OK, stats...everyone else is doing it.

Week 1 Story ("After Sunset"): 4,000 Words
Week 2 Story ("Under the Floorboards"): 5,100 Words
Week 3 Story ("Sing, Goddess, Sing Me to the Stars"): 4,700 Words
Week 4 Story ("Indoor Sunglasses"): 3,900 Words
Week 5 Story ("David and His Zebra"): 1,600 Words

(I had the Thursday deadline, so the "Week 1" story was critiqued on the Monday of Week 2, etc.)

So, all told, my combined wordcount for the six weeks was 19,300 words, not counting the various short exercises assigned by Paul in the first week and Maureen and Nalo in extra evening sessions that didn't amount to whole stories, which probably put it well over 20K.

So...not bad. Nothing compared to some people's output--I get the impression that Gord wrote that many words to warm up the keyboard on his laptop in the morning before he started writing his first novella of the day--but pretty good for me, since in real life if in the same time span I'd finished one 5K short story and had an idea for a second one, I'd consider myself prettty productive.

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Obviously, though, wordcount is far from the most relevant metric by which to measure the experience. It's just the easiest.

I also got to learn from five very cool and talented professional writers and one of the biggest editors in the field. I became aware of issues and pitfalls in my own writing that I never thought about before the workshop and (inshallah) that stuff might be getting better now that I know to look out for it. I also wrote some stuff that by most accounts of people who've seen it is better than what I was writing before the workshop.

I also got Nalo Hopkinson telling me that something I wrote "kicked ass." My bloated ego could ride that for a while.

I also got to meet some of my favorite people in the world. Some of them spoke with silly accents. Some of them lived to tempt men into evil. Some of them made Sangria. All of them were talented writers and fun people. One of them on one memorable ocassion wrote a more-or-less perfect vampire story, and rubbed my shoulders and gave me chocolate. Or did my fevered imagination make that up? I suppose it doesn't matter.

In any case, Clarion was a good time.

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Yesterday, I had a sit-down at a local cafe with a posse of Clarion East students.

Then we went to the Holly Black & Kelly Link reading at the bookstore.

Clarion East is still going until Friday (they're a week off-track), thus giving me the opportunity to hang out with them after getting back. Fun people--cute, vivacious, entertaining to talk to--but I definitely came out of it confirmed the impression that I was better off ending up at West this year. (Obviously, since the format's the same and instructors go back and forth different years, it's largely a year-dependent difference.) For one thing, they had a financial crunch and let in 22 people instead of the customary 17-18 this year, meaning that they had 5-6 crits a day on a normal day, sometimes more, some instructors kept class going until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, etc. Add to that the fact that--I'm not saying anything not on various Easties' blogs--we probably got along a bit more smoothly...

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I recently found out that Dan Mishkin was a Clarion grad.

Dan was the writer/co-creator of D.C. Comics' Blue Devil comic, one of my favorite comics as a kid, when I read vast enough quantities of the stuff for that to really mean something. When I was growing up, Dan lived in the same neighborhood in East Lansing. He had candy like everyone else, but on Halloween, knowing my interest, when I tricker-treated at his house every year he would give me a comic book instead of candy. I was in awe of the guy, and he was definitely one of my earliest formative writing inspirations and sources of advice when I was initially trying to write at the age of, I don't know, maybe 11. (There's a good ten or eleven year gap in the midde of my writing bio there, between 14 or 15 on one end and 25 on the other, when I wasn't writing at all, but that was the first attempt.) Anyway, when I found out about the Clarion connection it made me really happy.