eeek.

I shouldn't have waited until now to read the stories for tomorrow. I'm going to have to read myself to sleep, I can tell. I'm also putting on the TV, so I stop thinking in pictures. I really shouldn't have read that story now. that was just stupid. I could have read it tomorrow morning, or just passed. Would have been fine, and would have been so much better for me.

Writing

So, I have my first official Clarion idea. And I've got a title already too--The Absence of Charlie. I'll have to see how it works, as I may not actually write this story. Some stories are just for thinking about. And I have an other title I really want to use, "This vale of tears," but no story for it yet. And something else yet. but it just snuck out of my brain.

Oh, yeah. I need a new title for Sea Change. There was a story in Asimov's earlier this year with that title.

Scholarship!

They gave me more money. The money they'd given me first was just like a placeholder scholarship. What the workshop could afford to give me if no one else would give me money. But I got the (http://www.osfci.org/petrey/) Susan Petrey Scholarship, which nets me another $650, for a total of $1400. So this is costing me even less, about $400 before getting here and paying for things, and all that. But I'd been planning on paying for all that all along. Which is so astounding. That someone thinks I'm that good. just dumbfounded.

This is really doubly cool in that I've been feeling sort of, well, little fish-ish. I mean, I can see it, that I need to get better at stuff, but I look at other people's stuff and I'm so disheartened at how far from theirs mine is. This last piece, it was weak. And just going around the circle today, I had a number of ideas that will make it, well, I hope make it stronger. But part of me wonders why I should bother revising it, as it's not like that special of a story. I think I'm more disenchanted today than usual because I'm still so tired.

So everyone out there, when I whine about sucking, you can just point out that people have enough faith in me to invest in me.

Cara!

Please welcome astrophysicat to the LJ world.

Clarion Politicking

I'm being missquoted in other people's journals. For the record, I said that I wasn't having a diagram marked "unmitigated bitch" up on the board when the creator of it was being coy about its meaning. And I was not the only one who found the diagram distasteful. In the future, I suspect that phrase will be synomous with my name, but so be it. Not like that's anything new. He can join the long list of other people who are irritated by me on a regular basis.

Terry Meeting

Well, I had my meeting with Terry today. It went really pretty well. I suppose it helped that I *didn't* think this was my best piece or even remotely my best piece. It was fine, it was cute, and people liked it, but there was nothing all that outstanding about it. My twist isn't much of a twist, my characters need a little more to help them stand out, and some of the choices they made weren't all that obvious and need more to make sense.

Terry basically said that I need to put more detail into my stories. I do a good job with what I have in the story, but I need more. I need to give people more of an idea of the strangeness of the girl, and things like that. I've been thinking I explain too much stuff

I also took the easy way out of a couple issues--the change and such--and I should make them more complicated. between thinking about it and talking about it with him, I have a number of ideas of how to handle some of the problems I had with it.

OKay, my story: well, on one level it tanked. but on a couple others, it did really well--*everyone* had problems with it, but most of them should be easily solvable.