Clarion classmate E J Fischer recounts his last minute application to the worlds greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy writing workshop @ UC San Diego. If its any encouragement to those of you who barely scrapped the deadline, it seemed that almost everyone in the class of 2008 applied at the last minute (and now of course I’m discouraging those of you who applied in good time…)
Posts Tagged ‘san diego’
Kelly’s Crows
In Clarion San Diego 08 on July 14, 2008 at 5:10 amToday I finished two weeks at Clarion. It feels like much longer. There is a consensus that one week of Clarion world time is about three weeks of real world time (or should that be the other way around?). One of my fellow clarionites has observed that we are living in strange environment. The weather is the same every day. There are lizards and rabbits and crows leaping all over the UCSD campus, and eucalyptus trees everywhere with flaky bark that looks like skin. Its possible that the crows have been sent to watch over us, and conceivable that we are all living in a Kelly Link story (in which case dear reader, please don’t stop!)
Clarion is very hard work. You critique all morning. You write all day. You read all night. Sleep is scarce, but deep. Like intense, structured exercise, this kind of exertion has the effect of stretching the muscles being exercised. I can feel myself arriving at new revelations about story writing everyday. The combination of hours of writing, reading and deconstructing up to 20k words of story every day, discussing those stories, talking almost non-stop about story and being around one very skilled professional writer after another is filtering so many concepts into my head that I will still be processing all the details years after Clarion has finished.
Last weeks story, ‘Ocean Beach’ got all the experiences I’ve been absorbing from California and San Diego out of my system. Its very far from finished, but I’m really happy about the ideas I developed in the story, and its likely to be first on my list to complete when I get back. I hope I don’t lose the thread of it when Kalifornia is no longer looming all around me, being weird in ways that I think only this strange environment can be. I did a flash piece last week as well called ‘String Music’ which I will polish and submit when I have a spare few hours. This week I’m working on a high fantasy story, complete with Elves and magic rings. Its going v.well and is a good change of pace and style as the other pieces were very dense, this is much more exciting. I’m not expecting to walk away from my six weeks here with any finished drafts, but do want to generate as much material and absorb as many insights into the craft as possible.
Take-off
In Clarion San Diego 08, My Real Life, The Fiction Front, Writing Journal on June 25, 2008 at 9:59 pmRight then people. In just over twelve hours I will be zooming down the runway at Stansted, ready to hurl myself over the Atlantic with the help of American Airlines. I’ll be touching down in San Diego at 6pm local time, or 2am British time. I have three days to get over the jet lag, or as Mr Bill Gibson says, for my soul to chart a slower route over the ocean and finally reconnect with my body. Wish me luck.
