Category: Clarion

A Lot of Good News

To begin, other people’s good news:

  • First, and long run most important, Mary Anne had a baby!  Howdy, Anandan.  Welcome to the world.
  • Paul Berger sold one of his Clarion stories, “Small Burdens” to Strange Horizons.  It should be showing up next year in the Spring, and it is a marvelous piece of work.
  • Meghan McCarron also sold a story to Strange Horizons.  It will also be showing up next Spring, and is titled “WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!!”  My personal connection to Meghan is tenuous–I met her at WisCon and was probably creepily excited to do so.  But every one of her stories I’ve read has blown me away, so this leaps onto my list of eagerly anticipated works.
  • Sarah Miller put in the legwork to compile a list of Clarion ’08 publications.  It’s still incomplete, but we’re tallying in email, and it seems that in the slightly more than a year since we disbanded, we’ve sold 25 stories, 10 of which were written at Clarion, and 7 of which are to pro markets.  This counts as meta good news, in a “lots of my friends are doing awesome things” kinda way.

And now, my own good news.

  • I got a job.  After stringing together two consecutive months without losing a day to debilitating intestinal pain, it was time to stop living entirely off my parents.  I will be teaching the GRE for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.  This is part time work, and how much work is available depends on student demand.  I’ll find out how much of my costs this will reliably cover after I finish training.  I may end up needing another job in tandem, but after being on my back for most of a year, this is an awfully heartening development.
  • Another heartening development — I sold a story to Asimov’s!  It’s a hard-SF story titled “Adrift,” (I never was able to think up a better title for it than my working title.  It’s kind of boring, but whatever.) and I haven’t yet been told when it will run.  But when it does it will be my first publication that I can point at in a bookstore.  I’m pretty excited about that.
  • My website is working again. Hello website.

“Tentacle Mind Report” by Stefani Nellen

Steffi wrote the first draft of this story at Clarion last summer, and after a couple of pages I put my pen down and forgot I was supposed to be critiquing because I was so engrossed by it.  Steffi has a gift for marrying the mundane to the unsettling, and while this story of parasitic friendship and mental collapse in recently reunified Germany is among the most naturalistic she wrote last summer, fantastic imagery intrudes as a pseudo-authorial voice in a way that is deeply creepy and utterly brilliant.  I have been eagerly awaiting getting to see this story again, and now Conjunctions has had the wisdom to publish it.  Go read Stefani Nellen’s “Tentacle Mind Report.”

Sarah Miller in Everyday Weirdness

My Clarionmate Sarah Miller has had a lovely, elegant flash piece published at Everyday Weirdness.  Take a few moments and make your day a little stranger by experiencing “The Music at Bash Bish Falls.

Some Thoughts on the Announcement of the Class of Clarion 2009

ClarionAcceptance

My immediate reaction to learning I was accepted to Clarion: grabbing books by Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link and grinning like a maniac.

This picture was taken a year ago yesterday, approximately ten minutes after I found out I was accepted to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop for 2008.  That night my girlfriend and I were planning to go out to dinner to celebrate her having finished her qualifying exam.  We stopped at my apartment for some reason or other, and I checked my email, and suddenly we had something new to celebrate.  I was just finishing a year of Figuring Things Out that I took for myself after I graduated from Trinity, during which I tried to decide if I was going to stay in the sciences or if I was going to try seriously to pursue being a writer.  I viewed my application to Clarion as something of a personal test: if I could get in to this workshop, with that history and those instructors, then maybe being a science fiction author wasn’t just an impossible fantasy.  Despite having been a creative writing major at my swanky, free-thinking arts high school, five years of pouring all of my mental energy into physics and mathematics had made me lose any strong sense of myself as a writer.  Being accepted to Clarion was my first step toward taking myself seriously that way again.  And, in all the ways that Kathleen Howard writes about so eloquently (must-read advice for those just accepted), attending it changed my life.

Now eighteen more lives are going to be changed.  The Clarion 2009 class has been selected.  You can see their names and links to some blogs at the UCSD Clarion Alumni page.  Huge congratulations to all of you!  You are in for an amazing, exhausting, once-in-a-lifetime experience.

It’s a fascinating feeling, watching the cycle continue with a fresh group of students.  Part of me feels a sense of loss–my Clarion is undeniably over now that there is a new, more recent one.  But a large part of the appeal of Clarion when I first applied to it was its history.  Forty years of being the proving ground for some of the best and most successful writers in SF.  So another, greater part of me thrills to see the tradition continue, knowing that I am a part of that history now.

Finally: I can’t improve on Kat’s advice for the newly accepted.  But I do have some thoughts for the newly not-accepted (some of whom I know read this blog).  They all boil down to reasons why, disappointed as you may be, you should not be discouraged and you should apply again.  Know that Clarion receives more qualified applicants than it has spaces available every year, and this year was no exception.  The selection committee always has to make some very tough choices.  So a rejection, especially one which says you impressed the committee, should not necessarily be seen as an indictment of your writing.  You may well have been very close to getting in.  Additionally, as long as attending Clarion lines up with your means and life goals you should keep applying because, honestly: if you have talent and are putting in effort, your odds of getting in are not bad.  Pretend that applications were selected randomly.  There are 18 spots open every year.  The record number of applications in a year is 194.  This year there were 91.  (It is likely that economic factors depressed the number of applications somewhat.  One third of this year’s accepted class is from California, as were a majority of all applicants.  It looks like people for whom travel costs would be significant were less likely to apply this year.)  If we use these numbers as a range, then (pretending quality of writing is not an issue) a random application has about a 10%-20% chance of being accepted.  If you are serious and confident about your work, it is not unreasonable to assume that your chances of getting in are 1-in-5 or better.  I can’t overstate how positive an experience Clarion was for me.  Certainly worth continuing to shoot for, with odds like that.

One more note: While San Diego is my Clarion, there is actually a family of Clarion workshops.  Clarion West in Seattle has accepted (almost all?) of its 2009 class as well, and congratulations to them!  There is also an Australian workshop modeled after the American ones, Clarion South.  Clarion South is currently struggling to meet its funding goal for its next session.  The call is going out through the extended Clarion family: consider donating to Clarion South.  Help keep the workshops alive, so that they will be there for future students and their wonderful tradition and history can continue to grow.

Clarion Teachers Everywhere

Last night Neil Gaiman was on The Colbert Report discussing The Graveyard Book:


The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

And tonight on the BBC World Service, Geoff Ryman was brought on to discuss the propriety of the United Nations holding a panel discussion about Battlestar Galactica.  I haven’t been able to find a link to that segment, but my favorite part was the host asking, essentially, “might it not be considered irresponsible for the UN to look to a work of fiction for insight into real world events?” and Geoff answering, “Well, that depends on if you think of fiction as a lie or you think of fiction as a way of telling the truth.”

Paul M. Berger in INTERZONE

I urge you to find a way to get your hands on the current issue of Interzone, which contains the story “Home Again,” by Paul M. Berger.  Paul was my Clarion classmate and roomie, and I got to read the first draft of this story at the workshop.  I don’t actually know of anyplace in San Antonio that sells Interzone, but I’m going to have to track down a copy, because this story was a creepy little gem even at its earliest, and I must have it in a form that I can thrust in the faces of others.

A Message to the Applicants for Clarion 2009

And you should be finished with your Clarion and/or Clarion West workshop application right about…now.

Well, actually you probably should have finished and uploaded your application a while ago, giving yourself a comfortable cushion of time to correct any problems that might arise with the process.  But that isn’t what I did.  Around this time a year ago I was furiously pounding out the first science fiction story I had written in years, and it was taking twice as long as I had expected it to, and I couldn’t stop for anything, not even my dog dying, and I finally finished the damn thing and filled out the online forms and uploaded the documents in the middle of the night at my girlfriend’s apartment, eyes barely able to focus on my laptop screen, girlfriend trying to sleep through my typing ten feet behind me.  I got my application in with minutes to spare.

Then, for better or worse, it was done.  And I was proud of myself.  Whether I got accepted or not, I had identified going to Clarion as something that I would value, and I got over any fears I harbored of critique and rejection.  I had never seriously submitted for publication before, so it was my first time sending my fiction out to strangers to be judged.  That wasn’t a small thing for me, and I suspect it isn’t a small thing for many of you.  For a hundred different reasons, just applying can be hard.  So, now that the deadline for this year has passed, allow me to say to all the new applicants: well done!  I’m proud of you.

Now what?

Well, again, if you do as I did, you should be reading this blog post right about…now.  Because after I submitted my application I spent the next several weeks scouring the internet for other applicants.  I searched blogs and fora for any recent mention of Clarion.  (For the equally obsessive, I recommend Google Blog Search, Icerocket, and any forum dedicated to genre fiction in general or fans of a specific instructor or their work.)  I filled a folder with bookmarks to the blogs of everyone I could find who was in the same boat as me, starting the same waiting game.  And it seems possible that others may be doing the same thing now and stumbling upon this place.  So:  If you are reading this and you just applied to one of the workshops (1) congrats on getting it done and (2) leave a comment, let me know who you are.

And good luck!