Yikes. Another week has passed. 1/2 way through, which is bizarre. I guess I must know half of what there is to know about being a pro sf writer. Or is that not how it works?

Ian MacLeod's week ended today, and Nalo Hopkinson's kicks off on Sunday. Some people are taking this as their weekend off and getting out of Seattle, though obviously that's not an option for me--not complaning, mind you, I'm more than happy to hang out and veg at the house, maybe finally watch those extended LotR DVD's I brought.

So, what to say about this week....

#

During the preamble to Ian's reading at the SF Museum on Tueday, he mentioned that one of the stories that influenced him the most was Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark." On Wednesday night (in the aftermath of Sangria night) my classmate Mark read some of us "Haunter of the Dark" off somewhere where it was available on-line, straight-through in this wonderful deadpan even voice. Amazing stuff, that deminder how things (like piling on adjectives without mercy) that would be unreadable in most people's hands worked so well for Lovecraft, and--while its easily parodied, and that can be fun too--actually succeed in creating a really heavy, creepy atmosphere in his stories, in a medium-is-the-message sort of way, the baroque weirdness of his language playing off and re-enforcing the baroque weirndess of his vision of cosmic horror.

(Following up on this, this afternoon the class gave Ian a plush Cthulu stuffed animal as a parting gift.)

#

After a couple attempts at very different things, the story I turned in at the end of Maureen's week (so was critiqued this week) was "Under the Floorboards" a transdimensional alternate history romp revolving around a central metaphor inspired by a comment someone made in critting of my previous story ("After Sunset")--"anti-Semitism is rumbling under the floorboards of this story, but I think it needs to burst out and grab us by the ankles."

(The same person, btw, had the best written comment on "Under the Floorboards," that it was a "Judeo-realist piss-take on Narnia," which is the sort of thing I want on a back cover someday.)

Last time, the crits were good--Maureen laid out in a beautiful, crystal clear way of drawing out what the dramatic structure of the story needed to be in a vastly expanded novella version--but good in a "maybe in a couple of months I'll try to do that" way. The crits for "Under the Floorboards" were good in a "screw the next story, I want to go upstairs and revise this today" sense. (Yes, dear reader, I resisted the temptation.) The crits were focussed, specific and enormously constructive--one person pointed a crucial logistical problem with the ending that's easily fixed, one person re-imagined a central detail about what the background should be to a key scene that made me re-imagine the whole thing much more powerfully, and several people pointed out that some of the details should be re-aligned to fit the central metaphor. Great stuff...not just great in an "oh, yeah, I guess I should fix that bit" sense, but in the sense that I was left with this great vision of what the story could and shouldlook like that I could really get excited about.

#

Of course, it remains to be seen what the crits look like for the next story.

Last week, just for that week, I was able to switch my normal Thursday night deadline with someone with a Sunday night deadline, and I finished "Under the Floorboards" late Sunday afternoon. On Monday I didn't even try to get into anything new yet, although I did get a general idea, and on Tuesday I did try, but only got about two paragraphs in. On Wednesday, I scrapped those two paragraphs, wrote a new first line and wrote about two pages of character and plot notes--something I normally don't do, since it doesn't seem to work for me, but I was desperate to get some traction.

On Thursday morning during class (having stayed up late the previous night to drink Sangria and listen to the impromptu Lovecraft reading), I was sitting there in a sort of half-shut down mood, looking at my half-drunk coffee cup and a green rubber lizard toy parked on the table, and the first line popped into my head:

"There are lizards in my coffee, and I won't drink it."

What I needed to write, as it turns out, was a short space opera, with anti-war subtext and psychadelic weirndess, told in intense stream-of-consciousness first-person, present-tense. That afternoon, for several houirs with short breaks for lunch, dinner and walks, I sat down in front of my laptop (first at a cafe in the University District and then in the front porch outside the house) listening to "London Calling" (the album, not just the song) several times in a loop on my headphones--always for me the definitive soundtrack of unpleasant futurism--and cranked out a full 4700-word short story by an hour before the 9 o'clock deadline, sort of my attempt at a space somewhere in between Harrry Harrison's "Bill the Galactic Hero" and Robert Anton Wilson's "Masks of the Illuminati."

God knows what anyone's going to think of it--I'm expecting at least a couple very polite and searching comments translateable into "what the hell is this?"--but at least I'm stretching boundaries and trying new things.

Right?

Maybe.

We'll see.

#

I like the 4th of July. I always have. Watching fireworks in the night sky is fun, bottom line, and its not like I'm *against* independance from Britain. (-:

Still, I've always hated the imperialist-pep-rally aspect of organized events where you get a picinic blanket go out to watch them with a bunch of other people in lawnchairs and blankets in a designated area on a field. Maybe its not so bad now, I wouldn't know, but I still get a bad taste in my mouth remembering 1991 when the first Gulf War was going on and we were out in some park in Lansing and they had this radio-dj with shite about our brave fighting boys overseas, etc., etc., blaring in the background.

Ugh.

Still, I do like watching fireworks when I can do it in a congenial setting, and I basically enjoy the holiday. This year it was great for that, sipping drinks with friends out on the third-floor balcony and watching splashes of red and green explode against the night sky.

"Call the roller of big cigars....The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."

#

Next week should be interesting. Given the particular line up this year, since Nalo Hopkinson will be our first instructor this year who is herself a Clarion grad, so it should be fun to see if that gives her a different perspective.

#

Speaking of Clarion grads, my sister (CW2001) just made her third sale to Strange Horizons, thus qualifying her to join the SFWA.