Nalo Hopkinson is great.

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On Monday, she had us do a writing exercise. First, she had us write down something ordinarily and un-sensual, and then she had us write a paragraph making it sound sexy as hell. Since I can't imagine I'll ever have ocassion to use it in a story, here's what I came up with:

"My laptop computer sits on my desk. It's top glistens, white and shiny and smooth. I imagine opening it up, running my hands over its keyboard. I can almost hear the clittecky-clack of my fingers banging against its keys, faster and faster as I begin to type, but I do none of these things. Oh, God..."

The prose is pretty rushed (it was time-limited), but I still sort of like it. During hanging-out later that evening, several chairs had to be moved around and re-arranged. In the course of all this, Nalo picked up my laptop from one of the chairs, and said, "I feel sort of dirty touching this now."

I was so proud.

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My time-management has been less-than-stellar this week. I finished my fourth story, "Indoor Sunglasses," around four hours after the nominal deadline for e-mailing it in to Kinko's. It remains to be seen whether it connects positively with anyone or not--I think the circuits in my brain that might normally let me know whether something is OK or not after I finish it have been burnt out at this point--but I was insanely happy to be done with anything at all, since up until embarassingly late before I hadn't so much as started anything.

It is female-p.o.v., since I've never done that before for and it was suggested that it might be an interesting way to try to expand myself while I'm here. It's also set in Florida, possibly for no better reason than my having Florida on my mind, but I think (OK, hope) it ended up working and giving the story a distinctive flavor.

I guess we'll see.

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On the plus side, "Sing Goddess, Sing Me to the Stars" (my first-person, present-tense, psychadelic anti-war space opera), which I basically wrote as an experiment in doing something different than anything I'd ever written, got a surprisingly good reception in critique on Monday. Lots of people came up with important areas of possible improvement, but most people thought it represented considerable progress from my earlier stories. Nalo said that it was a "strong piece," the first line (see my previous post) "kicked ass" and in our conference said that (whereas she would have rejected "After Sunset") if I'd submitted "Sing Goddess" to an anthology she'd edited, she might have sent it back with a request for revision and then possibly published it in a revised version. I'm still kind of in shock about that last bit.

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On the other hand, on Sangria night (and after multiple Sangria's all around), the following discussion took place (heavinly paraphrased and probably distorted in memory.) It started out with some people talking about Paul Park's advice to try to lend interest and depth to stories by having several things going on besides the main thing, "almost putting more balls in the air than you can juggle."

Me: Sometimes I think I have the opposite problem. I have a lot of shit going on in a story, but it doesn't really come together in the form of a plot.

Nalo: Yeah, I've only read a couple, but it seems like your stories have interesting characters, and things going on, and action, and then everyone gets stoned and that's it.

Comments about "writing what you know" break out from various sources.

Relaying this to my brother on the phone, he said not to worry about it. Stories written on this template should have wide-ranging Gen-X appeal.

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Ellen Datlow's week starts tomorrow.

Rumors flit about our ranks.

She's read every word all of us have written during our entire time here. Hell, she's read every word of printed matter in existence from the Gutenburg Bible on down. She dwells amidst the clouds and creates planets to pass the time and eats galaxies for breakfast.

Or possibly not.

I'm certainly looking forward to finding out.