually too. Because I didn't know but a fellow workshop attendee from ApolloCon pointed out to me that they're interested in Hypertext stories. Which the Merlin Story very well could be. I wish I could get an artist to do a picture for the newspaper for me. Maybe I'll try to find one sometime soon.... Who do I know that's an artist?

Summary of the Last Two Days

So. Here goes. Yesterday I had a good talk with my old creative writing teacher, who's actually very young. I really love her and like another old prof, who's also actually young, I hope we become good friends now that the teacher/pupil line is muddied. Anyway so we talked about books and the develops in my life with writing. Of course I forgot to ask her help on my POV problem which was the whole reason I'd asked to meet with her in the first place but whatever. I think I might have already figured out what to do but seeing as all the solutions I come up with are going to take MASSIVE rewriting I want to work on something new for awhile. Enter Shep, Adolph and... good question our leading lady still doesn't have a name. Well there's Chloe, but she's a sheep and not as important as Shep thinks she is. Besides the point.
So talking with Karen was nice and hearing her reassure me that taking a year off will be a good thing. She's very proud of me for all the things I'm doing to work toward getting published. In fact she said, "You're totally going to get published before me. Tell me how it feels." lol. She's still getting rejection letters. But I think creative nonfiction is a way more difficult market to break into. I dunno if I have readers out there you tell me. In our age of the confessional self I think creative nonfiction is a pretty saturated market. But what do I know?
On another front today I went to a wedding for a girl I graduated with. She's 19. Yeah she was the youngest in our grade and won't turn 20 until August. Crazy. This is why people start getting married too soon. First one and then everyone follows suit and most don't make it. Well I won't be trapped in that. I don't really keep boyfriends because unless they're someone that can actually put up with me and I'm genuinely interested in (meaning they meet my impossibly high standards) then they're not worth my time. Those guys rarely come around and I have too much other shit to worry about to waste valuable school, friend, family, or writing time (in no particular order). It was just super weird being at that wedding. *shiver* So I'm going to try and forget it. Now I'm off to dinner. Sorry this turned into a post about my relationship views. Haha. Not my intention.

Ok final stretch................

This week is my final stretch for polishing up the Merlin Story and entering it in the FenCon short story contest. I also need to work on writing something new for the FenCon writers workshop. Which I hope I can do fast enough to secure one of the last spots. I have the beginning of the Shep story but I don't know whether that's worth working on right now or if I should try to get the first chapter of the Muse story done. Well the prologue and first chapter. *sigh* I dunno. But finishing up the Merlin Story first is imperative because I'm going to try and mail it thursday. So seems like I'm going to be spending all my free time this week writing! But that's always fun. I think I write better with deadlines and expectations. So off to class then finish up at work and get home to write!

I had a story idea last night about people with empathy type powers. But that there were other people out there that were emote'rs who give off negative and positive emotional energy. Hmm. I dunno it was right before I fell asleep I'm surprised I even remembered it.

New ideas and an update

The urge to put an update on me applying for a writing workshop makes me wonder, why? No one currently reads this. It's really only for my own use. Maybe my creative writing prof reads it every once in awhile. Although I doubt that with all the treadmill journals she has to do. BTW I'm a firm believer in treadmilling now. I will most definitely continue it on into my professional career and make my students do it too. Even my lit students. You could kind of tweak it for lit students and instead of writing, reading or if they have papers to write, writing too, but for reading you could change #4 to a reflection on what you read. It would be very helpful I think. Plus then I could see if my students were actually reading or not. lol. YES! Another strategy to ruining my future students lives. Really just enriching and helping them out in the end. But yeah they'll love and hate me all the same. :D I get goosebumps just thinking about it. hehe. Yes I do think I will take too much joy in being a mean ole professor who tries to make people learn. RAWR! hahahaha. ok enough of that.

SO! I didn't make the Clarion. I seriously doubt I had a chance of getting in but I tried. I'm now applying for Odyssey instead. This one seems more beneficial even in a professional way (although meeting Neil is still a life goal now) because its run by a former senior editor for Bantam Dell. HUGE publisher known for its science fiction and fantasy titles (its an imprint of Random House if that means more to you). Her critiques of your work they say are typed and about 1,000 words. How incredibly life movingly helpful will that be! Anyway I only have to submit one story for that under 4,000 words and its due to them by April 10. I'm planning on mailing it WAY before then. If I concentrate just on the Merlin story I should have it done in no time. I plan on staying in town to work and write all Spring Break. How nerdy and lame am I? lol. Oh well. I really think this all worked out for a reason because if Neil hadn't been an instructor for Clarion I never would have even tried for it. But now that I have and have the beginning of two great stories plus a butt load of confidence about myself as a writer I really might be able to do this other one. They say on the website they have around a 50% publishing rate for their graduates. But when you're getting comments from an award winning editor that's not surprising. You'll learn to write better and write to actually get published.

The story ideas I wanted to record for future use are as follows:
A shepherd boy (16-17 in age I think) who becomes an unlikely hero when his village is pillaged. He's shy, relates better to sheep then people and has a smart ass sheep dog who talks.

Also an Amazon woman who doesn't want to be a warrior but a housewife. I thought it would be funny because I'm writing an academic paper on characters who are all warrior women/heroines and don't want the home life. What if it was opposite, where the societal norm was to be a warrior and instead someone wanted to be a housewife. Also my mom is a housewife and people think she doesn't do anything. This would kind of be a tribute to my mom. :D Kind of a parallel to our world where the modern working woman is respected more than the housewife because she's helping contribute monetarily to the household.

Anyway that's all I got for now. More ideas will come to me I'm sure. I think I might do my exercise from creative writing on here later. The making a list thing. I want to make a list of things I'm passionate about. It helps inspire things to write.