I haven't ventured outside of the room and the meeting area much at all except for a short and brisk walk for sanity purposes. I've often wondered how profilic I could be under pressure and the answer is very. Unfortunately, the quality level declines. I don't want to write a huge quantity of crap. I want to write a huge quantity of award-winning quality stories. I can guarantee everyone that what I've written thus far couldn't win anything beyond possibly the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award. [Anyone remember that?]
Four stories to critique since one of these is mine and I got a little carried away on the assignment. Instead of just forming relationship between my two characters from assignment one, I wrote three pages of their first encounter. Single-spaced.
So thus far under things I want to write:
(1) Killing Helen Keller. I've wanted to do this alternate timeline thing for a long, long time. It's a horrible thing to kill Helen Keller and yet I think I could make this work.
(2) It's Just A Simulation. I've got a 1,000 word start on this one thus far and sent Greg e-mail bugging him for information that I knew he KNEW and thus I wouldn't have to look up. Cheating... yes. But it saves time.
(3) Lottery -- In this far future, all medical problems can be cured and some i/d/i/o/t politician decides that we're losing much by not having a disabled population and thus lotteries will determine which infants receive which diseases. The pov character is waiting to learn if her child will be afflicted and with what.
(4) Shanghai Sherri Seeks Navigator -- Okay -- that's just a working title and it's pure farce and I better never turn that one in. It's just about 500 words thus far and we're going to go through a large number of incredibly bad pickup lines. It's a stress-relieving kind of thing.
(5) Then there's the mad assortment of unstarted/half-started bits and pieces about Carousels on Mercury, Penguins at the Poles of Mercury (not really), the underground tunnel of Mercury... I think the Mercury-themed stories will wait until the weekend. OTOH, I may just collapse on the weekend.
(6) Oh yes, let's not forget my intended Blue Willow vampire story. I must write this. So many stories. So little time.
I've survived my first critique and I now truly feel a part of Clarion. I was pleasantly surprised to see it wasn't roundly hated and while there are obvious flaws (it is, after all, a first draft), it also wasn't awful in anyone's opinion but my own.
One of the things I'm learning/observing is the art of critique. No matter what the other 19 participants say about a story, Suzy McKee Charnas finds new angles and possibilities and other things to say. There is so much more within the story and this is where an experienced author's difference from us beginners really stands out. She has learned to SEE story and this is very much one of the skills I want to master. It's far easier to pull out the best from a story if you can see it all. I'm probably phrasing this badly but I think/hope that most will grasp my intentions.
Off for now. I've got stories to critique, stories to write, a reading to attend, and an exercie to complete. I must say I'm feeling much more optomistic now. Maybe I can make it at least a little further up that mountain after all.